victory at Thermopylae (191). In 183 he undertook an embassy to Prusias, king of Bithynia, to induce him to deliver up Hannibal, who forestalled his fate by taking poison. Nothing more is known of Flamininus, except that, according to Plutarch, his end was peaceful and happy.
There seems no doubt that Flamininus was actuated by a genuine love of Greece and its people. To attribute to him a Machiavellian policy, which foresaw the overthrow of Corinth fifty years later and the conversion of Achaea into a Roman province, is absurd and disingenuous. There is more force in the charge that his Hellenic sympathies prevented him from seeing the innate weakness and mutual jealousies of the Greek states of that period, whose only hope of peace and safety lay in submitting to the protectorate of the Roman republic. But if the event proved that the liberation of Greece was a political mistake, it was a noble and generous mistake, and reflects nothing but honour on the name of Flamininus, “the liberator of the Greeks.”
His life has been written by Plutarch, and in modern times by F. D. Gerlach (1871); see also Mommsen, Hist. of Rome (Eng. tr.), bk. iii. chs. 8, 9.
FLAMINIUS, GAIUS, Roman statesman and general, of
plebeian family. During his tribuneship (232 B.C.), in spite of
the determined opposition of the senate and his own father, he
carried a measure for distributing among the plebeians the ager
Gallicus Picenus, an extensive tract of newly-acquired territory
to the south of Ariminum (Cicero, De senectute, 4, Brutus, 14).
As praetor in 227, he gained the lasting gratitude of the people
of his province (Sicily) by his excellent administration. In 223,
when consul with P. Furius Philus, he took the field against the
Gauls, who were said to have been roused to war by his agrarian
law. Having crossed the Po to punish the Insubrians, he at
first met with a severe check and was forced to capitulate.
Reinforced by the Cenomani, he gained a decisive victory on the
banks of the Addua. He had previously been recalled by the
optimates, but ignored the order. The victory seems to have
been due mainly to the admirable discipline and fighting qualities
of the soldiers, and he obtained the honour of a triumph only
after the decree of the senate against it had been overborne by
popular clamour. During his censorship (220) he strictly
limited the freedmen to the four city tribes (see Comitia). His
name is further associated with two great works. He erected
the Circus Flaminius on the Campus Martius, for the accommodation
of the plebeians, and continued the military road from
Rome to Ariminum, which had hitherto only reached as far as
Spoletium (see Flaminia, Via). He probably also instituted
the “plebeian” games. In 218, as a leader of the democratic
opposition, Flaminius was one of the chief promoters of the
measure brought in by the tribune Quintus Claudius, which
prohibited senators and senators’ sons from possessing sea-going
vessels, except for the transport of the produce of their own
estates, and generally debarred them from all commercial
speculation (Livy xxi. 63). His effective support of this measure
vastly increased the popularity of Flaminius with his own order,
and secured his second election as consul in the following year
(217), shortly after the defeat of T. Sempronius Longus at the
Trebia. He hastened at once to Arretium, the termination of
the western high road to the north, to protect the passes of the
Apennines, but was defeated and killed at the battle of the
Trasimene lake (see Punic Wars).
The testimony of Livy (xxi., xxii.) and Polybius (ii., iii.)—no friendly critics—shows that Flaminius was a man of ability, energy and probity. A popular and successful democratic leader, he cannot, however, be ranked among the great statesmen of the republic. As a general he was headstrong and self-sufficient and seems to have owed his victories chiefly to personal boldness favoured by good fortune.
His son, Gaius Flaminius, was quaestor under P. Scipio Africanus the elder in Spain in 210, and took part in the capture of New Carthage. Fourteen years later, when curule aedile, he distributed large quantities of grain among the citizens at a very low price. In 193, as praetor, he carried on a successful war against the insubordinate populations of his recently constituted province of Hispania Citerior. In 187 he was consul with M. Aemilius Lepidus, and subjugated the warlike Ligurian tribes. In the same year the branch of the Via Aemilia connecting Bononia with Arretium was constructed by him. In 181 he founded the colony of Aquileia. The chief authority for his life is the portion of Livy dealing with the history of the period.
FLAMSTEED, JOHN (1646–1719), English astronomer, was
born at Denby, near Derby, on the 19th of August 1646. The
only son of Stephen Flamsteed, a maltster, he was educated at
the free school of Derby, but quitted it finally in May 1662, in
consequence of a rheumatic affection of the joints, due to a
chill caught while bathing. Medical aid having proved of no
avail, he went to Ireland in 1665 to be “stroked” by Valentine
Greatrakes, but “found not his disease to stir.” Meanwhile,
he solaced his enforced leisure with astronomical studies. Beginning
with J. Sacrobosco’s De sphaera, he read all the books
on the subject that he could buy or borrow; observed a partial
solar eclipse on the 12th of September 1662; and attempted the
construction of measuring instruments. A tract on the equation
of time, written by him in 1667, was published by Dr John Wallis
with the Posthumous Works of J. Horrocks (1673); and a paper
embodying his calculations of appulses to stars by the moon,
which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions (iv. 1099),
signed In Mathesi a sole fundes, an anagram of “Johannes
Flamsteedius,” secured for him, from 1670, general scientific
recognition.
On his return from a visit to London in 1670 he became acquainted with Isaac Newton at Cambridge, entered his name at Jesus college, and took, four years later, a degree of M.A. by letters-patent. An essay composed by him in 1673 on the true and apparent diameters of the planets furnished Newton with data for the third book of the Principia, and he fitted numerical elements to J. Horrocks’s theory of the moon. In 1674, and again in 1675, he was invited to London by Sir Jonas Moore, governor of the Tower, who proposed to establish him in a private observatory at Chelsea, but the plan was anticipated by the determination of Charles II. to have the tables of the heavenly bodies corrected, and the places of the fixed stars rectified “for the use of his seamen,” and Flamsteed was appointed “astronomical observator” by a royal warrant dated 4th of March 1675. His salary of £100 a year was cut down by taxation to £90; he had to provide his own instruments, and to instruct, into the bargain, two boys from Christ’s hospital. Sheer necessity drove him, in addition, to take many private pupils; but having been ordained in 1675, he was presented by Lord North in 1684 to the living of Burstow in Surrey; and his financial position was further improved by a small inheritance on his father’s death in 1688. He now ordered, at an expense of £120, a mural arc from Abraham Sharp, with which he began to observe systematically on the 12th of September 1689 (see Astronomy: History). The latter part of Flamsteed’s life passed in a turmoil of controversy regarding the publication of his results. He struggled to withhold them until they could be presented in a complete form; but they were urgently needed for the progress of science, and the astronomer-royal was a public servant. Sir Isaac Newton, who depended for the perfecting of his lunar theory upon “places of the moon” reluctantly doled out from Greenwich, led the movement for immediate communication; whence arose much ill-feeling between him and Flamsteed. At last, in 1704, Prince George of Denmark undertook the cost of printing; a committee of the Royal Society was appointed to arrange preliminaries, and Flamsteed, protesting and exasperated, had to submit. The work was only partially through the press when the prince died, on the 28th of October 1708, and its completion devolved upon a board of visitors to the observatory endowed with ample powers by a royal order of the 12th of December 1712. As the upshot, the Historia coelestis, embodying the first Greenwich star-catalogue, together with the mural arc observations made 1689–1705, was issued under Edmund Halley’s editorship in 1712. Flamsteed denounced the production as surreptitious; he committed to
