The series of wars in which the Romans made themselves masters of Greece were known in their annals as the Macedonian Wars. At the beginning, they were innocent of aggression. A young and ambitious but unprincipled king of Macedonia—Philip, who succeeded the able Antigonos Doson—had put himself in alliance with the Carthaginians and assailed the Romans in the midst of their desperate conflict with Hannibal. For the time they were unable to do more than trouble Philip so far as to prevent his bringing effective reinforcements to the enemy at their doors, and this they accomplished in part by a treaty with the Ætolians, which enlisted that unscrupulous league upon their side. The first Macedonian war, which began B. C. 214, was terminated by the Peace of Dyrrachium, B. C. 205. The Peace was of five years duration, and Philip employed it in reckless undertakings against Pergamus, against Rhodes, against Athens, everyone of which carried complaints to Rome, the rising arbiter of the Mediterranean world, whose hostility Philip lost no opportunity to provoke. On the Ides of March, B. C. 200, the Roman senate declared war. In the spring of B. C. 197 this second Macedonian War was ended at the battle of Cynoscephalæ—so called from the name of a range of hills known as the Dog-heads—where the Macedonian army was annihilated by the consul T. Quinctius Flamininus. At the next assembly of the Greeks for the Isthmian Games, a crier made proclamation in the arena that the Roman Senate and T. Quinctius the General, having conquered King Philip and the Macedonians, declared all the Greeks who had been subject to the king free and independent. Henceforth, whatever freedom and independence the states of Greece enjoyed were according to the will of Rome. An interval of twenty-five years, broken by the invasion of Antiochus and his defeat by the Romans at Thermopylæ (see SELEUCIDÆ: B. C. 224-187), was followed by a third Macedonian War. Philip was now dead and succeeded by his son Perseus, known to be hostile to Rome and accused of intrigues with her enemies. The Roman Senate forestalled his intentions by declaring war. The war which opened B. C. 171 was closed by the battle of Pydna, fought June 22, B. C. 168, where 20,000 Macedonians were slain and 11,000 taken prisoners, while the Romans lost scarcely 100 men. Perseus attempted flight, but was soon driven to give himself up and was sent to Rome. The Macedonian kingdom was then extinguished and its territory divided between four nominal republics, tributary to Rome. Twenty years after, there was an attempt made by a pretender to re-establish the Macedonian throne, and a fourth Macedonian War occurred; but it was soon finished (B. C. 146—see above, B. C. 280-146). The four republics then gave way, to form a Roman province of Macedonia and Epirus,