Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/325

Rh taken up some of the work which Philip had been obliged to abandon, and had occupied the Egyptian protectorates in Caria and the Thracian Chersonese. He then gave his daughter Cleopatra in marriage to Ptolemy, with the revenues of Coele-Syria and Palestine as her dower. He thus had established a kind of right to the cities of Caria and the Chersonese, and at any rate had prevented the fear of an appeal from Egypt to Rome against him. Nevertheless the Romans had remonstrated against his encroachment upon the Chersonese, and had told him at last that, if he did not quit Europe, they would free the Greek cities in Asia from him (B.C. 193).

But Antiochus had many reasons for not yielding to these threats. First, he had received the application of the Aetolians, who assured him that if he would come to Greece there would be a rising in the Peloponnese, headed by Nabis, in Boeotia, and other parts of Central Greece, and that Philip of Macedonia would gladly seize the opportunity of shaking off the supremacy of Rome. Again, there had just arrived in Ephesus the greatest general of the day and the most implacable enemy of Rome, Hannibal the Carthaginian, driven into exile by the unworthy jealousy of the Roman government. Hannibal held out an alluring prospect of inducing his fellow-countrymen to renew the war when the Romans were hampered by the rising in the East. Lastly, his past successes in Central Asia and Palestine had given Antiochus confidence in his power and fortune. Nor was it only as a victor that he had gained men's good word. He had known how to conciliate as well