Tom Holland

the legions once again meet with a Macedonian phalanx.

And it's fought in a great battle on the Macedonian coast, a place called Pydna.

And the guy in command of the Roman legions at this battle is called Aemilius Paulus.

And if that sounds familiar, then it's because he is the son of the Aemilius Paulus who had died at Cannae, Hannibal's great victory.

And Aemilius Paulus at Apidna, he confessed that the advance of the Macedonian phalanx was such a terrifying sight that he had briefly dreaded that he might suffer a defeat similar to that suffered by his father.

But in the event, he wins this spectacular victory.

utterly crushing victory so the legionaries you know they're much more flexible much more mobile and they're able to infiltrate the phalanx through gaps that open up in its ranks and then it's just a massacre the people in the phalanx have these huge long spears so they're hapless against the gladius the stabbing sword that the romans are using and the whole battlefield just becomes this great sea of blood and viscera all their guts are kind of you know the

is captured, he's deposed, and ends up being led through the streets of Rome in Paulus's triumph.

And Macedon itself, the monarchy is abolished.

And it is divided up into these kind of four petty cantons under dodgy little republics.

And this is obviously a recipe for instability, but that for the Romans is precisely the point.

You know, they're not there to administer direct rule, but what they do want is Macedon left both submissive and impotent.

And that is what, you know, these reforms do.

Yeah.

Well, to pursue the Donald Trump analogy, it's as though he were to invade Europe and take back as hostages a raft of Eurocrats from Brussels, regulators of American social media companies, and obviously the director general of the BBC.

And they would all be taken back to Washington and kept as hostages.

No comment.

So all these Greek hostages are taken back, and among them is a Greek from Arcadia whose name we have been mentioning quite a lot throughout this series, and that is Polybius, who will become...

the great historian of Rome's rise to dominance in the Mediterranean.

And the theme of Polybius's history, he sets it out, it's how the affairs of Italy and of Africa came to be interwoven with those of Asia and of Greece, and all things point in concert to a single end.