The two recent invasions of Italy by formidable enemies must have taught the Senate the necessity of making it impossible that there should be another. But another might yet be looked for—so at least they believed—not from Spain or Africa, but from the great military power of Macedon. Philip of Macedon had been among Rome’s enemies since Cannæ; but not even Hannibal could persuade him to attack her with vigour, and he missed his chance. Roman diplomacy had stirred up the Greeks against him, and he had plenty to do at home. But no sooner was Carthage crushed than the Senate coaxed the tired and unwilling people into declaring war against him, and this led in the course of the next half-century to the overthrow of the Macedonian kingdom, and finally to its absorption into what we must now begin to call the Roman Empire. At the same time, Rome acquired a protectorate over the whole of Greece, at first honestly meant to defend her against Macedon, but destined to pass rapidly into dominion. The Greeks in their leagues and cities were never again really free. If they could have kept from quarrelling among themselves, they might have endured this protectorate with profit; but ere Rome had done with them they were to feel her heavy hand.
Thus the “peasants of the Tiber” became masters of the Balkan peninsula as well as of that of Italy. In the same period they completed the conquest of Italy up to the Alps, not without difficulties and defeats, and went on driving their roads and planting colonies in all parts. In the Spanish peninsula, from which the Carthaginians had been finally driven, they now established two permanent commands (_provinciæ_), one in the basin of the Ebro in the north-east, and the other in the fertile valleys of the Guadiana and Guadalquivir, as the two great rivers of southern Spain are now called. From these they slowly but persistently, after their manner, and in spite of many defeats and even disgraces, pushed up into the high tablelands of central Spain, until they had brought the greater part of the peninsula under their sway. Here they had to deal with a people very different from the weary and exhausted Greeks and Macedonians; a people only half civilised, but lively, intelligent and capable of making excellent soldiers, as Hannibal had found. It is to the credit of the Romans that, in spite of much cruelty and misgovernment, they gave this peninsula a real civilisation, of which the traces are still abundant especially in the south, and a beautiful language, which descends directly from their own.