Chapter 1
The Mithridatid kingdom
The history of Pontus is the history of its ruling family, the Mithridatid kings. It was their tenacity, military skill and ability to out–double–cross, betray and backstab their rivals that built the Pontic kingdom from scratch, and it was their economic nous that developed it into a profitable concern.
The propaganda of the Mithridatids proclaimed their descent from the Achaemenid Persian kings, and modern historians have rather surprised themselves by discovering indications that this was so.1 The evidence for these early ancestors of Mithridates VI is sketchy and in places contradictory. Depending on how we read the sources, the early Mithridatids were minor nobility based around the town of Cius in Propontis, or wealthy Persian noblemen who dominated the much larger area of Mysia. But however one reads the evidence, the family certainly existed well before its future kingdom.
The family history becomes clearer soon after the death of Alexander the Great, ruler of all Asia Minor and much else besides. On Alexander’s death, one of his generals called Antigonus forcibly took charge of the region. Whilst consolidating his rule, he put to death a man called Mithridates of Cius, the first unmistakeably identifiable ancestor of Mithridates VI.2 The executed Mithridates had a relative of the same name (referred to by the historian Appian as ‘a scion of the royal house of Persia’). He was probably a nephew of Mithridates of Cius, and was at that time staying in the court of Antigonus. One night (so the legend goes) Antigonus dreamed that he had sown a harvest of gold dust, and the crop was reaped by the young Mithridates. Accordingly the superstitious Antigonus planned to have this Mithridates executed. He confided this fact to his son Demetrius (the same Demetrius who later in life famously failed to capture Rhodes), notwithstanding the fact that Demetrius and Mithridates were close friends. Demetrius was sworn to silence, but overcame the conflict between filial loyalty and comradeship by mutely sketching the word ‘flee’ in the sand whilst the pair were walking along the beach. Asiatic nobility survived by picking up on hints far more subtle than this, and within hours Mithridates was on the run.3
The year 300 BC saw the fugitive dug into the mountains of Paphlagonia, on the westernmost border of his family’s future kingdom. With the fortress town of Cimiata as his base, Mithridates took advantage of the confusion elsewhere in Asia Minor to begin gouging himself a little kingdom out of the inland river valleys to the east. The next time Mithridates appears in the historical record is as an ambitious upstart with predatory designs on the town of Amastris on the Black Sea coast. Amastris, founded by a Greek noblewoman, was also claimed by the Greek city of Heraclea, on the grounds that Amastris’ founder had been a Heracliot. However, Heraclea had fallen out with the current Seleucid king, who, partly to spite the Heracliots, handed Amastris to Ariobarzanes, son of Mithridates. The dynasty thus won its first Greek city, a handsome establishment with two good harbours, and a thriving business in exporting boxwood from the immediate interior.
In 281 BC the Seleucids made an effort to bring the embryonic Pontic kingdom back under their control, but Mithridates fought them off with the help of the newly–arrived Galatians. It is probable that he issued his first coins at this point, defiantly asserting the independence that his kingdom had just so conclusively proven. By the time this Mithridates died in 266 BC, he well deserved his nickname of Ctesias (‘founder’). He left his heir a small but well–appointed realm with considerable potential for expansion.
All that is known of the heir, Ariobarzanes, once he changed from ruling Amastris to Pontus as a whole, is that the kingdom was so weak that the Galatians successfully ravaged the place on his death. However, this does not mean that Ariobarzanes had not been busy during his reign. One of the distinguishing features of the area that was to become Pontus is a range of mountains created by the earthquake–prone Anatolian fault line. These mountains, home of almost the only temperate rainforests on the Eurasian landmass, separate a coastal plain only a few miles wide from the interior of Asia Minor. The drier, warmer interior of this area is dominated by the systems of the Halys and the Lycus rivers. It is quite possible that Ariobarzanes followed his father’s example and spent his time busily expanding up these river valleys, out of sight of the Greek cities of the coast on whom our historical record relies.
Certainly by the time Mithridates II came to the throne in about 250 BC he was considered suitable to marry a daughter of the Seleucid royal house, and the proud Seleucids did not marry off their offspring to just anybody. Bloodlines were very important to the royalty of Asia Minor, mainly because kingdoms were very seldom inherited by those outside a rambling network of relatives by marriage. This was certainly not due to family affection, but because the powerful landowners on whom the kings relied for financial and military support preferred that this was so. For Mithridates II to be admitted to the ranks of the Seleucid family suggests both that the Mithridatid claim to Persian royal blood was credible, and that Ariobarzanes had indeed built a good–sized extension on to the family property. Later, Mithridates VI was to claim Phrygia as part of the Pontic kingdom on the basis that Mithridates II had received it as part of his wife’s dowry.
