Chapter 10
King Mithridates to King Arsaces [of Parthia], greetings. ...
If you were looking at eternal peace with no perfidious enemies just beyond your borders, and if crushing the power of Rome would not bring you glory and fame, I would not dare to ask that you unite your prosperity with my misfortunes and join in an alliance....Fortune has deprived me of much, but has given in return the experience which underlies my advice.1
So begins a letter to the king of Parthia from the new commander of the Armenian army, Mithridates of Pontus. Tigranes had belatedly seen the benefits of putting in charge someone with almost two decades of experience in fighting the Romans. While Lucullus was delayed in sorting out Tigranocerta, Mithridates was looking for allies and doing what he did best – raising another army. Whether the letter to Arsaces is genuine has been the heated topic of debate for centuries. It comes from the papers of Sallust, a contemporary historian. He might be quoting the letter verbatim from papers which later fell into Roman hands. Alternatively, he might have used a genuine letter as a topos, the basis for a literary exercise, or he might have invented the entire composition on the basis of what Mithridates should have said.
Either way, we get some spirited anti-Roman invective:
From the beginning of their existence, they have nothing, not homes, wives, nor empire, which they have not stolen. Parentless, homeless vagabonds, created to be the scourge of the world, no laws, human or divine are allowed to stand in the way of rapine and destruction ... The Romans are the enemies of mankind, most vicious where the loot is greatest. By audacity and deceit, leapfrogging from war to war, they have grown great. They will destroy humanity, or themselves perish in the process.2
The argument of Mithridates was simple. Rome was an out-of-control juggernaut. Ultimately foiled in the west by the Atlantic shore, the monster had turned east, successively destroying Philip of Macedon, Antiochus of Seleucia and Pontus itself. ‘Do you think that when we have all been crushed, that the wars will end, or that you can withstand the Romans otherwise?’
Though this last comment was both prescient and correct, the Parthian king chose to send sympathetic responses, but no help. Arsaces had in fact also sent envoys to Lucullus assuring him of his complete goodwill, so it was as well that Mithridates was not basing his survival strategy on Parthian intervention.
The campaign of 68 BC
It was fortunate for Mithridates and Tigranes that the Battle of Tigranocerta had taken place late in the campaigning season, in October, as this allowed the pair to withdraw their remaining forces to the fastnesses of upper Armenia. This meant leaving lower Armenia to its fate, but the Romans would not venture to follow their enemies through the mountain passes so late in the year. The two kings had until the start of the campaigning season of 68 BC to brace for the storm.
Mithridates had the smithys of every town working overtime to produce weapons, and set about raising a sizeable infantry force. This was organized and trained legionary-style by his Pontic officers, who had learned their skills from the Romans. Indeed, there were still some genuine Romans in his entourage, simply because these men had nowhere else to go. Tigranes meanwhile mustered the cavalry. Since we can discount out of hand Appian’s figure of 70,000 men, all that can be said with certainty is that the two kings had a handy army, albeit raw, partially trained and fragile, with which to withstand Lucullus when he arrived in the summer of 68 BC.3
As instructed by Mithridates, Tigranes avoided bringing his cavalry to battle, but harassed the Roman supply lines. The historian Cassius Dio tells us that the Armenian light cavalry, like their Parthian counterparts, were expert at shooting over the rumps of their horses even as they retreated. Not only were the legionaries unable to get to grips with their enemy, but those hit by bowfire suffered doubly, both because the Armenians allegedly poisoned their arrows, and because they deliberately made the heads loose, so that these came off in the wound when an attempt was made to remove them.4
Much of the summer was spent in marching and counter-marching about the mountains in a game of large-scale chess. Lucullus attempted to bring the Armenians to battle, while the Armenians attempted to isolate and cut off his columns, attack his forage parties and lead the Romans on fruitless pursuits. It would appear from the fragmentary evidence available that Lucullus attempted to advance to the west of Lake Van, though his exact route cannot be determined. Whichever of the two possible paths the Roman took, his army, and especially his foragers, would at some point have been exposed to the Armenian cavalry on the plain of Mutsch.5
However, when an increasingly confident Tigranes decided to challenge the Romans at a river crossing (probably the eastern Euphrates in the valley of Arsanias), he received a sharp setback. This eased the pressure on the Roman supply lines and allowed Lucullus to set his course for Artaxata, the capital of Armenia proper, where he hoped to repeat the success he had enjoyed before Tigranocerta, the former capital of Tigranes’ Armenian empire. However, Mithridates’ delaying tactics had achieved their purpose. Winter came early in northern Armenia and it was already too late in the year for a major initiative. A frustrated Lucullus was forced by his cold and hungry troops to swerve westward and try to draw Tigranes into battle by besieging Nisbis.
