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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: FLA-FRA |
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FLAMININUS, TITUS QUINCTIUS (c. 228174 B.C.) , Roman general and statesman. He began his public life as a military tribune under M. Claudius
Flamininus was one of the first and most successful of the rising school of Roman statesmen, the opponents of the narrow patriotism of which Cato was the type, the disciples of Greek culture, and the advocates
fascination , and his intimate knowledge of Greek, all marked him out as the fittest representative of Rome in the East
great
control . The demand of the Greeks for the expulsion of Macedonian garrisons from Demetrias, Chalcis and Corinth, as the only guarantee for the freedom of Greece, was refused, and negotiations were broken off. Hostilities were renewed in the spring of 197, and Flamininus took the field supported by nearly the whole of Greece. At Cynoscephalae the Macedonian phalanx and the Roman legion for the first time met in open fight, and the day decided which nation was to be master of Greece and perhaps of the world. It was a victory of superior tactics. The left wing of the Roman army was retiring in confusion before the Macedonian right led by Philip in person, when Flamininus, leaving them to their fate, boldly charged the left wing under Nicanor, which was forming on the heights. Before the left wing had time to form, Flamininus was upon them, and a massacre rather than a fight ensued. This defeat was turned into a general rout by a nameless tribune, who collected twenty companies and charged in the rear the victorious Macedonian phalanx, which in its pursuit had left the Roman right far behind. Macedonia was now at the mercy of Rome, but Flamininus contented himself with his previous demands. Philip lost all his foreign possessions, but retained his Macedonian kingdom almost entire. He was required to reduce his army, to give up all his decked ships except five, and to pay an indemnity of loot
spring , 194), and formed the chief
triumph
In 192, on the rupture between the Romans and Antiochus III. the Great
victory at Thermopylae (191). In 183 he undertook an embassy to Prusias, king of Bithynia, to induce him to deliver up Hannibal, who forestalled his fate by taking poison. Nothing more is known of Flamininus, except that, according to Plutarch, his end was peaceful and happy. There seems no doubt that Flamininus was actuated by a genuine love of Greece and its people. To attribute to him a Machiavellian policy, which foresaw the overthrow of Corinth fifty years later and the conversion of Achaea into a Roman province, is absurd and disingenuous. There is more force in the charge that his Hellenic sympathies prevented him from seeing the innate weakness and mutual jealousies of the Greek states of that period, whose only hope of peace and safety lay in submitting to the protectorate of the Roman republic. But if the event proved that the liberation of Greece was a political mistake, it was a noble and generous mistake, and reflects nothing but honour on the name of Flamininus, " the liberator of the Greeks." His life has been written by Plutarch, and in modern times by F. D. Gerlach (1871); see also Mommsen, Hist. of Rome (Eng. tr.), bk. iii. chs. 8, 9. _ End of Article: FLAMININUS, TITUS QUINCTIUS (c. 228174 B.C.) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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