to achieve the traditional aim of the policy of the Seleucidae, the acquisition of Egypt, while the Romans were employed in Macedonia.  Fortune seemed favourable to him.  The king of Egypt at that time, Ptolemy vi, Philometor, the son of Cleopatra, had hardly passed the age of boyhood and had bad advisers; after a great victory on the Syro-Egyptian frontier Antiochus was able to advance into the territories of his nephew in the same year in which the legions landed in Greece (583), and soon had the person of the king in his power.  Matters began to look as if Antiochus wished to possess himself of all Egypt in Philometor’s name; Alexandria accordingly closed its gates against him, deposed Philometor, and nominated as king in his stead his younger brother, named Euergetes ii, or the Fat.  Disturbances in his own kingdom recalled the Syrian king from Egypt; when he returned, he found that the brothers had come to an understanding during his absence; and he then continued the war against both.  Just as he lay before Alexandria, not long after the battle of Pydna (586), the Roman envoy Gaius Popillius, a harsh rude man, arrived, and intimated to him the command of the senate that he should restore all that he had conquered and should evacuate Egypt within a set term.  Antiochus asked time for consideration; but the consular drew with his staff a circle round the king, and bade him declare his intentions before he stepped beyond the circle.  Antiochus replied that he would comply; and marched off to his capital that he might there, in his character of “the god, the brilliant bringer of victory,” celebrate in Roman fashion his conquest of Egypt and parody the triumph of Paullus.

Measures of Security in Greece

Egypt voluntarily submitted to the Roman protectorate; and thereupon the kings of Babylon also desisted from the last attempt to maintain their independence against Rome.  As with Macedonia in the war waged by Perseus, the Seleucidae in the war regarding Coelesyria made a similar and similarly final effort to recover their former power; but it is a significant indication of the difference between the two kingdoms, that in the former case the legions, in the latter the abrupt language of a diplomatist, decided the controversy.  In Greece itself, as the two Boeotian cities had already paid more than a sufficient penalty, the Molottians alone remained to be punished as allies of Perseus.  Acting on secret orders from the senate, Paullus in one day gave up seventy townships in Epirus to plunder, and sold the inhabitants, 150,000 in number, into slavery.  The Aetolians lost Amphipolis, and the Acarnanians Leucas, on account of their equivocal behaviour; whereas the Athenians, who continued to play the part of the begging poet in their own Aristophanes, not only obtained a gift of Delos and Lemnos, but were not ashamed even to petition for the deserted site of Haliartus, which was assigned to them accordingly.