Both sides were disappointed, Tigranes because he wrongly calculated that the walls of Nisbis were equal to the highly-practised skills of the besieging Romans, not least because the city was well garrisoned and commanded by his brother and Callimachus, the man who had for so long withstood the Romans at Amisus. However, although Lucullus took the city and helped himself to another royal treasury, Mithridates and Tigranes ignored his provocation. Instead, working on the principle that Lucullus did not have the troops available to both fight and hold his conquests, Tigranes spent the time busily repossessing himself of Lucullus’ conquests in southern Armenia, no doubt consoled by the thought that Nisbis too would fall back into his hands when Lucullus moved on.
Lucullus had in fact noted the same point, and sent to Sornatius for some of the remaining legions garrisoning Pontus. These, with true Fimbrian recalcitrance, simply refused to move. Nor could Lucullus press the point too hard. The truth was that he had overstayed his tenure in command, and that command had only been for Cilicia in the first place. It was not just the Fimbrians, but some very highly-placed senators in Rome who were asking exactly why the ex-commander in Cilicia was currently hundreds of miles away from there, charging around Armenia with several unwilling Roman legions in tow.
Partly because his legions followed orders with ever-increasing reluctance, the Armenian campaign of 68 BC was ultimately inconclusive. The military initiative lay with Lucullus, but the wile and experience of Mithridates ensured that he could not use it. It almost seems as though, despite the loss of his armies, his conquests and his kingdom, Mithridates was beginning to enjoy himself. The king who had once, like a true Asiatic monarch, sent generals and armies to war on his behalf had now matured into a hardened warrior king who led from the front. His early setbacks had given him a resilience and cunning which made him a formidable general, and though now in his sixties, Mithridates’ sheer physical presence made him a terrifying opponent on the battlefield.
Certainly, Mithridates showed no traces of war weariness and threw himself into campaigning with gusto. Leaving Tigranes to tidy southern Armenia, Mithridates took a small expeditionary force of about 8,000 men to Armenia Minor. Half of this force was Pontic (perhaps including the cavalry detachment which had been with him since Cabira) and half loaned by Tigranes. With this force Mithridates began to harry the small Roman garrison in eastern Pontus, catching many small Roman detachments unaware and cutting them down before they were even aware that there was a serious enemy presence in the region.
Perhaps because of his inability to get Lucullus his desperately needed reinforcements, Sornatius was now gone, and command was with Hadrianus, another Roman commander with whom Mithridates had clashed in the past. Like many a Roman before him, Hadrianus found that Mithridates was not to be underestimated. For a start, Hadrianus lost the strong force of Thracian mercenaries which he had inherited from Mithridates after the latter’s flight from Cabira. As soon as they heard of his return, these men defected in a body back to their old master. Shortly afterwards, an early clash lost the Roman legate 500 of his men. He withdrew to his camp and sent out desperate messengers seeking reinforcements. Even so, when the attack came, Hadrianus was in danger of being overwhelmed until Mithridates exposed too much of himself in his enthusiasm to take the walls. He received a dart under the eye and a stone, probably from a sling, damaged his knee. The attack faltered as the king was taken away, and for a while his men feared for his life.
