"It seems probable that not less than three hundred thousand Italians perished in this war, the brunt of which loss fell chiefly on Rome. After the battle of Cannæ it was found necessary to fill up the hideous gap in the Senate by an extraordinary nomination of 177 senators; the ordinary burgesses suffered hardly less severely. Further, the terrible strain on the resources of the state had shaken the national economy to its very foundations. Four hundred flourishing townships had been utterly ruined. The blows inflicted on the simple morality of the citizens and farmers by a camp life worked no less mischief. Gangs of robbers and desperadoes plundered Italy in dangerous numbers. Home agriculture saw its existence endangered by the proof, first given in war, that the Roman people could be supported by foreign grain from Sicily and Egypt. Still, at the close and happy issue of so terrible a struggle, Rome might justly point with pride to the past and with confidence to the future. In spite of many errors she had survived all danger, and the only question now was whether she would have the wisdom to make right use of her victory, to bind still more closely to herself the Latin people, to gradually Latinize all her Italian subjects, and to rule her foreign dependents as subjects, not as slaves--whether she would reform her constitution and infuse new vigor into the unsound and fast-decaying portion of her state." Up to the close of the third century before Christ the wars of Rome had been mainly forced upon her by the aggressions of others, or had grown out of disputes which had arisen in the natural course of events; but after the battle of Zama, Rome entered deliberately upon a career of foreign conquest. In 200 B.C. a Roman army invaded Macedon, and Philip, the king of this country, was completely defeated at the battle of Cynoscephalæ in 197 B.C., but the Romans consented to easy terms of peace at this time on account of the expectation of a war with Syria. The first war between Rome and Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, began in 191 B.C. and ended in 187 B.C. By the terms of peace Antiochus gave up all his claims in Europe, and in Asia west of the Taurus. The Second Macedonian War began in 172 B.C. and was concluded by the great Roman victory at Pydna in 168 B.C. Macedon was at first divided into four republics, between which the rights of _connubium_ and _commercium_ were prohibited, but soon sank into the condition of a Roman province. Roman influence and interference were also rapidly increasing in Greece during this period, although no formal annexation of territory was made at this time.