o submit to his
landing in Europe in the spring of 558 and invading the Thracian
Chersonese, where he occupied Sestus and Madytus and spent a
considerable time in the chastisement of the Thracian barbarians and
the restoration of the destroyed Lysimachia, which he had selected as
his chief place of arms and as the capital of the newly-instituted
satrapy of Thrace. Flamininus indeed, who was entrusted with the
conduct of these affairs, sent to the king at Lysimachia envoys, who
talked of the integrity of the Egyptian territory and of the freedom
of all the Hellenes; but nothing came out of it. The king talked in
turn of his undoubted legal title to the ancient kingdom of Lysimachus
conquered by his ancestor Seleucus, explained that he was employed not
in making territorial acquisitions but only in preserving the
integrity of his hereditary dominions, and declined the intervention
of the Romans in his disputes with the cities subject to him in Asia
Minor. With justice he could add that peace had already been
concluded with Egypt, and that the Romans were thus far deprived of
any formal pretext for interfering.(2) The sudden return of the king
to Asia occasioned by a false report of the death of the young king of
Egypt, and the projects which it suggested of a landing in Cyprus or
even at Alexandria, led to the breaking off of the conferences without
coming to any conclusion, still less producing any result. In the
following year, 559, Antiochus returned to Lysimachia with his fleet
and army reinforced, and employed himself in organizing the new
satrapy which he destined for his son Seleucus. Hannibal, who had
been obliged to flee from Carthage, came to him at Ephesus; and the
singularly honourable reception accorded to the exile was virtually a
declaration of war against Rome. Nevertheless Flamininus in the
spring of 560 withdrew all the Roman garrisons from Greece. This was
under the existing circumstances at least a mischievous error, if not
a criminal acting in opposition to his own better knowledge; for we
cannot dismiss the idea that Flamininus, in order to carry home with
him the undiminished glory of having wholly terminated the war and
liberated Hellas, contented himself with superficially covering up for
the moment the smouldering embers of revolt and war. The Roman
statesman might perhaps be right, when he pronounced any attempt to
bring Greece directly under the dominion of the Romans, and any
interven