The Roman Senate reasserts its own terms…

The Romans establish the town of Pisaurum as a colony in the territory of the Piceni, a tribe living in the Marche on the Adriatic.

The northern Piceni had been invaded in the fourth century BCE by the Senones Gauls, and when the Romans reached the area the population was a mix of the two races.

Within it the Gauls at least were still distinct, as the Romans separated them out and expelled them from the country.

Cato finally becomes censor, with his colleague Flaccus, in 184.

Already the champion of the ancient, austere Roman way of life, Cato now inaugurates a puritanical campaign.

He aims at preserving the mos majorum ("ancestral custom") and combating all Greek influences, which he believes are undermining the older Roman standards of morality.

He passes measures taxing luxury and strictly revises the list of persons eligible for the Senate.

Abuses by tax gatherers are brought under control, and public building is promoted as a worthy cause.

He orders the construction of the Basilica Porcia, a large, oblong building adjoining the forum. (The name is derived from the Greek Basilike, meaning royal, but this basilica is the earliest known. The architectural form proves so useful that others will soon built throughout the Roman world, usually adjoining the forum or agora of a town.)

Roman dramatist Titus Maccius Plautus, commonly known as Plautus, whose comedies are among the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature, is also one of the earliest pioneers of musical theater.

Playwrights throughout history would look to Plautus for character, plot, humor, and other elements of comedy.

His influence ranges from similarities in idea to full literal translations woven into plays.

The playwright’s apparent familiarity with the absurdity of humanity and both the comedy and tragedy that stem from this absurdity have inspired succeeding playwrights centuries after his death in 184.

The most famous of these successors is Shakespeare—Plautus had a major influence on the Bard’s early comedies.

With concerns rising in Rome over whether Philip V of Macedon is preparing for a new war with the Romans, Appius Claudius Pulcher is sent at the head of an embassy into Macedonia and Greece to observe Philip's activities.

The Roman Senate reasserts its own terms in 184 for settlement of the dispute between Sparta and the Achaean League.

The Romans, by unknown means, finally put themselves in a position to demand the surrender of Hannibal when Roman diplomat Titus Quinctius Flamininus is sent to the court of Prusias of Bithynia, to demand the surrender of the former Carthaginian diplomat and general Hannibal.

When Hannibal finds out that Prusias is about to agree to the Roman demands and thus betray him, and unable this time to escape, he poisons himself in the Bithynian village of Libyssa.

The year is uncertain but is probably 183.

Pontus gradually has asserted itself among the petty Hellenistic states of Anatolia in the third and early second centuries BCE; Pharnaces, fifth king of Pontus, the son of Mithridates III, who he succeeded on the throne, succeeds in reducing Antiochus, …

…the important city of Sinope, which has been long an object of ambition to the kings of Pontus, and annexes the city in 183 as the new Pontic capital.

The Rhodians send an embassy to Rome to complain of this aggression, but without effect.

About the same time, Pharnaces becomes involved in disputes with his neighbor, Eumenes II, king of Pergamon, which leads to repeated embassies from both monarchs to Rome, as well as to partial hostilities.

The independent-minded Philopoemen has for the past decade dominated Achaean policy In the Peloponnese, but in 183 when Messene rebels against the Achaean League, …

…the seventy-year-old general, intervening to try and control the rebellion, is taken in a skirmish and given and imprisoned.

He is then given poison to take so that he can die honorably. (Plutarch relates his life.)

The city of Parma was most probably founded and named by the Etruscans, for a parma (circular shield) was a Latin borrowing, as were many Roman terms for particular arms, and Parmeal, Parmni and Parmnial are names that appear in Etruscan inscriptions.

Diodorus Siculus (XXII, 2,2; XXVIII, 2,1) reported that the Romans had changed their rectangular shields for round ones, imitating the Etruscans.

Whether the Etruscan encampment was so named because it was round, like a shield, or whether its situation was a shield against the Gauls to the north, is more a matter of choice.

The Roman colony is founded in 183 BCE, together with Modena.

Two thousand families are settled.

The territory around Modena (Roman Mutina, Etruscan Muoina) was inhabited by the Villanovans in the Iron Age, and later by Ligurian tribes, Etruscans, and the Gaulish Boii (the settlement itself being Etruscan).

Although the exact date of its foundation is unknown, it is known that it was already in existence in the third century BCE, for in 218 BCE, during Hannibal's invasion of Italy, the Boii revolted and laid siege to the city.

Livy described it as a fortified citadel where Roman magistrates took shelter.

The outcome of the siege is not known, but the city was most likely abandoned after Hannibal's arrival.

Mutina is refounded as a Roman colony in 183 BCE, to be used as a military base by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.

Cato's Praecepta ad filium, a self-tutorial encyclopedia conceived to develop skills and knowledge in practical fields and published about 183 BCE, reflects Roman pragmatism.

Cato is also opposed to the spread of Hellenic culture, which he believes threatened to destroy the rugged simplicity of the conventional Roman type.

It is in the discharge of the censorship that this determination is most strongly exhibited, and hence that he derives the title (the Censor) by which he is most generally distinguished.

He revises with unsparing severity the lists of senators and knights, ejecting from either order the men whom he judges unworthy of it, either on moral grounds or from their want of the prescribed means.

One example of his rigid justice is the expulsion in 184 BCE of Lucius Quinctius Flamininus, Roman Consul in 192 and brother to the great Titus Quinctius Flamininus, the conquerer of Greece, for wanton cruelty.

Flamininus's removal from the Senate is a part of a bigger struggle between the party of the Scipios and their opponents led by Cato.

If he is not personally engaged in the prosecution of the Scipiones (Africanus and Asiaticus) for corruption, it is his spirit that animates the attack upon them.

Even Scipio Africanus, who refuses to reply to the charge, saying only, "Romans, this is the day on which I conquered Hannibal," and is absolved by acclamation, finds it necessary to retire, self-banished, to his villa at Liternum, where, ill and disillusioned, he dies in 183.

Cato's enmity dates from the African campaign when he had quarreled with Scipio for his lavish distribution of the spoil among the troops, and his general luxury and extravagance.