The Romans remained quiet over this period, for they had wounds of their own to lick. Among the retinue of Mithridates were members of the Agari, Scythians who treated wounds with snakebite. This appealed to a king with an interest in pharmaceuticals, and the royal patient was entrusted to them. Evidently the Agari were up to the job. Valerius Triarius, another Roman general, had been bringing reinforcements to Lucullus. Hearing of the crisis at Cabira, Triarius promptly changed direction and headed to his comrade’srelief. Mithridates, thanks to his exotic medical treatments (or despite them) was able to rise from his sickbed to resume command. A cowed Hadrianus handed his battered troops to the command of the newcomer, but it soon became evident that the only battle over the next few days would be against the elements. A terrific late autumn storm developed, which soldiers afterwards reported as lifting whole tents into the air, and blowing to their doom those who strayed too near cliff tops.
Mithridates pulled back before the combined Roman force, toward Comana. Even in retreat he was dangerous, for after crossing a river (probably the Iris) he prepared to attack Triarius as his men came over the same bridge. Meanwhile, a second force had been sent hurrying back post-haste with the intention of re-crossing the river by a second bridge, so that the Romans would be caught halfway over the river and attacked by Mithridates’ men on both sides. However, the bridge collapsed, so Mithridates was forced once more to retreat after a brisk but inconclusive engagement. Thereafter he followed the Roman example and went into winter quarters.
Even after campaigning finished for 68 BC, the advantage lay with Mithridates, for - as was the case almost anywhere in Asia Minor that had experienced the benefits of Roman rule - the local population were desperately keen to assist anyone who might offer an alternative. This meant that hordes of volunteers flocked to the royal standards, and allowed Mithridates to extend his power to include several local fortresses.
This left Lucullus with the thankless task of persuading his surly troops out of their winter quarters and informing them that it was necessary to abandon the conquest of Armenia and return with all speed to prevent Mithridates taking back Pontus. In order to save fellow Romans, the troops eventually agreed, but the effort cost Lucullus the little credibility that he had left with his men.
Events of 67 BC
It was a sign of the renewed confidence of Mithridates that he took the initiative and opened campaigning. When Triarius declined his initial offer of battle, he followed this up with an attack on the Roman fortress of Dadasa. This showed two things. Firstly that the Mithridatic intelligence organization was back to its usual level of efficiency, and secondly, that having been informed by his scouts that Lucullus was on his way, Mithridates had determined to dispatch Triarius before his arch-enemy arrived. The attack on Dadasa was a neat choice, for it held the booty looted by the legionaries on their campaigns so far. Either Triarius would be compelled by his men to defend their hard-won gains, or Mithridates would help himself to a handy financial windfall.
In the event, it turned out that Triarius needed little persuading. He may have been regretting his earlier reluctance to engage. After all, the Pontic troops had fled the region once before when confronted by Lucullus at Cabira, and the Armenians could not be worth much as soldiers if the legionaries of Lucullus had defeated ten times their number at Tigranocerta. Now, with his troops motivated by the defence of their booty, he felt reasonably confident of being able to present Lucullus with a tidy victory by the time his commander and the rest of the army arrived, and in the process would have done his career no harm.
Mithridates chose to meet Triarius near Zela, a fortified town which guarded the approaches to Amaseia from the Anatolian highlands. Though the walls of Zela itself are buttressed by a hill, the surrounding plain gave the Pontic cavalry excellent room for manoeuvre. It is also possible that Triarius had not expected the local reinforcements Mithridates had picked up over the winter. Not all of these would have been raw recruits either, as it may be that many who defected after Mithridates’ retreat from Cabira had, like the Thracian mercenaries, returned to their old commander.
