Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/327

Rh from Elis, Epirus, and Boeotia. In the latter the king was received personally with enthusiasm, and commissioners from some of the towns in Thessaly attended a conference with him at Demetrias. But the friendly states more often had need of help from him than ability to furnish any; and on the whole he must have felt that the idea of leading a united Greece was hopeless. Such alliances as he had been able to form collapsed next spring (B.C. 191) when a Roman army marched through Thessaly, receiving the submission of city after city. Antiochus had spent the winter at Chalcis, and now tried to block the famous pass of Thermopylae against the Roman advance; but being utterly defeated there, he escaped by sea to Ephesus and never returned. His intervention had been useless to Greece, and was in the near future to prove disastrous to himself. All parts of Greece relapsed into their former submissiveness, and hardly any severities were employed by the consul Acilius to the states which had favoured Antiochus.

But the Aetolians would not give in. An Aetolian force stood a long siege at Heracleia, just north of Thermopylae, and their main army was strongly posted at Naupactus. A year went by with indecisive sieges and protracted negotiations, during which the only gainer was Philip of Macedon, who was entrusted with the reduction of revolted cities in Thessaly, and was rewarded by the remission of his war indemnity and the restoration of his supremacy in part, at any rate, of that district. The Romans felt sure of being able to settle the Aetolian question