Lying just to the southeast of Pontus, Phrygia was not a particularly good fit with the then-existing borders of the kingdom. A mountainous area, it was both where Alexander had cut the Gordian knot and where Midas had his golden touch. However, Phrygia had suffered badly at the hands of the Galatians, and the nascent power of Pergamum had a firm grip on what was left. Mithridates II chose instead to concentrate on the northeastern seaboard, where citizens of the wealthy Greek city of Sinope suddenly became aware that the power beyond the mountains had a deep and personal interest in them. It is not known whether Mithridates II actually made a military grab for the city, but if he did he was unsuccessful, since Sinope remained independent for another generation and Pontus vanishes off the pages of history; apart that is, from mention of Mithridates II scoring a further diplomatic coup by marrying his daughter to the Seleucid king – the first time that a Seleucid monarch had taken a wife outside Macedonian royalty.4
One has to assume the period of 220 –190 BC as the reign of Mithridates III, simply because he has to be fitted into the record somewhere. The only evidence for the existence of Pontus at this time is the coinage which archaeologists are still unearthing in the region. They show a distinctly Asiatic–looking Mithridates (presumably III) on the obverse, together with the crescent moon and star which was to become a symbol of Pontus and the Mithridatids (a symbol which has since become a bone of heated contention both as to its origins and its relationship with the star and crescent symbol of the Turks). However, it is probable that Mithridates III tightened the Pontic noose around Sinope by bringing Amisus (a coastal city to Sinope’s east), into his hegemony.
If Mithridates III was content to keep a low profile, the next ruler, Pharnarces I, was not. He immediately became involved in a messy war between Pergamum and Bithynia, and when the Romans forced a ceasefire in about 183 BC, he did not stand down his army but instead pounced on and captured Sinope.5 This was a crucial acquisition. With a splendid harbour, once used by the Hittites, Sinope was the Black Sea terminus for trade caravans from Mesopotamia, and thus another stop on the Silk Road which so enriched all the countries which it passed through. Pharnarces brought Sinope’s colonies of Cerasus and Cotyora into his kingdom at the same time, and shifted the populations of these colonies to a site near Cerasus. There he established an omnibus edition of the two colonies which he named Pharnarcia. At about the same time the rich mines of the Chalybes region are recorded as belonging to the Mithridatids, though Mithridates III may have acquired these late in his reign rather than Pharnarces early in his. In any case, this area, in the east of the kingdom, was immensely rich in iron, but also boasted substantial silver and copper deposits. With control of this area came Trapezus, a city on the coast which specialized in refining the metals from the Chalybes mines and exporting them to the Mediterranean world. Pharnarces also made the first ventures into the Chersonese; the start of a family project aimed at turning the entire Black Sea into a Pontic lake.
This vigorous empire builder also moved aggressively into Cappadocia and Paphlagonia, and even attempted to steal the town of Tium from Bithynia in the west. This was too much for the neighbours, and Pharnarces was brought to heel by an armed coalition which forced him to withdraw from many of his conquests (Though he kept Sinope and most of the Pontic gains to the east). Pharnarces died about 170 BC, leaving the finances of the kingdom in some disorder, testimony to the fact that his ambition had outstripped his resources. Yet Pharnarces also bequeathed his heirs the infrastructure to make those resources considerably more extensive.
Mithridates IV nicknamed himself Philadelphus, which suggests he was probably the brother of Pharnarces (the name Philadelphus suggests fraternal love). Love of a sister was also involved, as Mithridates IV adopted a practice not uncommon among Hellenistic kings and married his sister, Laodice (one of the many Laodices who crop up in the history of the region). Laodice appears on the coins of Mithridates IV associated with Hera, queen of the gods, a portrayal which, like his Greek nickname, shows that this Mithridates was trying hard to make his new Greek subjects like him. Under Mithridates IV, Pontus also tried the rare foreign policy of getting on well with the neighbours and there were no major wars in his reign.