Exactly what happened at Zela is unknown. The Romans are much happier giving details about their victories than they are fond of describing defeats, and nobody sufficiently prominent for a biographer to take an interest in fought on the Roman side. From the scanty details we have, we know that there were perhaps two legions on the Roman side, and that Mithridates had a considerable force of cavalry. It appears that Mithridates sized up the Roman approach, threw his entire force against one section of the advancing enemy and defeated it whilst holding off the other section. Thereafter his cavalry rode around to the rear of the remainder of the Roman force and broke that too. There are tight-lipped Roman references to ‘a ditch’ across the plain, which Mithridates may (with fond memories of Sulla) have constructed in preparation for the battle, and then flooded. Many Romans were trapped against this unexpected obstacle and cut down in great numbers. Appian ruefully lists 150 centurions among the Roman casualties, which other sources put at about 7,000 men.6
Things could have been much worse for the fleeing Romans, for the Pontic cavalry were ideally placed to cut down the survivors. However, in the confusion of flight and pursuit, a Roman centurion found himself alongside Mithridates himself, who evidently took him for one of the Romans in his own entourage. This man ran up to the king as though bearing dispatches and stabbed him in the thigh, which was probably the only accessible point where Mithridates could be wounded, since he was armoured Armenian-style in a metal corselet.
The would-be killer was promptly cut down, but the damage had been done. The entire Pontic army came to a disconcerted halt. Fortunately the king’s physician (a Greek called Timotheus on this occasion) was near at hand and he ordered the king to be lifted above the throng of worried followers, so that his men could see that their leader still lived. Not only was Mithridates alive, he was furious that the pursuit of the Romans had been halted. Despite his wound, he personally set the attack back in motion, directing it toward the Roman camp. However, Mithridates soon discovered that in the delay his birds had flown. The Romans made no attempt to defend their camp, but fled directly to Lucullus, who had to take pains to prevent his men from lynching Triarius.
This showed considerable restraint, for Lucullus probably felt like lynching Triarius himself. Zela was a very substantial defeat, and the fact that it had been incurred by a lieutenant of Lucullus totally undermined his only remaining grounds for continuing to wage war in the region – namely that he was doing so successfully. The sad thing is that Lucullus, had he been as uninhibitedly brutal as Sulla, could have become wildly popular by allowing his men far greater freedom to plunder and quartering them on the unfortunate cites of the region during the winter. He could also have taken the approach of many of his contemporaries, which was that the barbarism of the tax-collectors was dangerous to interfere with, and was in any case no harm to him personally. As it was, by restraining his troops and forcing them to winter in tents, Lucullus had alienated his army; and by protecting those he had conquered from the full avarice of the tax-collectors he had lost vital political support at home. In short, whilst his enemies claimed that he was prolonging the war in Asia minor for his own benefit, the real case against Lucullus was that he was not being greedy and brutal enough whilst doing so.
After Zela, there was a slight air of unreality about the campaigning. Troops were deployed, positions offensive and defensive were taken up, but everyone was waiting to hear what the reaction would be in Rome to one of the city’s most substantial defeats for decades. Mithridates withdrew toward a fortress called Talaura in the direction of Armenia Minor, there to await reinforcements from Tigranes, who had finished mopping up after the Roman invaders had left his territory. Indeed, an advance guard of cavalry under one of Tigranes’ relatives was already operating in the area. The tide seemed to be turning in Mithridates’ favour. Attidius, one of the Roman senators in Mithridates’ entourage, had been planning to betray Mithridates when the time was right. However, the increasing strength of the Pontic position encouraged waverers to betray the plot. The senator was killed quickly through virtue of his rank and Mithridates excused the freedmen and servants, saying there was no fault in following one’s master. All others involved met a horrible end by torture.
