Carthage attacks Masinissa after the Numidian king…

Prusias II Cynegus of Bithynia had in 156-154 invaded the territories of Pergamon, only to be defeated, and the Pergamenes have insisted on heavy reparations.

His son Nicomedes II is so popular with the people that his father had sent him to Rome to limit his influence.

However, in Rome, he had also gained favor from the Roman Senate, forcing Prusias to send an emissary with secret orders to assassinate him.

But the emissary reveals the plot, and persuades the prince to rebel against his father.

Supported by Attalus II, king of Pergamon, he is completely successful, orders his father to be put to death at Nicomedia, and takes the Bithynian throne as Nicomedes II Epiphanes.

Andriscus, having contrived to escape his Roman captors, reappears in Macedonia with a large body of Thracians, provoking a Fourth Macedonian War with Rome.

He defeats the first Roman force sent against him in 149 BCE under the command of the praetor Publius Iuventius Thalna, who is killed in battle.

Andriscus now assumes the title of king.

Rome establishes the first permanent court in 149 BCE.

After Galba returns in this year to Rome, the tribune, Titus Scribonius Libo, brings a charge against him for the outrage he had committed on the Lusitanians; and Cato the Elder, now eighty-five years old, attacks him most unsparingly in the assembly of the people.

Galba, although a man of great oratorical power himself, has nothing to say in his own justification; but bribery, and the fact of his bringing his own children and the orphan child of a relative before the people, and imploring mercy, procure his acquittal.

Meanwhile, Scipio Aemilianus sides with the conservatives, including the elderly Cato, in pressing for a third Punic War.

The older conservatives, scarred by their earlier experience, harbor fear and loathing of Carthage; younger Romans, such as Aemilianus, see another war as an avenue to glory.

Rome therefore declares war shortly before Cato’s death in 149 BCE.

Rome, after taking Tunis, …

…Sfax, and …

…Tripoli in 149 BCE, …

…quickly defeats Carthage, which surrenders conditionally, accepting all the Roman demands and surrendering their arms.

The Roman consuls then tell them to abandon their city and settle inland as farmers, for Carthage is to be destroyed.

The disarmed Carthaginians, besieged and desperate, rescind their surrender and renew the war.

Seleucid power had begun to weaken after the defeat of Antiochus the Great at the hands of the Romans at the Battle of Magnesia in 190 BCE effectively broke Seleucid power and in particular the Seleucid army.

The Arsacids had taken power in Parthia and declared their full independence from the Seleucid Empire.

The Parthian king Mithridates I of Parthia invades Media, which is already in revolt against the Seleucid empire, in 148 BCE.

After winning a decisive battle at the Battle of Ecbatana, Mithridates is able to annex Media from the Seleucid Empire.

Andriscus’ conquest of Thessaly and alliance with Carthage makes the Macedonian situation dangerous.

A second Roman army under the praetor Quintus Caecilius Metellus in 148 defeats the pretender in the Second Battle of Pydna with relative ease and crushes the rebellion.

Andriscus, his brief reign marked by cruelty and extortion, flees to Thrace, whose prince gives him up to Rome.

The consul Spurius Postumius Albinus in 148 BCE constructs the Via Postumia, which runs from the coast at Genua (Genoa) …