It is probable that Mithridates IV was ruling on behalf of his nephew, the son of Pharnarces. This young man became king when Mithridates IV died (or was disposed of) around 150 BC, and he took the name of Mithridates V Euergetes (Benefactor). Mithridates V seems to have adopted a pro–Roman policy. He gave nominal assistance to the Romans in the final war against Carthage in 149 BC, and his support for Rome in the rebellion of Aristonicus meant that Rome acquiesced in his partial occupation of Phrygia. That Pontus was able to extend its reach to Phrygia means that by now the state must have been dominant in Paphlagonia, as well as in Cappadocia. Control of Cappadocia was achieved by blatant invasion. Aware that this would offend Roman sensibilities, Mithridates V stayed in occupation only long enough to marry his daughter (another Laodice) to the king, effectively making Cappadocia a client state. It is possible that at some point in his diplomatic dealings Mithridates V met a man called Cornelius Sulla, since the sons of the two were to meet in later years and the paternal ‘friendship’ was a topic of discussion.6
Mithridates V set another precedent for his son in his aggressive recruitment of Greek mercenaries. There had probably always been an element of these soldiers in the Pontic armies, but Mithridates V is on record as actively recruiting across the entire Aegean island chain and on the Greek mainland. It is probable that Mithridates V also invested in Cretan archers, whose bows were superior to those of his own hillmen.
By now Pontus was a well-established kingdom stretching across most of the southern shore of the Black Sea, and deep into the interior of Asia Minor. It had mineral wealth, good crops, and useful supplies of timber, not to mention a healthy trade with Mesopotamia and onward from there to Rome. Their coinage shows that the later Mithridatid kings chose to defiantly proclaim their Iranian origins in the face of the current fashion for Hellenization, yet they nevertheless took care to be seen as benevolent rulers who had the best interests of their Greek subjects at heart. Indeed, it was one of the major achievements of the Mithridatid kings that they ruled their kingdom with apparently very little friction between the half–dozen or so major ethnic groups of which it was composed.
To the mercantilist, cosmopolitan Greeks of the Black Sea ports, the Mithridatids were civilized monarchs with a Hellenistic court who sent embassies to Rome, and who made donations and sacrifices to the gods at the Greek sanctuaries. Yet to the people of the interior, many of whom knew little of life outside their own valleys, the Mithridatids were the ancient heirs of the Persian kings, to whom their priests and barons owed unswerving loyalty.
To the outside world, Pontus was an energetic, expansionist power, ready to try diplomacy or armed force as the occasion suited. Every rebuff sent the Pontic rulers into a period of consolidation from which they emerged, richer, stronger, and as fixed on their target as before. Mithridates V had every reason to feel pleased with his contribution. Pontus had hegemony in Paphlagonia and Cappadocia, Galatia was cowed, and relations with Rome were good. The kingdom was rich and getting richer. His wife had given him two sons and there were possibilities for his heirs to further expand into the Chersonese and the eastern shores of the Black Sea. In short, by 120 BC everything was going swimmingly for Mithridates V, right up to the moment when his wife had him assassinated.
Mithridates VI Eupator
At the time of his father’s death, Mithridates VI was in his early teens. He was well aware that it would suit many at court if he got no older. His untimely death would enable his mother to continue as regent until his younger brother was old enough to assume the throne, and undoubtedly this situation would also suit the younger brother and his supporters.
It was also apparent that the new regent of Pontus intended to continue her husband’s policy of friendship with Rome, even though the Romans, worried by the growing power of Pontus, took every opportunity of chiselling away at the kingdom’s borders. The gains of the war with Aristonicus were reversed, with the senate refusing to allow Pontus control of Phrygia, and supporting the claims of the Bithynians to disputed parts of Paphlagonia. Given the spirited character of Mithridates and his later determination to expand the kingdom at every opportunity, it is unlikely that he took this Roman interference patiently. Therefore it might well be that the Roman governor in Pergamum quietly let it be known that Rome would not be unhappy if the charismatic young Mithridates never came to power.
It was probably at this point that Mithridates, aware of his numerous and powerful enemies, earned his nomination as the world’s first experimental toxicologist. He started taking small doses of poison on a regular basis; both to accustom himself to the taste, and his system to the effects. After a while he had put together a small pharmacopoeia of poisons and antidotes that were known for generations afterwards as ‘Mithridatic potions’. Pliny the Elder gives one such antidote claiming that it was found by Pompey among Mithridates’ private papers in his own hand–writing. The ingredients were two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue (a bitter aromatic plant), pounded together with a grain of salt. This might not have conferred immunity to poison as claimed, but would certainly have given the poison swift enough passage through the victim’s system to limit any damage. Other potions described by Pliny and the later writer Celsus have literally dozens of ingredients, and are also described as the fruit of Mithridates’ relentless investigations.7 Mithridates’ alleged immunity to poison might well have saved his life on several occasions, not least because it persuaded potential assassins that poison was not even worth trying.
