Plutarch, a Greek from Chaeronea in what is now central Greece, wrote Parallel Lives: paired biographies of Greeks and Romans. This is the life of Titus Quinctius Flamininus, a Roman general, set opposite Philopoemen, the last Greek trying to keep his cities free from the inside.

Flamininus beat Philip V, king of Macedon — the old northern power in Greece — at Cynoscephalae in Thessaly. He was thirty-three. At the Isthmian Games near Corinth, a herald declared the Greeks free. The shout was so loud, Plutarch says, that crows fell from the air. Rome had a new way of winning: by proclamation. He hunted Hannibal in Bithynia, now northern Turkey, until the old man drank poison, meddled in Sparta, and found that freedom announced is not freedom kept. A man of the Senate, Rome’s council of elders, standing in a Greek theatre.