Meanwhile, Lucullus, desperate for the chance to pull his men’s morale together by a successful battle, turned to meet the Armenian force. In the event, he turned alone. As soon as it reached a relatively secure position, his army downed tools and refused to advance a step further. The arguments of Clodius rang in their ears. The soldiers of Pompey, who had fought a brisk campaign in Spain before mopping up the remains of Spartacus’ uprising, had been discharged and were now living on the grants of land which their commander had secured for them. In many cases called to the standards whilst Pompey’s recruits had still been schoolchildren, the soldiers of Lucullus had chased Mithridates across the length of Anatolia, and all about Armenia. Now, after his victory at Zela, Mithridates looked set to take them around again and the exasperated soldiery were having none of it. When the distraught Lucullus came to them, sometimes taking individuals by the hand and pleading with them to continue the fight, his soldiers responded by throwing their empty purses at his feet. Since Lucullus was the only one making a personal profit from the war, they told him he could continue it on his own.7
This also seemed to be the attitude of Lucullus’ official successors. Marcius Rex, proconsul of Cilicia and Lucullus’ direct replacement, refused to do anything. He had a small fleet and three new legions, but his soldiers had heard of the merry dance Lucullus’ men had been on and he claimed that they would refuse to march if he ordered them eastward. Acilius Glabrio, who had been appointed governor of the new province of Bithynia et Pontus, was making light work of taking control of the Bithynia part of his command. That was, however, the limit of his interest. Not even the Pontus part of his new province concerned him, let alone a nasty-looking war on the borders of Armenia.
It was all that Lucullus could do to keep his army together for the duration of the summer, with the newer legionaries extracting from the Fimbrians the promise that they would fight if attacked. Naturally, Mithridates (fully occupied with making himself at home once more in Pontus) and Tigranes (engaged in his customary occupation of kicking Ariobarzanes off the throne of Cappadocia) took care to offer no such provocation. Therefore, at the end of the summer, a good part of Lucullus’ army packed its bags and unilaterally discharged itself. To complete the misery of Lucullus, a commission arrived from Rome. During the full flush of his victories he had earlier asked that this commission be sent to settle the affairs of Pontus and bring it into working order as a Roman province.
As 67 BC came to an end, it appeared that after twenty-one years of intermittent warfare costing hundreds of thousands of lives, with a front line that had moved over a thousand miles from west of Athens to east of the Euphrates, Mithridates of Pontus was right back where he had started.
Pompey and the pirates
This situation did not go unremarked in Rome. Standing before the assembly of the Roman people, the orator Cicero thundered:
He [Mithridates], already conquered, has just been able to accomplish that thing, when he was in the full enjoyment of his powers, he never even dared even to wish for!’ [ie victory over a Roman army in battle]).The kingdom of Ariobarzanes... is wholly in the power of the enemy ... and that man, who in one day marked down for slaughter all the Roman citizens in all Asia, ... has not only never yet suffered any punishment worthy of his wickedness, but, now, twenty-three years later, is still a king. Not only a king, but so much a king that he is not content to hide himself in Pontus, or in the recesses of Cappadocia, but seeks to expand once more from his hereditary borders.8
Cicero was speaking in support of a law proposed by the tribune Manlius, which suggested that powers greater than any heretofore awarded be given to a Roman general. The lucky recipient of these powers was to be Gnaeus Pompeius, better known to posterity as Pompey. Pompey was later to try to persuade his contemporaries to call him Pompeius Magnus - ‘Pompey the Great’ - though one senator on hearing the new title asked interestedly ‘Really? How big is he then?’9
Pompey was an ambitious man who deeply scared many in the senate. As a teenager, he had thrown his support behind Sulla when the latter returned to take control of Italy after the peace of Dardanus. Pompey’s enthusiastic and unscrupulous endorsement of Sulla’s philosophy earned him the unofficial title of ‘carnifex adulescens’ – the ‘teenage butcher’. But when young Pompey went to fight in Spain, he made a chilling discovery. He was a brilliant general. He was a master of logistics and manoeuvre. His strategic vision was unequalled. Tactically, however, he was weak and he could not win battles. When he tried in Spain, Sertorius came close to terminating his promising career on the spot and Pompey was only saved by the timely arrival of his colleague, Metellus Pius.
Consequently, Pompey appears to have decided that henceforth he would win his wars without major battles. Given that battles were in his day the customary way of deciding wars, this was no easy thing to do. But it was certainly possible and Pompey, as mentioned, was a brilliant general.