While accepting that Mithridates had powerful ill–wishers, we should be wary of the romantic myth that the young king took himself off into hiding in the Pontic wilderness like an early version of Robin Hood. Hunting and horse riding were normal parts of a Persian prince’s upbringing. No doubt Mithridates enjoyed these enthusiastically, but it is unlikely that he was engaged in them for seven years in the wilderness as was later reported. Someone, at least, was certainly ruling as Mithridates VI, as coins appear bearing his image, and dedications on statues refer to him as king of Pontus.
It is probable that young Mithridates, who was as aware as anyone of the mortality rate among the royalty of the region, abandoned Sinope in favour of extended tours of his kingdom. This both removed him from his mother’s court (and his mother’s cooks) and gave him the chance to gather personal support among the provincial governors of the kingdom’s provinces (called eparchies). This support would be needed for the power struggle with his immediate family which Mithridates must have known was imminent. That these tours later gave his biographers the chance to link a period in the wilderness with a similar legend about the great Persian king Cyrus, was something of a bonus.
With Mithridates, those responsible for promoting his image had promising material to work with. The young king was handsome enough to bear comparison with Alexander the Great; if only Alexander had been able to handle a sixteen-horse chariot as Mithridates could. The Romans, who considered Asiatic monarchs effete and decadent, readily made an exception for Mithridates. Naturally robust, he regularly exercised and took part in sporting events. This gave him exceptional stamina, and he was said to have been able to ride 1,000 stades (about 110 miles) in a day, wearing out a chain of horses in the process. He was also a keen bowman, and alleged that it was his passion for archery which led him to keep a bow handy at all times (one never knows when having a long–range weapon about might come in handy). His fondness for exercise gave Mithridates a formidable physical presence, which as a skilled propagandist he exploited – for example by sending copies of his armour to Delphi, ostensibly as a gift to the gods, but in reality to show that the ruler of Pontus was powerful in every respect.
The writer Justin also reports that when Mithridates was born in Sinope, the skies above his birthplace were illuminated by ‘a comet which burned with great splendour, so that for seventy days in succession, the whole sky appeared to be on fire with a brightness that seemed to obscure even the sun. The tail of the comet covered a quarter of the sky, and its rising and setting took a whole four hours’.8 Justin was quoting a historian called Trogus. Though Trogus’ father had probably fought against Mithridates, the son was definitely a fan. Mithridates was for him a king ‘whose greatness was afterwards such that he surpassed all kings in glory – not only those kings of his own times, but of preceding ages too’.
Mithridates was well aware of the advantages of what would today be called a personality cult. He deliberately portrayed himself as a fusion of Greek and Persian culture, giving himself the Greek nickname of Eupator, ‘loving father’, and also adopting the title of Dionysius, a god associated with liberty, peace and law; on the other hand, Mithridates habitually dressed in the robes of a Persian noble. He explicitly boasted to his troops that they found in him the best of both worlds. ‘I count my ancestors, on my father’s side, from Cyrus and Darius, the founders of the Persian empire, and on my mother’s side Alexander the Great and Seleucus Nicator, who established the Macedonian empire’.9
Sadly, at this point Mithridates’ mother was not present to hear her lineage so proudly recounted. Some time before 116 BC the lady departs from the scene. Some historians believe that Mithridates had her killed, others assert that she was merely thrown into a dungeon and forgotten. It appears that the palace coup by which Mithridates removed his mother from power was a largely bloodless affair. Basically, having survived to an age when he could rule the country, Mithridates simply started to do so. His orders were obeyed, and politically his mother became irrelevant.
The younger brother was disposed of. He was executed. The nature of the charge was largely irrelevant, since everyone knew that his true crime was that he had been born of the same parents as the king, and (to paraphrase the later Roman emperor, Augustus) one can have too many Mithridatids. Perhaps working on the principle that one kept one’s friends close, and one’s enemies closer, Mithridates took his younger sister (Laodice, naturally) as his wife. His older sister (Laodice) was already married to the king of Cappadocia as a result of a foreign policy adventure on the part of Mithridates V. His remaining sisters he kept in luxurious seclusion, unwilling to marry them to possible rivals, yet reserving them for a suitable diplomatic match should the need arise.
