FLAMININUS, TITUS QUINCTIUS (c. 228-174 B.c.), Roman general and statesman. He was military tribune under M. Claudius Marcellus, the conqueror of Syracuse. In 199 he was quaestor, and consul the next year.
Flamininus was one of the first and most successful of the rising school of Roman statesmen, the opponents of the narrow patriotism of which Cato was the type, the disciples of Greek cul ture, and the advocates of a wide imperial policy. His personal charm, his knowledge of men, and his intimate knowledge of Greek, all marked him out as the fittest representative of Rome in the East. Accordingly, the province of Macedonia, and the conduct of the war with Philip V. of Macedon were assigned to him. Flamininus modified both the policy and tactics of his pre decessors. He spent most of his first year in gaining control of Greece by diplomacy and force. Hostilities were renewed in the spring of 197, and Flamininus took the field supported by nearly the whole of Greece. At Cynoscephalae the Macedonian phalanx and the Roman legion met for the first time. It was a victory of superior tactics. The left wing of the Roman army was retiring before the Macedonian right led by Philip when Flamininus charged the left wing under Nicanor, which he caught still form ing, and cut it to pieces. This defeat was turned into a general rout by a nameless tribune, who collected twenty companies and charged in the rear the victorious Macedonian phalanx. Mace donia was now at the mercy of Rome, but Flamininus contented himself with his previous demands. Philip lost all his foreign possessions, but retained his Macedonian kingdom almost entire. He was required to reduce his army, to give up all his decked ships except five, and to pay an indemnity of I,000 talents (1244,000). At the Isthmian games a herald proclaimed to the assembled crowds that "the Roman people, and T. Quinctius their general, having conquered King Philip and the Macedonians, declare all the Greek states which had been subject to the king henceforward free and independent." Flamininus's last act be fore returning home was to ask the Achaeans to ransom the Italian captives who had been sold as slaves in Greece during the Hanni balic War. These, to the number of 1,200, were presented to him on the eve of his departure (spring, 194), and formed the chief ornament of his triumph.
In 192, on the rupture between the Romans and Antiochus III. the Great, Flamininus returned to Greece as the civil representa tive of Rome. He secured the wavering Achaean states, cemented the alliance with Philip, and contributed largely to the Roman victory at Thermopylae (190. In 183 he undertook an embassy to Prusias, king of Bithynia, to induce him to deliver up Hannibal, who forestalled his fate by taking poison. Nothing more is known of him.
There seems no doubt that Flamininus was actuated by a genuine love of Greece and its people. To attribute to him a Machiavellian policy, which foresaw the overthrow of Corinth fifty years later and the conversion of Achaea into a Roman province, is absurd. There is more force in the charge that his Hellenic sympathies prevented him from seeing the innate weak ness and mutual jealousies of the Greek states of that period, whose only hope of peace and safety lay in submitting to the protectorate of the Roman republic.
His life. has been written by Plutarch, and in modern times by F. D. Gerlach (1871) ; see also Mommsen, Hist. of Rome (Eng. tr.), bk. iii. chs. 8, 9.