Quinctius Flaminīnus first served against Hannibal during the Second Punic War. He was present at the capture of Tarentum in 209 B. c., and in 208 was military tribune under Marcellus. After being employed on minor business of state, he became quaestor in 199, and, immediately after his year of office, consul, passing over the aedileship and praetorship, and attaining the consulship at the extraordinarily early age of 30. In 197 he won the victory of Cynoscephalae over the Macedonians, which ended the war. At the Isthmian games in the spring of 196 Flamininus made his famous proclamation of freedom to all the Greeks. He returned to Rome in 194 to enjoy a splendid triumph. For the rest of his life was employed chiefly on diplomatic business concerning Greece and the East. One of his embassies was to Prusias, king of Bithynia, call on him to surrender Hannibal, who was living at his court in advanced old age; this led to Hannibal's suicide. Flamininus was censor in 189 (see below, 42), and lived on till some time after 167, in which year he became augur; but the date of his death is unknown. He was a man of brilliant ability both as general and as diplomat, and also possessed much culture and was a great admirer of Greek literature. -- ILLE VIR etc.: _i.e._ the shepherd mentioned in n. on line 1. Livy 32, II, 4 says that Flamininus sent to the master of the shepherd, Charopus, an Epirote prince, to ask how far he might be trusted. Charopus replied that Flamininus might trust him, but had better keep a close watch on the operations himself. -- HAUD MAGNA CUM RE: 'of no great property'; _re_ = _re familiari_, as is often the case elsewhere in both verse and prose. Cf. pro Caelio 78 _hominem sine re. Cum_ is literally 'attended by'; it is almost superfluous here, since _vir haud magna re_ would have had just the same meaning. Madvig, Gram. § 258 has similar examples. -- PLENUS: final _s_ was so lightly pronounced that the older poets felt justified in neglecting it in their scanning. It was probably scarcely pronounced at all by the less educated Romans, since it is often wholly omitted in inscriptions, and has been lost in modern Italian. Cicero, Orator 161, says that the neglect to pronounce final _s_ is 'somewhat boorish' (_subrusticum_), though formerly thought 'very refined' (_politius_). Even Lucretius sometimes disregards it in his scanning. In the ordinary literary Latin a large number of words has lost an original _s_; _e.g._ all the nouns of the _-a_ declension. A. 375, _a_; G. 722; H. 608, 1, n. 3. -- FIDĒI: this form of the genitive of _fides_ is found also in Plautus, Aulularia 575, and Lucretius 5, 102. _Fidĕi_ as genitive seems only to occur in late poets, but as dative it is found in a fragment of Ennius. _Fidē_ as genitive occurs in Horace and Ovid. H. 585, III. 1; Roby, 357, (c). -- QUAMQUAM: see n. on 2 _etsi_. -- SOLLICITARI etc.: Cicero probably has not quoted the line as Ennius wrote it. The word