The family had a glorious place in the early history of Rome, especially the famous hero Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, but it had somewhat lost its political influence by the middle of the fourth century BC.

Flamininus' great grandson later put an apex, the head covering of the Flamen, as a symbol of his family on a denarius he minted.

At the end of the third century, the Quinctii regained a good status among the political class, as shown by Flamininus' uncle Caeso who built the Temple of Concord in 217,[3][4] his younger brother who became augur in 213 at a very young age,[5] and his distant cousin Titus Quinctius Crispinus, consul in 208.

Likewise, Flamininus was probably married to a Fabia, as Polybius says that Quintus Fabius Buteo, who later served under him in Greece, was his wife's nephew.

[6] He served under the five time consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who commanded the operations against Hannibal in Southern Italy.

Flamininus is mentioned again in 201 as the last member of a ten-men commission tasked with settling veterans of Scipio Africanus in Southern Italy (Samnium and Apulia), perhaps because he knew the area after his command at Tarentum.

He was even younger than Scipio Africanus, elected consul in 205 at 31, who had for him impressive military records and prestigious family support.

[19][20] Plutarch tells that he owed his success to his land distributions in the commissions that made him popular among the settlers, who voted for him in return.

[21] The other consul likewise lacked any notable military achievement, and was elected thanks to his aedileship the previous year, during which he imported a lot of grain from Africa.

[24] After his election to the consulship he was chosen to replace Publius Sulpicius Galba who was consul with Gaius Aurelius in 200 BC, according to Livy, as general during the Second Macedonian War.

He chased Philip V of Macedon out of most of Southern Greece, except for a few fortresses, defeating him at the Battle of the Aous, but as his term as consul was coming to an end he attempted to establish a peace with the Macedonian king.

In 197 BC he defeated Philip at the Battle of Cynoscephalae in Thessaly, the Roman legions making the Macedonian phalanx obsolete in the process.

Philip was forced to surrender, give up all the Greek cities he had conquered, and pay Rome 1,000 talents, but his kingdom was left intact to serve as a buffer state between Greece and Illyria.