Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/315

Rh thought that by uniting with a strong quasi-Hellenic power like Macedonia the "cloud from the West" might be kept off, others preferred their local autonomies and precarious alliances. The result was again the same—that all fell alike under a great united power.

Peace, indeed, was made in B.C. 205; but it only gave Philip opportunity for fresh encroachments and provocations, and his policy brought into the arena another sovereign—Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, who had secured complete control of all Asia this side Taurus in B.C. 214 by the capture and death of his cousin Achæus, and since then had been on a seven years' expedition into Upper Asia, beyond the Hindu-Kush, and had reduced to obedience the satraps of a vast region (B.C. 212–205). Foiled for a time in his ambitions in Greece and the West, Philip turned his eyes to the East, and made an agreement with Antiochus to partition the outlying dominions of the infant King of Egypt, Ptolemy V., who had just succeeded. In pursuance of this agreement Antiochus at once occupied Pales- tine, long a bone of contention between the Syrian and Egyptian sovereigns; defeated Scopas, the Ætolian general in the service of Egypt, at Panium, near the sources of the Jordan; and contemplated the subjection of Cyrene and Egypt itself. Philip, for his part, proceeded to occupy those Egyptian dominions which had been taken over by Ptolemy at the division of the Thracian kingdom at the death of Lysimachus in B.C. 281—that is, the Thracian Chersonese, certain cities in Asia Minor, and the