Now firmly in the saddle, Mithridates could take stock of his kingdom. The heart of Pontus was the royal capital of Amaseia, where the Pontic kings were traditionally buried. High in the hills, yet only 82km from the Black Sea coast, Amaseia was a highly defensible site, protected on one side by the river Iris, and on the other by steep cliffs. The great citadel contained both the royal palace and a huge altar to Zeus Stratios, whom the Mithridatids identified with Ahura–Mazda, the Iranian fire god and official protector of the dynasty. Originally founded by the ancient Hittite civilization, Amaseia gained its name from Amasis, the legendary queen of the Amazons who was said to have ruled from there. The cool climate and fertile soil of the area produced crops such as the apples for which the region is famous even today.
Mithridates knew that the true strength of his kingdom lay here and in the lands of the interior, especially along the Lycus and Iris river valleys. These areas often comprised huge tracts of temple land such as those at Comana and Zela (the temple complex at Comana was large enough to support 6,000 sacred slaves, reports the geographer Strabo).10 Comana was also a rare city in the Pontic interior; a lively trade centre with a famously cosmopolitan and decadent lifestyle. These provinces of the interior gave Mithridates unquestioning loyalty almost to the last. It was here, in the many highly-defensible royal strongholds which dotted the area, that Mithridates was later to keep his reserves of treasure, and from here that he raised levy after levy of troops.
The interior provided support and manpower, and these in turn gave Pontus dominance of the fertile coastal plain, and the wealthy Greek cities of (from west to east) Amastris, Sinope, Amisus, Pharnarcia and Trapezus. These not only provided trading outlets for the Pontic interior and beyond but were also useful bases from which Mithridates intended to fulfil the ancestral ambition of expanding across the Black Sea. Between the interior and the coastal plain, the thickly forested mountains had the timber for the ships which could make this ambition possible. From the borders of Armenia to the mountains of Paphlagonia the kingdom was about a thousand miles across, and with a population estimated as being over two million strong.
A large population and reserves of money and metal meant a strong army. We do not know as much as we would like about the Pontic army, the composition of which certainly changed as Mithridates’ empire grew and shrank. Certainly even the core levies of the kingdom would have been a mixture which varied from Greek cities with the latest in military technology to semi–barbarian tribes such as the Leucosyrians from the deep interior. It is an interesting reflection of Mithridates ability as a leader that he was able to keep this cosmopolitan army largely intact and coordinated, not to mention that for decades he kept it considerably more loyal and disciplined than the forces of his Roman opponents.
It might be assumed that the core of the army was the phalanx, a unit of close–formation pikemen who used long pikes as their primary weapon. Because a pike could be up to twenty–one feet long, this meant that several ranks could present their pikes to the enemy at once, forming a veritable hedge of spears. (The Roman general Aemilius Paullus faced the phalanx in 168 BC during the third Macedonian war, and admitted that just the memory of it bearing down on him was enough to bring him out in a cold sweat.) Horrible as the phalanx was when advancing head–on, it was pathetically vulnerable on the flanks. Three ranks of men with their pikes levelled cannot be easily turned to face a threat on the left or right, and since the forward progress of the phalanx required everyone to move forward in time, even a few rabbit holes in the wrong place could severely impair its progress.
However, given the right conditions, and adequate cover for the flanks, the phalanx could keep an enemy army pinned whilst cavalry swept down to take them from the sides and rear. It was a technique which Alexander had used time and again to conquer huge swathes of Asia, and it was still the preferred form of warfare among his successors. The Greek cities of Pontus provided a good supply of phalangites (as members of a phalanx are called), and the interminable wars of the Seleucids and their successors meant that there was always a large pool of mercenaries to draw upon, as the Mithridatids often did. Often only the front ranks of the phalanx wore armour, but Pontus, with its wealth and large iron reserves could afford to be generous in this regard.
