In the middle of this war, in order to keep the Macedonian king from aiding Hannibal, Rome had entered a Greek coalition of states which were at enmity with Philip of Macedonia, and had thus come into close contact with Athens. When, therefore, the Greek states later appealed for aid to save democracy, a strong “philhellenism,” aroused by such contacts and no less by the influence of Euripides and Menander on the Roman stage, brought about Rome’s entrance into the Second Macedonian War.[3] Several men at Rome began (doubtless with the aid of secretaries) to write Roman histories in the Greek language. This does not mean that many Romans could read Greek with ease. It expressed, in a way, a desire that the cultured world should have some knowledge of what this “barbaric” state was accomplishing, and it was a gesture of deference to the one literature then known in the civilized world. Ennius also began to introduce such Greek prose works as he thought the people were ready for, the saws of “Epicharmus” and the cynical theology of Euhemerus. The directest result of philhellenism on literature was the demand for a closer approach to Greek models in the drama. Ennius’ tragedies seem to have restored the Greek chorus, while in comedy men like Luscius and Terence presently vied with each other in claiming to be faithful translators of the Greeks. In the early decades of the second century it appeared to some observers that Greek literature was about to overwhelm Rome. The younger nobility, led by Scipio Africanus, Flamininus, and their friends, was willing to employ all of Rome’s man power and resources for the liberation of the Greeks from Macedonian rule, and when the Seleucid kingdom began to take advantage of the defeat of Philip and to subjugate the Greek cities of the Anatolian coast, these Romans challenged the great king with the ultimatum: “No Greek shall ever again anywhere be subject to foreign rule.” Never has sentimentalism gone farther in foreign politics. It would not be an overstatement to find in the plays of Euripides produced in translation on the Roman stage the chief factor in this unreasonable wave of enthusiasm for a foreign cause. But this love of things Greek—which resembles the English enthusiasm for French culture in the Restoration—overshot its mark. The armies that served in Greece and in Asia Minor learned foreign ways too rapidly and brought back too much. Livy (39.6), in a passage which accomplishes its purpose by a sarcastic juxtaposition of incongruous items, tells of the loaded trucks that the returning armies brought home.