This brilliance had its full chance to shine in Pompey’s next command, which was against Mithridates’ old allies, the pirates. With Rome preoccupied with rebellion, Mithridates, civil war and then the uprising of Spartacus, the pirates had been left to grow from an irritant to a problem to a fully-fledged menace. Their dominance of the sea now seemed complete, to the extent that they were now extending their operations, storming minor cities and staying there for weeks at a time as they plundered far inland.
They no longer confined their operations to the Cilician coast, or even to the Aegean. The west coast of Italy now offered the most profitable plunder, and there the pirates had even kidnapped two praetors off the roads of Italy as they travelled in their full state and regalia. On another occasion a female relative of Mark Antony was captured and only freed after the payment of a substantial ransom. Clodius (as related already) and Julius Caesar were among others who had involuntarily experienced pirate hospitality. So profitable had their occupation become, says Plutarch, that their ships had sails coloured with expensive purple dye and oars plated with silver.
Now Pompey, who had successfully brought the war in Spain to a conclusion, was given a command which overrode that of all Roman magistrates, both along the coast and for a considerable distance inland. His orders were to wipe out the pirates and their stranglehold on maritime trade (which was in danger of ceasing altogether). Currently, Roman efforts against the pirates consisted of a campaign in Crete by a general called Metellus, and he was making heavy weather of it.
In very short order, Pompey assembled a fleet of 500 ships,and divided the Mediterranean into thirteen areas of operation. Starting around Rome, he swept the Mediterranean from end to end, rolling the pirate fleets back before him all the way to Cilicia. From start to finish, the entire operation was accomplished in three months, with the greater part in forty days; all with minimal loss of life and only a single minor battle. In part, Pompey was successful because he allowed the pirates to surrender on terms. All who came to him as supplicants were allowed to live and many were settled on lands in Greece and other areas still depopulated after the ravages of the war with Mithridates had passed across them. All this was accomplished, as Cicero effusively commented, with ‘god-like’ speed and efficiency.10
Now, with Lucullus undone, and Pompey sightseeing in the east of the Mediterranean where his campaign had concluded, it seemed a natural step to give Pompey a further extension of his command, and make him responsible for stamping out the resurgent Mithridates and Tigranes. In addition to his present powers, Pompey was to be made commander of Phrygia, Lycaonia, Galatia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, upper Colchis and Armenia – quite a swathe of territory, when one considers what Lucullus had got up to when he was merely in command of Cilicia. Exactly how much control Pompey had over Bithynia is disputed, and in any case moot, as he did not operate there.
The law was carried, mainly because Pompey was very popular with the people, for whom the cost of imported materials had dropped sharply since the defeat of the pirates, and because Lucullus was unpopular with those of the upper classes who considered that he had curtailed their right to plunder Asia. It should also be noted that the territory allocated to Pompey in Asia Minor was less substantial than it appeared. Apart from western Anatolia and the allied kingdom of Galatia, anywhere else that Pompey wanted to command would have to be wrenched from the grasp of Mithridates and his son-in-law.
It was hardly to be expected that Lucullus would take all this calmly, though he tried. When he met with Pompey, he started by complimenting the man on his achievements. Then he discovered that Pompey had rearranged his settlement of Asia; partly in such a manner as to show clearly that he, Pompey, was now in charge, and partly, one suspects, to reward those in Rome who had contrived to organise his present command for him. At this point cordiality broke down.
Pompey claimed that Lucullus had merely been playing at fighting Mithridates whilst he used the war to enrich himself (and Lucullus was by now fabulously wealthy). Only now that a proper general was in charge would the war be fought in earnest. Lucullus responded by calling Pompey a ‘vulture’ who gorged on the winnings of other men.11 Metellus Pius had saved Pompey’s bacon in Spain, Crassus had won the slave war in Italy that Pompey claimed to have torn up by the roots, and Metellus had been winning in Crete against the pirates. Now, despite Mithridates’ temporary resurgence, Lucullus’ war was all but won and Pompey had come to claim the spoils.
These pleasantries exchanged, the two men had to be physically kept from each other’s throats by their friends. Thereafter Lucullus took himself homeward in a huff, leaving Pompey and Mithridates to square off for the latest round of the drawn-out war.