On rough ground, where the phalanx feared to tread, it was the job of the peltast to rush in. Because they required rather less training than the rigorously drilled phalanx, peltasts were often recruited from semi–Hellenized tribes, or newly levied citizens. Because their mobility was the peltasts’ prime asset, it was also easy for the peltasts to rush out again if they encountered opposition stronger than they could handle. They wore minimal armour, and carried a spear twice as tall as themselves (so about 11 feet), the better to deal with cavalry. (Cavalry, though useless against formed troops, was death on hooves to skirmishers and troops which had broken ranks.) The prevalence of bowmen in oriental armies meant that peltasts also needed large, light shields and metal helmets. By contrast, the phalangites had discovered that raising their pikes to between forty-five degrees and vertical managed to deflect a surprising amount of incoming arrows, and they therefore coped with just a minimal shield strapped to a forearm.
Dealing with enemy bowmen, as opposed to enduring them, was the job of psiloi. These were very lightly-armed, highly mobile troops, often armed with missile weapons themselves. The close ties between the Mithridatids and Crete meant that Pontus always had a good supply of Crete’s famous mercenary archers on tap, and within Pontus itself, it was a rare shepherd who was not proficient with a sling.
A special class of mercenaries were the Galatians. Thanks to their warrior culture, the Galatians were usually happy to fight against anyone, and between themselves if no-one else was available. The wealth of Pontus meant that the Galatians could combine business with pleasure, and large numbers of them were usually available to fight under the Mithridatid standard. It appears that the Galatians still fought in traditional Gallic style. Though skilled metal workers, all but tribal leaders generally fought naked. This is less silly than it seems when one considers that many deaths in ancient battles resulted from dirty clothing being forced into the bloodstreams of the wounded. Slashers to a man, every Gaul who could afford it wielded a long sword which some did not even bother putting a pointy end on to. The Gauls made excellent shock troops, as it took experienced opponents to stand firm against a headlong charge by hundreds of large sword-wielding warriors who wore nothing but spiky lime hairstyles and ferocious expressions. The bad news was that the Galatians had only a rudimentary grasp of military discipline, and tended to regard setbacks as an invitation to go home.
The perfect mixture for an ancient army was generally regarded as about fifty-five percent heavy infantry, twenty percent light infantry and skirmishers and twenty-five to thirty percent cavalry. Not many ancient armies managed to get to the thirty percent cavalry mark, but thanks in part to the south Pontic Cappadocian plains and the plains of Lycaonia, the Pontic army managed this without difficulty. Because horsemen in the ancient world fought without stirrups, any attempt to charge at high speed with a couched lance would have propelled the lancer backward over his horse’s buttocks on impact. Therefore cavalrymen fought with swords or with long spears which they wielded at shoulder height. The exceptions were heavily-protected horsemen known as cataphracts (literally ‘covered-overs’), who were virtually an armoured phalanx on hooves. However, Mithridates seems not to have made much use of this innovation in warfare.
His cavalrymen still varied as much as did the infantry. From the very east of the country, Armenia Minor provided both armoured heavy cavalry able to stand and fight all but heavy infantry, and light horse archers, capable of emulating their Parthian cousins and firing over the rumps of their horses even as they galloped away from their attackers.
The Galatians made use of the fact that they occupied some fine horse country, and were considerably better horsed than their compatriots in Europe. Because the horsemen tended to be from among the aristocracy, they were armoured, and usually carried sword and shield. In this they were similar to Cappadocian cavalry who seem to have been kitted out as were the average Greek horsemen, on unarmoured horses with riders wearing cuirass or mail, and carrying javelins and/or xyston (a kind of long thrusting spear). As will be seen, Mithridates expansion of his kingdom was to increase the variety of the cavalry arm even further.
Finally, Mithridates seems to have been the first of his line to give serious consideration to a navy, although the raw material in the form of well-forested hillsides and Greek expertise had been available for decades. In part, Pontus had not needed a fleet, because the kingdom made a point of being friendly with the pirates who infested the coast of Crete, and more recently, Cilicia. Now, with mastery of the Black Sea in mind, Mithridates began to recruit shipbuilders. It might also have occurred to him that if the questions of Phrygia and Paphlagonia could not be amicably resolved, Pontus and the Romans were probably going to have a serious falling out at some point.
Given that the Roman navy was as bad as the Roman army was good, and that the only practical way of getting an army to face Mithridates in Asia Minor was to bring it by sea, it would be a good idea to face the Romans on the water rather than on land. The problem was what to do about the Romans and their allies already in Asia Minor. From the later evidence, it appears that the young Mithridates spent a substantial part of his early reign considering this question.