Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/328

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298
THE ROMAN CONQUEST

whenever they chose, and gave all their energies for the present to crush Antiochus, whose high talk of a second expedition into Greece was partly responsible for the obstinacy of the Aetolian resistance. The king's fleet was defeated in the autumn of B.C. 191 off Phocaea, but in the spring of the next year it gained a victory over the Rhodians, while the Roman fleet was detained some time with the blockade of Abydos. Things seemed promising for the king at first, his son Seleucus carried all before him in Aeolis, and he himself, at the head of a large army, occupied the territory of Pergamus. But a Roman army was on its way, commanded by L. Scipio, assisted by his famous brother Africanus; and whilst waiting to fight this army the king's fortune at sea went from bad to worse. Hannibal, with a Phoenician fleet, was defeated by the Rhodians; his own fleet was beaten with great loss in the bay of Teos; Phocaea was captured by the Roman ships; and there was no chance of preventing the Scipios from crossing the Hellespont. The battle of Magnesia, late in B.C. 190, ended all his hopes. His army was cut to pieces, and he and his son with difficulty escaped to Sardis. He was obliged to submit to any terms the Romans chose to demand. They included an immense war indemnity and the abandonment of his authority in Asia this side of Taurus. It was a repetition of the so-called treaty of Callias in B.C. 452: Asiatic Greece was no longer to be under an Eastern sovereign. But times were changed, and the restoration of complete and separate independence to the cities proved to