The Dasteria campaign
Whilst the Romans politicked, Mithridates was rearming for the inevitable confrontation. He had learned at Cyzicus and Tigranocerta that sheer numbers do not a conquering army make, and he was experimenting with a Roman-style force that emphasized quality and mobility. Despite his best efforts he was low in cavalry, partly because the Sarmatians of the Black Sea were now loyal to his undutiful son Menchares. He had some 30,000 infantry, the hard core of which was made up of Roman exiles prepared to fight to the death rather than fall into the hands of their mother city. However, the remainder consisted of raw recruits of fragile morale. He was also re-fortifying his cities for a further round of sieges.
The new round of conflict opened with diplomatic sparring. Tigranes, like Mithridates and any Hellenistic monarch, needed sons to prevent opportunistic aristocrats from fancying themselves as successors to the throne and forthwith expediting the death of the current monarch. Parenthood restricted the potential beneficiaries of regicide to royal sons, but made the lives of these sons correspondingly more dangerous. The necessarily-paranoid eye of Tigranes had lingered on one of his offspring long enough to cause that son to bolt to the court of the Parthian king, Phraates. With an Armenian heir in his keeping, Phraates began to consider championing the son against his father and gaining a compliant puppet king on his western border. When diplomats arrived from Pompey promising generous Roman support for the invasion he was already contemplating, Phraates decided to launch his attack.
The invasion of his heartlands immediately took Tigranes homeward and out of the war in Anatolia. This left an isolated Mithridates with the grim prospect of facing not only the Romans, but also the Galatians and the levies of Bithynia and Asia. Pompey may have felt that the prospect was bleak enough for him to get Mithridates to surrender without a fight, or he may have felt that he needed more time to assess the situation and assemble his levies. In either case, his next step was to send envoys to Mithridates to discuss the king’s surrender.
It is likewise uncertain how serious Mithridates was about negotiations. He had managed to extract a very favourable deal from the Romans in the past; but that was when Sulla had been desperate to depart the theatre of operations in order to deal with pressing domestic problems. Pompey had come specifically to deal with Mithridates and Tigranes and it was unlikely that he would depart without a convincing victory to take to the Roman people. But still, Mithridates had men to train, the Bosporan kingdom to bring firmly back under his control, and perhaps his son-in-law’s war in Armenia might prove short-lived, making him available once more for an Anatolian war. In short, Mithridates was quite happy to waste a bit of time talking.
Pompey made it plain that he merely wanted to skip the war part of the business and have Mithridates behave as though he were already conquered. He was to place himself entirely at Pompey’s mercy and to hand over all his possessions and all the Roman deserters serving under his standards. Mithridates could not for a moment appear to contemplate such an offer. Had he done so, his worried Roman contingent might actually have done him physical injury. Indeed, by some reports he only managed to soothe his men by saying that he had sent envoys to the Roman camp only in order to gain from them some measure of the Roman strength.
This strength would appear to have been about 50,000 men, at a very shaky estimate.The magic of Pompey’s name had caused many of the Lucullan legionaries to re-enlist, and even a few of the veteran Fimbrians had stayed on to have a last shot at a decent pension under a commander already well known for his care for his soldiers upon their discharge. The legions were supplemented by a large force of native levies, including cavalry, and from Mithridates’ later conduct it seems likely he was outnumbered even in this, his favourite military arm. However, the key to the matter was that Mithridates 30,000 men seem to have been facing an equal number of Roman legionaries, which meant that he could never expect to win a direct confrontation.12
Given the imbalance in numbers and quality of the armies, Mithridates chose to make his stand in the eastern heartlands of his kingdom, near the northern borders of Armenia. He had decided to let Pompey come to him and to try his now-standard tactic of hitting the Roman supply lines, rather in the manner that had worked so well against Lucullus in Armenia. In fact, according to Cassius Dio, Mithridates used a scorched earth strategy, devastating his own lands along the line of the Roman advance in the hope of making them short of supplies.
