Among the future Romans pointed out to Aeneas by Anchises in the underworld are two who did harm to Greeks and so avenged Troy. The first, as editors of Book 6 have long realized,Footnote 1 is L. Mummius, who defeated the Achaean League and captured Corinth in 146 b.c., so subjecting a large part of Greece to Rome, dependent on the province of Macedonia.Footnote 2 The second—and he must be someone different, since his achievements are contrasted as more precisely directed at the leaders of the Greek expedition to Troy—has been variously interpreted since C. Iulius Hyginus (Gell. NA 10.16.14–18): perhaps M’. Curius who defeated Pyrrhus (so Hyginus), or Q. Metellus Macedonicus who defeated the Pseudo-Philip in 148, or the great L. Aemilius Paulus who defeated Perseus, the last king of independent Macedon, in 168.Footnote 3 Not only Pyrrhus but also Alexander the Great was an offshoot of Aeacus—through his mother (Plut. Alex. 2.1)—and for Roman poets the same was true of members of the subsequent royal house of Macedon.Footnote 4 The chief weakness of the three candidates for the second ille is that none made war on Agamemnon's Argos and Mycenae. The worst that Paulus did was to take political prisoners, such as the historian Polybius, from the Peloponnese.Footnote 5
An alternative is to hand, however, a man who began the ruin of Macedon on the field of Cynoscephalae in 197 and also campaigned against Nabis, the tyrant of Sparta and Argos in 195: T. Quinctius Flamininus.Footnote 6
He had called himself and his Roman army descendants of Aeneas on his dedications at Delphi—silver shields, his own battle-shield and the gold crown for Apollo (Plut. Flam. 12.6–7)—thus highlighting the connection with revenge for Troy. The notion that the cities of Agamemnon and Menelaus might pay for the downfall of Troy is as old as Homer (Il. 4.51–3) and was developed in Hellenistic epigram (Anth. Pal. 9.28, 101–4), though not with specific reference to Rome.Footnote 7 Virgil, however, has already developed this theme, when he makes Jupiter prophesy that Aeneas’ descendants will conquer Macedon, Mycenae and Argos (Aen. 1.183–5).Footnote 8
A possible explanation for the failure of commentators to consider Flamininus in this context is that he was judged to be a philhellene. It is true that he proclaimed the liberation of Greece by the Romans at the Isthmia of 196 (Polyb. 18.44–7) and consequently his head appeared on coins (RRC no. 546), that he was praised in a paean (Plut. Flam. 16.4) and that festivals (Titia) were founded in his honour.Footnote 9 However, that liberty implied a Roman political umbrella and even those Greeks who were not attacked as Nabis was soon perceived it as a form of subjection. In three years’ time the Aetolians were requesting the Syrian king Antiochus III to liberate them from the Romans.Footnote 10 In any case, for Romans Flamininus was one of their foremost commanders, who defeated one major enemy of Rome, Philip V, and turned the Greeks into a front line against the Romans’ next major opponent, Antiochus III.Footnote 11
