The Chief Periods of European History. Freeman Edward Augustus
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The fight of Zama put an end to the long and wonderful episode of Phœnician power in the Western seas; it left Rome leisure to go on with her work, as conqueror and teacher in Western Europe, as conqueror and disciple beyond Hadria. Whether if Philip had put forth the full power of his kingdom and its allies, he and Hannibal together could have overthrown Rome, it is a waste of time to guess. It is enough for us to know and to rejoice that so it was not; Philip failed to act with Hannibal, and Rome could overthrow Hannibal and Philip, each in his turn. The first Macedonian war brought Rome into the thick of Greek affairs. The Greek states learned all of a sudden what Rome could be either as a friend or as an enemy. But they were slow to learn how truly the relation of either friend or enemy of Rome was only a step to the relation, first of Roman dependent, and then of Roman subject. They were not likely to learn the lesson; neither princes nor commonwealths are ever quick in learning such lessons. The Greeks of that day no more dreamed what Roman interference meant than the Greeks of a hundred and fifty years before had dreamed what Macedonian interference meant. No prince or people ever does in such cases fully understand what is coming. But, seeing Rome had been on the whole the immediate loser in the first Macedonian war, the Greeks of that day were still less likely to see how vastly Rome was a gainer by engaging in any Macedonian war at all. Men who had grown up as leaders in the several Greek states, who were used to look on Greece and the neighbouring powers as forming a world of their own, a world in which Roman interference was as little looked for as interference from another planet, were not likely to foresee the days that were to come before their own lives were ended. Philopoimên dreamed not yet of days when no Greek statesman dared to strike a blow or speak a word without the good will of the barbarian commonwealth which had become practically the mistress of them all. That they did not foresee those days was no special short-sightedness of Greeks or of commonwealths; it was the common short-sightedness of merely human statesmen, who had not, like their critics, the means of profitting by the experience of ages which were still unborn.
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