Rome suffered more from the Antigonids than from any other Hellenistic dynasty because it had there alone to do with a nation of veterans under arms. The Macedonians were, as has been said, an imperial people, loyal to their kings, and ambitious to maintain their ascendancy in the world. While at war with Rome--the wielder of armies 100,000 strong--they were assailed simultaneously by their Hellenic vassals and rivals and attacked or abandoned by their Macedonian kinsmen in Asia and Africa; yet they held out under the Antigonids, in the first struggle for eight years (212-205 B.C.), in the second for four (200-197 B.C.), in the third for still another four (171-168 B.C.); and even after one half of their men of military age had fallen at Pydna, and their last king had died in captivity and his only son as a clerk at Alba Fucens, their conquerors were so seriously disturbed by the "throbbings of their ancient loyalty" that the Senate had finally to place a Roman proconsul on the throne of the great Alexander (148 B.C.). * * * * * Though sprung from a Macedonian stock, the dynasty of the Antigonids was bred in Asia, and it was transplanted into Macedon only in its third generation. That came about in the following way. The first Antigonus was made ruler of Phrygia when Alexander the Great left Asia Minor in 333 B.C., and he was still in possession of that satrapy when his sovereign died ten years later. With Phrygia as a starting point and a nomination as commander-in-chief of the royal forces in Asia as a pretext, he planned and fought with such success in the next decade that in the spring of 312 B.C. he seemed destined to add Macedon to Asia, which he already possessed; and with it to support and not to oppose him, he counted on being able to master the whole of Alexander's empire. We have already seen why this project failed, and also how a later attempt to accomplish the same purpose cost him his life and his Asiatic realm. He may have been over-ambitious. Possibly no one could have prevented the dismemberment of the Græco-Macedonian world. Perhaps the centrifugal tendencies would have proved too strong for Alexander himself had he lived long enough to test them. That, however, does not make the issue less of a calamity for the Hellenes; for on the battle-fields of Gaza and Ipsus it was decided that the alien Romans and not the kindred Macedonians were to unite the world under a single government. With the person of the first Antigonus went to the grave the hope of a great people.