Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER X REACTION TOWARD PRACTICAL POLITICS The general withdrawal of Rome's Eastern armies in 188 seemed for the moment to prove that the Scipios had succeeded in completely reforming Rome's foreign policy. Instead of fighting for an extension of empire, the senate had during ten years proved its willingness to act as a member of the Egean concert of powers, to enter into temporary alliances and coalitions, and to withdraw its forces when its main work had been done. In 188 it was apparent that if this policy could be conserved long enough to eradicate the old Roman idea that an ally was a subject, Rome might become a permanent member of the Hellenic coalition whose purpose it was to propagate the Greek particularistic doctrine. But the philhellenic group in the senate was not strong enough to bend the nation to a course so un-Roman. The Scipios soon fell from power, and with them their policies; or perhaps, if we knew the whole truth, we should find that these leaders fell because their philhellenic policy could not withstand the vigorous assaults of conservative Romans like Cato. We can readily understand why the doctrine that underlay the work of this decade was not popular. Firstly, it broke utterly with the mas maiorum. The creators of Rome's old institutions had formed scores of alliances, but always with the understanding that each and every one of their allies should surrender its foreign affairs to Rome's supervision. It made old-fashioned Roman senators uncomfortable to observe that they had signed away their privilege of lording over the East by accepting alliances of friendship instead of insisting upon the far more advantageous forms of treaty which former senators had imposed upon Italian states. Many of them felt that the Greeks did not deserve any privilege...