Tom Holland

But there, very dramatic developments have taken place.

Because as we've already mentioned, Rome has finished the Great War against Hannibal with what is probably the most lethal and battle-hardened fighting force in the whole of history.

And if you have the most lethal and battle-hardened fighting force in history,

Very tempting to use it.

Right.

I mean, why let it go to waste?

Yeah, of course.

And Carthage obviously remains Rome's, you know, the chief object of her vigilance.

But she is not in any mood to take insubordination from other famous powers either.

So in Macedon, on the other side of the Adriatic, what's now northern Greece,

There is a king there who sits on what had once been the throne of Alexander the Great.

And this is a guy who's been Macedonian king for many decades, Philip V. And in the course of the Punic War, he had made a terrible mistake because he had assumed in the immediate wake of the Battle of Cannae that Rome was bound to lose.

And so he had signed up to an alliance with Hannibal.

Didn't actually go anywhere.

But the Romans, in their kind of best mafia style, do not forget this show of disrespect.

And so in the year 200, so very shortly after the Battle of Zama, a Roman task force crosses the Adriatic, begins a war against Macedon.

And in 197, the legions meet with Philip's great phalanx, this great kind of bristling porcupine of spears, at a battle at a place called Kinocephali.

And

The Romans cut the Macedonian phalanx to pieces.

And the guy who has won that victory, a man called Flaminius, the following year, he goes to the Isthmian Games, which are held in Corinth, the city on the join point between northern Greece and the Peloponnese.