Battle of Cynoscephalae — Rome Defeats the Macedonian Phalanx
Rome defeated Macedon at Cynoscephalae in 197 BC and then declared Greece free. Philip V had made an alliance with Hannibal during the Second Punic War, which Rome had noted and could not act on at the time, and had spent the following years taking cities in the Aegean and Asia Minor. Rhodes, Pergamon and Athens asked for help, and Rome, having just finished with Carthage, sent Titus Quinctius Flamininus. The battle was an accident. Both armies were moving in fog over the ridge called the dog's heads, their advance guards met, and the two forces were fed into a fight neither commander had chosen on ground neither had seen. The Macedonian right formed its phalanx and drove the Roman left back downhill. The Macedonian left had not deployed at all, and the Roman right destroyed it; an unnamed tribune then took twenty maniples out of the pursuit and attacked the victorious phalanx from behind, where a pike formation cannot turn. It is the clearest demonstration in ancient warfare of what happens to a phalanx on broken ground against a more flexible formation. Philip lost some 8,000 men and made peace, giving up Greece, his fleet and an indemnity. Flamininus then announced at the Isthmian games of 196 that the Greek cities were free and autonomous, and the crowd's cheering is said to have knocked birds out of the air. Rome had no intention of leaving, and annexed Macedonia fifty years later. Polybius, who fought in a phalanx himself before being taken to Rome, wrote the standard analysis of why it lost. The formation is irresistible frontally on level ground and cannot maintain its line on anything else, and the legion could fight in fragments while the phalanx could not.
- Year: 197 BCE
- Category: Military
