<P> Thus, in less than twenty years, Rome had destroyed the power of one of the successor states, crippled another, and firmly entrenched its influence over Greece . This was primarily a result of the over-ambition of the Macedonian kings, and their unintended provocation of Rome, though Rome was quick to exploit the situation . In another twenty years, the Macedonian kingdom was no more . Seeking to re-assert Macedonian power and Greek independence, Philip V's son Perseus incurred the wrath of the Romans, resulting in the Third Macedonian War (171--168 BC). Victorious, the Romans abolished the Macedonian kingdom, replacing it with four puppet republics; these lasted a further twenty years before Macedon was formally annexed as a Roman province (146 BC) after yet another rebellion under Andriscus . Rome now demanded that the Achaean League, the last stronghold of Greek independence, be dissolved . The Achaeans refused and declared war on Rome . Most of the Greek cities rallied to the Achaeans' side, even slaves were freed to fight for Greek independence . The Roman consul Lucius Mummius advanced from Macedonia and defeated the Greeks at Corinth, which was razed to the ground . In 146 BC, the Greek peninsula, though not the islands, became a Roman protectorate . Roman taxes were imposed, except in Athens and Sparta, and all the cities had to accept rule by Rome's local allies . </P> <P> The Attalid dynasty of Pergamum lasted little longer; a Roman ally until the end, its final king Attalus III died in 133 BC without an heir, and taking the alliance to its natural conclusion, willed Pergamum to the Roman Republic . The final Greek resistance came in 88 BC, when King Mithridates of Pontus rebelled against Rome, captured Roman held Anatolia, and massacred up to 100,000 Romans and Roman allies across Asia Minor . Many Greek cities, including Athens, overthrew their Roman puppet rulers and joined him in the Mithridatic wars . When he was driven out of Greece by the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the latter laid siege to Athens and razed the city . Mithridates was finally defeated by Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) in 65 BC . Further ruin was brought to Greece by the Roman civil wars, which were partly fought in Greece . Finally, in 27 BC, Augustus directly annexed Greece to the new Roman Empire as the province of Achaea . The struggles with Rome had left Greece depopulated and demoralised . Nevertheless, Roman rule at least brought an end to warfare, and cities such as Athens, Corinth, Thessaloniki and Patras soon recovered their prosperity . </P> <P> Contrarily, having so firmly entrenched themselves into Greek affairs, the Romans now completely ignored the rapidly disintegrating Seleucid empire (perhaps because it posed no threat); and left the Ptolemaic kingdom to decline quietly, while acting as a protector of sorts, in as much as to stop other powers taking Egypt over (including the famous line - in - the - sand incident when the Seleucid Antiochus IV Epiphanes tried to invade Egypt). Eventually, instability in the near east resulting from the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Seleucid Empire caused the Roman proconsul Pompey the Great to abolish the Seleucid rump state, absorbing much of Syria into the Roman Republic . Famously, the end of Ptolemaic Egypt came as the final act in the republican civil war between the Roman triumvirs Mark Anthony and Augustus Caesar . After the defeat of Anthony and his lover, the last Ptolemaic monarch, Cleopatra VII, at the Battle of Actium, Augustus invaded Egypt and took it as his own personal fiefdom . He thereby completed both the destruction of the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Republic, and ended (in hindsight) the Hellenistic era . </P> <P> In some fields Hellenistic culture thrived, particularly in its preservation of the past . The states of the Hellenistic period were deeply fixated with the past and its seemingly lost glories . The preservation of many classical and archaic works of art and literature (including the works of the three great classical tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) are due to the efforts of the Hellenistic Greeks . The museum and library of Alexandria was the center of this conservationist activity . With the support of royal stipends, Alexandrian scholars collected, translated, copied, classified and critiqued every book they could find . Most of the great literary figures of the Hellenistic period studied at Alexandria and conducted research there . They were scholar poets, writing not only poetry but treatises on Homer and other archaic and classical Greek literature . </P>

Which city was the theatrical center of the hellenistic world