Details of the actual campaign are vague and contradictory. It appears that Mithridates was happy to let the Romans approach and even camp alongside his army, but he refused to offer to fight except from highly-defensible positions, which the mountainous lands along the Armenian border offered in abundance. There were various clashes, including, for example, one in which Pompey ordered his cavalry to feign a confused retreat from a skirmish in the hope of drawing the Pontics into an ambush; but just as the trap was sprung, Mithridates led his infantry on a sally and forced the Romans to retire.
The strategy of Mithridates is reasonably clear. To win, he had simply not to lose. Every month that he kept Pompey fruitlessly traipsing about the mountains was another month in which the glamour would wear off the Roman’s name, and the soldiers would once again tire of a war which offered all the privations of a campaign but no prospect of victory or loot. Eventually the wheel of Roman politics would turn again and Pompey would go the way of Sulla, Murena and Lucullus.
Had Mithridates known his man better, he would have realized that he was, in fact, fighting Pompey’s preferred kind of war. Once again, Pompey’s logistical genius ensured that his men remained adequately supplied, whilst it was Mithridates who had periodically to shift his camp due to lack of supplies. Pompey had his men working ceaselessly at a series of ditches and minor forts, which constantly harassed the Pontic foragers and which threatened to enclose Mithridates completely if he did not keep moving. On one occasion, Mithridates was caught and besieged by the Romans in his camp for over a month and, when he finally broke out, Mithridates had to sacrifice his sick and wounded, and all but fifty days of supplies.
His retreat had taken him up against the headwaters of the River Lycus, not far from the later city of Nicopolis. Again we have three historians who have recorded what happened here, and each gives a somewhat different version. However, it is evident that Mithridates had established his camp on a now-unknown hill called Dasteria. Approach to this camp was by way of a defile with a single road. At some point there was a sharp engagement between the Romans and the Pontic army in this defile – either becausePompey had stolen a march on Mithridates and set up an ambush (according to Dio) or because Mithridates had set a strong rearguard to block the defile (Appian).
By Appian’s report, some of the Pontic cavalrymen were dismounted and fighting as infantry and making a good show of it until the Romans showed up with a large contingent of cavalry. At this, the Pontic cavalrymen rushed back to the camp to get their horses, precipitating a general retreat by those who did not know why their companions were running off and decided not to wait and find out. According to Appian this marked the end of the battle, but it is more probable that, as Plutarch, our third source, says, the Pontics finished up back in their camp – a secure base with a steep drop on at least one side.
Plutarch reports that Mithridates, as his men made camp for the night, was disturbed by a dream in which he was sailing pleasantly along the Black Sea with the Bosporan coast coming into sight when suddenly conditions changed, and he found himself alone in a shipwreck and clinging desperately to a plank.13 At that point his lieutenants came to him with the news that the Romans, fearing that he intended to cross the river and make for Armenia, were launching a midnight attack on his camp.
Here Plutarch and Dio agree that the moon was low on the horizon and the Romans attacked with the moon at their backs. This confused the raw Pontic troops, who launched their missiles early, mistaking the shadows thrown far ahead by the Romans for the soldiers themselves. It is in any case notoriously difficult to judge ranges up and down a slope, let alone in highly-confusing circumstances in semi-darkness. Once the experienced Roman legionaries got among the Pontic troops the battle was as good as won. The Romans fought shoulder-to-shoulder in close formation, using their stabbing swords to terrible effect on men who were more preoccupied with escape and flight than in holding the enemy off. Also, Mithridates’ foresight told against him at the last. He had made his camp at a site which was hard to get to. As his desperate troops now discovered, it was equally difficult to get out of.
Mithridates did manage to escape, fighting his way clear with 800 hundred horsemen, but at least 10,000 of his men did not. They were cut down by the Romans or, in many cases, simply forced off the edge of the cliff by the panicking throng. The Romans were not inclined to take captives and Dio reports that prisoners were far fewer than the dead. Defeated once more, and with his army dead or dispersed, Mithridates was again on the run.14