It would take far too long to tell you about all the stages by which the people, the common citizens, grew to have more and more power, and the patricians to have less. You must understand that the Senate was not in the least like our House of Lords. The eldest son of a Senator did not become a Senator when his father died, but the numbers of the Senate were kept up by elections, and some of the highest officials of the Comitia became Senators by reason of their holding these offices, so that by degrees many of the plebs, that is, of the people themselves, became Senators, and this made the citizens more content than they would otherwise have been with the Senate deciding how the wars should be carried on and when it was right to make war and peace with their enemies. The number of soldiers in a legion was from four to six thousand. These legionaries, as they were called, all being--at first, at all events--holders of property in the Roman Republic, must have felt that it was for themselves and for their own property that they went to fight. That must have added to their courage and determination. They were heavily-armed {182} infantry soldiers, and to each legion was assigned some auxiliary lighter-armed troops and some cavalry. The way of fighting was much the same as that of the Macedonian phalanx, and it was actually the Macedonian phalanx that the Roman legions came clashing up against when Rome began to extend herself eastward beyond Italy. That came about in this way. Philip V., king of Macedon, had allied himself with the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War, that war in which Hannibal seemed to have Rome at his mercy. During its progress the Romans had made alliances with several powers in the East: with Egypt, where one of the Ptolemies was king; with Rhodes, the large island lying just off the coast of Asia Minor, which had a strong navy; with Pergamus, a city state on the mainland, which also had a strong fleet; and of course she was the defender, in Italy and in Sicily, of the Greek colonies there. When she was threatened by Philip of Macedon on her north-eastern side, she put herself at the head of a confederation of Greek states against Philip. Philip, on his part, had made an ally of Antiochus, one of the dynasty of Seleucus, who was king of Syria, and they agreed between them to take possession of Egypt, which had little power of its own at this time to withstand them. [Sidenote: Rome against Macedon] Thus the Romans, with all the trouble with Carthage on their hands on the one side, had these enemies in Macedonia and right away to Asia Minor on the other. But the alliance with Pergamus and Rhodes gave them strength in the eastern waters of the Mediterranean. Then, in 201 B.C., the Punic War ended, in a manner probably quite different from that which Philip and his {183} Syrian friend had expected. Rome was free to turn her full attention to the East.