than his countryman Philopoemen who was the main founder of that
patriotic policy; but he was in the right.

Death of Hannibal

Thus the protectorate of the Roman community now embraced all the
states from the eastern to the western end of the Mediterranean.
There nowhere existed a state that the Romans would have deemed it
worth while to fear. But there still lived a man to whom Rome
accorded this rare honour--the homeless Carthaginian, who had
raised in arms against Rome first all the west and then all the east,
and whose schemes perhaps had been only frustrated by infamous
aristocratic policy in the former case, and by stupid court policy in
the latter. Antiochus had been obliged to bind himself in the treaty
of peace to deliver up Hannibal; but the latter had escaped, first to
Crete, then to Bithynia,(8) and now lived at the court of Prusias king
of Bithynia, employed in aiding the latter in his wars with Eumenes,
and victorious as ever by sea and by land. It is affirmed that he was
desirous of stirring up Prusias also to make war on Rome; a folly,
which, as it is told, sounds very far from credible. It is more
certain that, while the Roman senate deemed it beneath its dignity to
have the old man hunted out in his last asylum--for the tradition
which inculpates the senate appears to deserve no credit--Flamininus,
whose restless vanity sought after new opportunities for great
achievements, undertook on his own part to deliver Rome from Hannibal
as he had delivered the Greeks from their chains, and, if not to
wield--which was not diplomatic--at any rate to whet and to point,
the dagger against the greatest man of his time. Prusias, the most
pitiful among the pitiful princes of Asia, was delighted to grant the
little favour which the Roman envoy in ambiguous terms requested; and,
when Hannibal saw his house beset by assassins, he took poison. He
had long been prepared to do so, adds a Roman, for he knew the Romans
and the word of kings. The year of his death is uncertain; probably
he died in the latter half of the year 571, at the age of sixty-seven.
When he was born, Rome was contending with doubtful success for the
possession of Sicily; he had lived long enough to see the West wholly
subdued, and to fight his own last battle with the Romans against the
vessels of his native city which had itself become Roman; and he was
constrained at last to remain a mere spectator, while Rome overpowered
the East as the t