The war in question was the First Macedonian War, in which Rome had allied itself with the Aetolian League against Philip V. The Roman motive was to tie down Macedon while fighting Carthage in the west; the Aetolians had their own grievances with Philip. By the spring of 210 BC, the coalition had grown: Pergamon, Elis, Messenia, and Sparta had all signed on. Rome and Pergamon controlled the sea with their combined fleets, and Philip was under pressure from multiple directions. The Roman proconsul Publius Sulpicius Galba and Aetolian strategos Dorimachus coordinated land and sea operations while the Aetolians struck deep into Macedonia's sphere of influence.

Philip responded by moving in the one direction the coalition had left him — he took Echinus by siege and probably secured Phalara, the port of Lamia on the Maliac Gulf, cutting into Aetolian territory.

By spring 209 BC, Philip faced competing demands. His ally the Achaean League was under attack from Sparta and the Aetolians in the Peloponnese. Word came that Attalus of Pergamon had been elected one of the two supreme commanders of the Aetolian League and was preparing to cross from Asia Minor into the Aegean. Leaving these threats unmet was not an option. Philip marched south into Greece — toward Lamia, where the Aetolians, under their commander Pyrrhias, were positioned with Roman support.

The battle that followed was a Macedonian victory. The Aetolian league suffered nearly 1,000 casualties. A second engagement was fought near Lamia later in the same year.

The First Battle of Lamia belongs to a period of Roman history that is easy to underestimate: the phase when Rome was simultaneously fighting for its survival against Hannibal in the west and conducting what was essentially a proxy war against Macedon in the east. The mechanism the Romans used was precisely the alliance with the Aetolians — fund and supply Greek allies to keep Philip busy, without committing legions that were needed elsewhere. When Laevinus returned to Rome to take his consulship, he could report that the eastern legion might safely be withdrawn. The Greek war was costing Rome relatively little. Philip was doing most of the absorbing.

That calculus was cold, and the Aetolians understood it. Rome enslaved the inhabitants of Anticyra when they took it in 210 BC, while Aetolia received the town itself. The alliance was profitable for both parties, but the profit was not equally distributed.

The Spercheios valley where Lamia stands has absorbed conflict across more than two millennia. Thermopylae — where the Spartans fell to the Persians in 480 BC and where Greek fighters took defensive positions again in 1821 — is only a short distance east, where the mountains squeeze the road to a narrow corridor. The Lamian War of 323–322 BC, fought here in the aftermath of Alexander the Great's death, gave this region its name in that earlier crisis. The First Battle of Lamia in 209 BC is a separate engagement, a later chapter in the same landscape's long habit of drawing armies to the chokepoints between mountain and sea.

Today the city of Lamia covers much of the ground. Its acropolis still stands, now home to the Archaeological Museum that displays the artifacts left by the people who lived through all these centuries of conflict.