The Battle of Panium marks the end…

Antiochus III, ruler of the Seleucid kingdom in West Asia, had been occupied with internal troubles for several years after his decisive defeat by Ptolemy IV at Raphia, and it was therefore not until about 200 that he could think again of an attack on Egypt, where a child—Ptolemy V Epiphanes—had recently ascended the throne.

The Egyptian government is in the hands of overly powerful ministers who are more concerned with feathering their own nests than with preserving the integrity of the kingdom.

The armies of Antiochus and Ptolemy meet in battle in 198 at Panion, on the northern boundary of Galilee near the source of the Jordan River, and the Ptolemaic general Scopas is defeated.

Thus, the Ptolemaic possessions north of the Sinai desert, including Palestine, pass to the house of Seleucus.

His expansionist drive insatiable, Antiochus occupies parts of the kingdom of Pergamon in 198 BCE.

Philip's position in Greece is shaken by the Roman campaigns in Macedonia in 199 BCE and …

…Thessaly in 198 BCE.

The young Roman general Titus Quinctius Flaminius, a military tribune during the Second Punic War, has had a distinguished military career.

Elected quaestor in 205, he exercised the authority (imperium) of a praetor at Tarentum in southern Italy, and he twice (202, 200) has been involved in the distribution of lands to victorious troops.

These veterans help elect him consul for 198.

A philhellene, he goes to Greece with a fresh army to continue the Second Macedonian War.

After an initial victory over Philip, Flaminius devotes himself to winning over the Greek cities and leagues by diplomacy andin the case of the Achaean League, by force.

Pergamon’s king, Eumenes II, has just succeeded his long-lived father Attalus I Soter and continues his father’s policy of alliance with the Romans, who in 197 assign eastern Thrace to Pergamon.

The official coronation of Ptolemy V takes place in 197.

Called Ptolemy Epiphanes, he proves an ineffectual ruler; during his minority Egypt had lost most of its foreign possessions to the Seleucid king Antiochos III and the domestic revolts of his father's reign continue.

Serious difficulties have arisen in the young king’s first decade of rule.

Native revolts in the south, sporadic in the second half of the third century, have now become serious and weakened the hold of the monarch on a vital part of the kingdom.

These revolts, which produce native claimants to the kingship, are generally attributed to the native Egyptians' realization of their potential power after their contribution to the victory at Raphia (217) that had won the Fourth Syrian War.

The twelve-year-old king directs the fighting against rebels in the Nile Delta, exhibiting great cruelty toward those leaders who capitulate.

Antiochus occupies the Ptolemaic Greek cities in Asia Minor in 197 BCE, conquering the entire coast of Anatolia from Cilicia to the Hellespont, while also attacking Pergamon in the interior.

Flamininus has made allies of most of Greece by spring 197 BCE.

When the Aetolian cavalry prevails against the isolated Philip's forces at Cynoscephalae in Thessaly, the single decisive battle of the war, in which the Macedonian phalanx of heavy infantry had shown that it was hard to beat if it kept its ranks but vulnerable if it did not, …

…the Romans hand over Dolopia, Phocis, and Eastern Locris to the Aetolians but withhold their former Thessalian possessions.