20,000 Macedonians lay on the field of battle, 11,000 were prisoners.  The war was at an end, on the fifteenth day after Paullus had assumed the command; all Macedonia submitted in two days.  The king fled with his gold—­he still had more than 6000 talents (1,460,000 pounds) in his chest—­to Samothrace, accompanied by a few faithful attendants.  But he himself put to death one of these, Evander of Crete, who was to be called to account as instigator of the attempted assassination of Eumenes; and then the king’s pages and his last comrades also deserted him.  For a moment he hoped that the right of asylum would protect him; but he himself perceived that he was clinging to a straw.  An attempt to take flight to Cotys failed.  So he wrote to the consul; but the letter was not received, because he had designated himself in it as king.  He recognized his fate, and surrendered to the Romans at discretion with his children and his treasures, pusillanimous and weeping so as to disgust even his conquerors.  With a grave satisfaction, and with thoughts turning rather on the mutability of fortune than on his own present success, the consul received the most illustrious captive whom Roman general had ever brought home.  Perseus died a few years after, as a state prisoner, at Alba on the Fucine lake;(5) his son in after years earned a living in the same Italian country town as a clerk.

Thus perished the empire of Alexander the Great, which had subdued and Hellenized the east, 144 years after its founder’s death.

Defeat and Capture of Genthius

That the tragedy, moreover, might not be without its accompaniment of farce, at the same time the war against “king” Genthius of Illyria was also begun and ended by the praetor Lucius Anicius within thirty days.  The piratical fleet was taken, the capital Scodra was captured, and the two kings, the heir of Alexander the Great and the heir of Pleuratus, entered Rome side by side as prisoners.

Macedonia Broken Up

The senate had resolved that the peril, which the unseasonable gentleness of Flamininus had brought on Rome, should not recur.  Macedonia was abolished.  In the conference at Amphipolis on the Strymon the Roman commission ordained that the compact, thoroughly monarchical, single state should be broken up into four republican-federative leagues moulded on the system of the Greek confederacies, viz. that of Amphipolis in the eastern regions, that of Thessalonica with the Chalcidian peninsula, that of Pella on the frontiers of Thessaly, and that of Pelagonia in the interior.  Intermarriages between persons belonging to different confederacies were to be invalid, and no one might be a freeholder in more than one of them.  All royal officials, as well as their grown-up sons, were obliged to leave the country and resort to Italy on pain of death; the Romans still dreaded, and with reason, the throbbings of the ancient loyalty.  The law of the land and the former constitution otherwise