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196 BCEPrimary source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Flamininus Declares Greece Free at the Isthmian Games, a Promise Rome Would Not Keep

On the timeline · around 196 BCE · The Hellenistic PeriodThe Hellenistic PeriodFlamininus Declares Greece Free at the Isthmian Games, a Promise Rome Would Not Keep225 BCE200 BCE175 BCE150 BCE

What happened

After defeating Macedon's King Philip V at the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 BCE, the Roman general Titus Quinctius Flamininus appeared at the Isthmian Games near Corinth in 196 BCE, one of the major Panhellenic athletic festivals. A trumpet called the stadium to silence, and a herald announced that Rome, having beaten Philip, restored a long list of Greek peoples, the Corinthians, Locrians, Phocians, Euboeans, and others, to freedom, without garrisons, without tribute, and under their own ancestral laws. According to Plutarch, the crowd's shout of joy was so loud it reportedly carried to the sea, and people crowded forward demanding the herald repeat the announcement because they could not believe what they had heard. Plutarch adds that ravens flying overhead reportedly fell out of the sky, which he explains, offering it as the natural theory of the day, as the shout rupturing the air beneath their wings. Despite the proclamation, Roman troops stayed garrisoned in several Greek cities and were not withdrawn until 194 BCE, and Rome kept intervening directly in Greek affairs over the following decades.

Why it matters

The promise of freedom functioned more as a Roman administrative strategy than a genuine withdrawal, since a buffer of nominally independent Greek states was more useful to Rome than either annexation or a truly autonomous Greece that might ally against it. When the Seleucid king Antiochus III invaded Greece in 191 BCE, Rome answered with its own legions rather than leaving Greek freedom to the Greeks to defend. Roman involvement in Greek politics continued for the next fifty years, and Rome's patience ran out entirely by 146 BCE, when it destroyed Corinth and put mainland Greece under direct Roman control, closing this timeline's account of ancient Greece.

How we know

Plutarch's Life of Flamininus gives the fullest surviving narrative of the Isthmian proclamation, including the herald's wording, the crowd's reaction, and the ravens detail. The 2nd-century BCE Greek historian Polybius, writing much closer to the event, corroborates the proclamation and the crowd's disbelief in his own Histories, and Livy's History of Rome records the same list of freed city-states.

Sources

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Flamininus Declares Greece Free at the Isthmian Games, a Promise Rome Would Not Keep · Ancient Greece · SourcedStory