The presence of Hannibal and the sound…

The government of Ptolemy V issues a coin weighing almost one ounce (twenty-seven point seventy-one grams), about six times the weight of most ancient gold coins, which weigh about four and a half grams.

Minted in Alexandria and dating to 191 BCE, the coin, right, is only the second gold Ptolemaic coin ever found in Israel.

The coin's denomination is referred to by numismatists as a "mnaieion," meaning a one-mina coin, and is equivalent to one hundred silver drachms, or a mina of silver.

The obverse portrays Queen Arsinoe II Philadelphus.

The reverse, or 'tail,' illustrates two "overlapping cornucopias decorated with fillets," according to Dr. Donald T. Ariel, head of the Coin Department of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), who stated that the coin, wedged in an ancient kitchen wall at the Tel Kedesh site near the Lebanon border, and discovered in June 2010 by a combined university research team in Israel, ranked in the top five of the rarest finds in that country's history.

Antiochus finds little support in central Greece.

Roman legions under the command of Manius Acilius Glabrio, numbering more than twenty thousand troops, cut him off from his reinforcements in Thrace in 191 and outflank his position at the pass of Thermopylae (in Greece), which Aetolian forces have failed to hold. (Cato the Elder is among those fighting in the east.)

Antiochus flees with the remainder of his troops to …

…Chalcis on Euboea and from here by sea to Ephesus, where his fleet is wiped out by the combined naval forces of Rome, Rhodes, and Pergamon.

Antiochus returns home to gather a larger army.

The Achaean League, still seeking to dominate the entire Peloponnesus, annexes Elis and …

…Messene and …

…in 191 crushes a Spartan revolt.

Achaean general Philopœmon, however, had neglected to obtain Roman permission to quell the rebellious Spartans, causing tension between Rome and the League.

Rome’s great comic dramatist, Titus Maccius Plautus, writes Stichus in 200, when he is about sixty-three.

Writing in the style of Greek New Comedy and borrowing extensively from the Atellan farces of Italy, Plautus’ witty comedies—a unique blend of farce, music, and dance—make inventive use of colloquial Latin and of puns, allusions, and asides to the audience.

Plautus employs such stock characters as the overbearing soldier, clever slave, and miser.

He characteristically bases his plots on mistaken identity or on rivalry between father and son.

Plautus writes Pseudolus in 191, one of two plays that can be assigned definite dates.

(Of the approximately one hundred and thirty plays he wrote after settling in Rome, following a career as a stagehand, the twenty-one plays that survive in whole or part include Mercator, Miles Gloriosus, and Cistellaria, from the early period; Aulularia and Curculio, from the middle; and Captivi and Menaechmi, from the late period.)

Antiochus is now eager to negotiate on the basis of Rome's previous demands, but the Romans now insist that he first evacuate the region west of the Taurus Mountains.

When he refuses, Antiochus is decisively defeated in winter 190-189 in the Battle of Magnesia near Mt. Sipylus (not far from Sardis), where he fights with a heterogeneous army of seventy thousand men against an army of thirty thousand Romans and their Pergamene allies.

The military skill of Eumenes II of Pergamon contribute substantially to the victory.

Scipio Africanus and his brother have fought Rome's victorious war, but Flamininus has remained active in diplomacy.

One of the terms demanded of Antiochus by the Romans is that Hannibal should be surrendered.

Accounts of Hannibal's subsequent actions vary: either he flees via Crete to the court of King Prusias of Bithynia, or he joins the rebel forces in Armenia, where Artaxias and Zariadres, Antiochus' satraps, have revolted against Seleucid rule.

The navies of Rhodes and Pergamon, having joined the Roman cause, have won two victories over the fleets of Antiochos III off the coast of Anatolia.

The Roman army, meeting no resistance in 190, crosses the Hellespont.

The Phocaeans, allied with the Seleucids against Rome and Pergamon, so savagely repel the Roman forces, however, that the praetor Lucius Aemilius Regillus is obliged to withdraw his men and entreat the citizens not to take the war so seriously; his infuriated troops take advantage of the truce to sack the city.

Philip has meanwhile aided Rome against her enemies on the Greek peninsula.

As a reward, his tribute is remitted and his younger son Demetrius restored in 190.