First Macedonian War Begins amid Second Punic War

Italy groaned under Hannibal’s winter camps and summer marches when Philip V of Macedon looked west. The Antigonid king controlled Pella and the mountain corridors into Thessaly; he also controlled his ambition. Appian’s line is cool but cutting: the Romans, obsessed with wars “in Italy, Africa, Spain, and Sicily,” paid no attention to Philip [7]. The Adriatic, a choppy gray moat between Brundisium and Epirus, suddenly looked like a road.

So Philip sent envoys and feelers to Hannibal, bargaining with Rome’s greatest enemy while he raided along the Illyrian coast [7]. Corcyra, that fortress-island near the mouth of the Adriatic, flashed bronze in the sun as Macedonian ships nosed close to its harbors. At Apollonia and Epidamnus, garrisons listened to the creak of oarlocks and watched for scarlet standards that might not come. Rome’s priority was Italy; its strategic reflexes were coastal and limited.

The First Macedonian War that followed (214–205 BCE) unfolded as an adjunct to a larger crisis, its campaigns shaped by the fact that the Senate’s best legions were pinned in Campania and Apulia [18][14]. Roman commanders in the Adriatic worked with Illyrian allies, fought for ports more than provinces, and thought in seasons rather than in conquests. They staged from Brundisium, crossed to Apollonia, and shuttled forces along the ragged shoreline to deny Philip an easy bridgehead. The war sounded like oars slapping water and scouts shouting in the dark, not like the clash of great field armies.

Philip’s diplomacy proved as provocative as his raids. He angled for leverage by talking to Carthage and testing Greek cities from Ambracia to Pharos. Appian tells how captured embassies inflamed Roman opinion and turned what had been a nuisance into a recognized theater of conflict [7]. Yet even Roman anger needed resources, and resources were tied to the Italian killing fields.

So the war froze into a pattern. Macedonian thrusts toward Illyria met Roman naval counterstrokes. Islands such as Issa and Corcyra mattered because they controlled passage; mainland towns such as Oricum mattered because they fed passage. The Senate’s orders to commanders sounded pragmatic: hold the line, sustain allies, avoid disasters that would echo in the Forum while Hannibal still drew pay in silver and blood.

From Pella, Philip saw opportunity but not clarity. He wanted a free hand on the Aegean’s northwestern rim and bargaining power with both Greeks and Carthaginians. From Rome, the consuls saw a king probing a door that could not be allowed to swing open. The balance was precarious: a handful of ships, two legions detached from the Italian front, and the promise to Illyrian chiefs that Rome would not forget them when the great war ended.

By 206 and 205 BCE, the pressure of events elsewhere—Scipio in Spain, Carthage’s fraying alliances—pushed both sides toward a pause. The Peace of Phoenice in 205 ended the fighting without changing the political map of Greece [18][14]. It felt like relief. It was only a reprieve.

What changed was psychological. Macedon had tested Rome’s reach across the Adriatic and found a limit, but also a presence. Rome had learned how quickly the sea could carry legions to Apollonia and Corcyra when it had to. The Adriatic ceased to be a moat. It became a monitored channel.

From Apollonia’s quays to the quarries of Corcyra and the warehouses of Brundisium, the war left traces—new alliances, fresh grievances, and maps in the Senate chamber with pins stuck in strange place-names. It also left a lesson crucial for what came next: Rome could fight east while fighting west, if it chose its tools and partners carefully [7][18][14].