The Achaeans and Nabis of Sparta were obstinately neutral, while nearer home in the north the Epirots and Aetolians threatened Thessaly and Macedonia. His own resources both in men and in money had been severely strained by his constant wars, and the only ally who could have given him effective assistance, Antiochus, was fully occupied with the conquest of Coele-Syria. It is no wonder then that, in spite of his dashing generalship and high courage, he made but a brief stand. T. Quinctius Flamininus (consul, 198), in his first year of command, defeated him on the Aous, drove him back to the pass of Tempe, and in the next year utterly routed him at Cynoscephalae. Almost at the same moment the Achaeans, who had now joined Rome, took Corinth, and the Rhodians defeated his troops in Caria. Further resistance was impossible; Philip submitted, and early the next year a Roman commission reached Greece with instructions to arrange terms of peace. These were such as effectually secured Rome's main object in the war, the removal of all danger to herself and her allies from Macedonian aggression. Philip was left in possession of his kingdom, but was degraded to the rank of a second-rate Power, deprived of all possessions in Greece, Thrace and Asia Minor, and forbidden, as Carthage had been in 201, to wage war without the consent of Rome, whose ally and friend he now became.
The second point in the settlement now effected by Rome was the liberation of the Greeks. The "freedom of Greece" was proclaimed at the Isthmian games amid a scene of wild enthusiasm, which reached its height when two years later ( i94.) Flamininus withdrew his troops even from the "three fetters of Greece" Chalcis, Demetrias and Corinth. There is no reason to doubt that, in acting thus, not only Flamininus himself, but the senate and people at home were influenced, partly at any rate, by feel ings of genuine sympathy with the Greeks and reverence for their past. It is equally clear than no other course was open to them.
For Rome to have annexed Greece, as she had annexed Sicily and Spain, would have been a flagrant violation of the pledges she had repeatedly given both before and during the war ; the attempt would have excited the fiercest opposition, and would probably have thrown the Asiatic as well as the European Greeks into the arms of Antiochus. But a friendly and independent Greece would be at once a check on Macedon and a barrier against aggression from the East. Nor while liberating the Greeks did Rome ab stain from such arrangements as seemed necessary to secure the predominance of her own influence. In the Peloponnese, for instance, the Achaeans were rewarded by considerable accessions of territory; and it is possible that the Greek states, as allies of Rome, were expected to refrain from war upon each other with out her consent.