Armenia (where ruled Xerxes, betrayed by his name as an Iranian), in Parthia (where Arsaces, the third king of a barbarian line from the Turanian desert, which had mastered that country a little less than forty years before, had just come to the throne), in Bactria (where Euthydemus, a Greek from Magnesia, had recently founded a new Hellenic dynasty in the place of an old one established nearly fifty years earlier by Diodotus, "lord of the thousand Bactrian cities," as he is called), and in India, where a certain Sophragasenus, following the examples of Arsaces and Euthydemus, recognized the superior power of the Seleucid. On his return to Antioch after five years of marching and fighting in the Far East (210-205 B.C.), Antiochus wrested Palestine from the now feeble grasp of the Ptolemies. This exploit gave him the long-desired, long-lacked, and long-fought-for access to the sea; and for the first time in the history of the realm an opportunity was secured for the construction of a great fleet. Simultaneously, Philip of Macedon fell before the Romans at Cynocephalæ (197 B.C.); whereupon Antiochus went vigorously to work dislodging all "foreigners" from the Mediterranean seaboard of Asia Minor. This led in 192 B.C. to conflict with Rome. Antiochus the Great has been late in coming into his due.[103] The mere fact that Hannibal, whom the undying hatred of Rome had driven into his service, worked out for him a plan of campaign against the Romans which he rejected, and that he put the greatest general of his age in charge of a new squadron of his extemporized fleet, have sufficed to rule out of court in advance any apology for his defeat. The issue showed that the view taken by Hannibal of the power of Rome was right. It is true that it could have been checked only by a great combination of all the Mediterranean states. But it is equally true that such a combination was impracticable. Antiochus had to deal with the situation as he found it. He risked too much for a few frontier districts and a possible hegemony in Greece. But he seems to have greatly underestimated the power of Rome, and to have credited the Senate with far less energy and tenacity of purpose than it actually possessed. Once his vanguard was thrown out of Greece by the incomparable Roman legions, his main hope of defending Asia Minor did actually rest with his fleet. Hannibal was, accordingly, in the right place. But the fleet was too new and too weak as well as too scattered to hold the Romans in Europe; and, once the veterans of the Second Punic War were across the Hellespont, no army in Asia could have resisted them.