Chapter 2
The North and Northeast
It would have been extraordinary if the young Mithridates had not given considerable thought before he came to power as to what sort of kingdom he wanted Pontus to be. He had before him the examples of his two immediate predecessors, the reign of his father and the regency of his mother. The foreign policy of both was based on friendship with Rome. Mithridates V had actively assisted the Romans during the rebellion of Aristonicus, and his mother had complacently acquiesced whilst Rome stripped the kingdom of the rewards it had received for that help. On the other hand, Pontus had kept its conquests to the east, and retained hegemony over Cappadocia – gains acquired without, and in the case of Cappadocia, despite, Rome. Mithridates seems to have drawn the obvious conclusion. Whilst enmity with Rome was unproductive, and possibly fatal, the friendship of Rome was not worth having either. A further example of this fact was the former kingdom of Pergamum, which had once been Rome’s most loyal ally in the region, and was now a Roman province being methodically raped by tax-collectors.1
Mithridates would also have noted that Rome was an aggressively expansionist power which had moved in less than two generations from the shores of Italy to those of Africa, Spain and Greece. There was nothing in Rome’s recent history to suggest it was going to stop there, and being too hard to conquer was the best defence that Pontus could have. In short, Mithridates seems to have concluded that Pontus had to get big, and become strong, or die. Such a policy would in any case have appealed to young Mithridates, who was refreshingly free from a victim mentality. His view appears to have been that the Romans were doing what he would have done in the same situation; the same, in fact, as he intended to do once he had budged the Romans from the picture. As the Romans themselves were later to note with a large degree of respect, Mithridates saw himself not as a victim of Rome but as a rival for mastery; certainly in Asia Minor, and after that, who knows?
Yet the question remained. If Pontus was going to build itself an empire, where was the new territory going to come from? The Romans, whilst helping themselves to the spoils of Asia (as they termed their new acquisition of Pergamum), kept a jealous eye on the balance of power amongst their new neighbours. From the Roman point of view, the westernmost borders of over-powerful Pontus had been trimmed back, and the kingdom had borne the humiliation with commendable fortitude. A major war in the west was only going to happen over strong Roman objections, and with Rome itself taking sides against the aggressor. Perhaps a coalition of all the powers in Asia Minor might have been able to deprive Rome of its possessions in the region, but for a herd of country bumpkins the Romans were proving annoyingly good at diplomacy. Anyone attempting to take on Rome would almost certainly suffer the fate of Aristonicus, with the other powers of Asia Minor piling in on the Roman side for whatever rewards they could get. Mithridates was probably sophisticated enough to recognize tactics of divide and conquer when he saw them in operation, but he was neither militarily strong enough in his own kingdom nor diplomatically trusted enough among his neighbours to be able to do anything about it.
The only alternative was to take advantage of the Roman obsession with the status quo. If Rome would not permit Pontus’ rivals to attack him from the west, Mithridates could rely on the Pax Romana to secure that flank of the kingdom while the military power of Pontus was deployed elsewhere. South was Cappadocia, satisfactorily cowed at present, and anyway, another area where Rome frowned on explicit interference. East was Armenia. Mithridates and his advisers probably contemplated this rich and growing kingdom with predatory interest. But Armenia was hard to invade and easy to defend, closely linked with Parthia, and currently a useful buffer between Pontus and the expansionist Parthian empire.
However, if Armenia was a sleeping dog best left to lie, there was still Armenia Minor. For generations Armenia Minor had been subject to Pontus without really being part of it. It lay snuggled between northeast Cappadocia, Armenia proper and southeast Pontus. Not only was it a rich area with an excellent supply of cavalry, but it offered access to the lands on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, especially the legendary lands of Colchis, north of Armenia. And it had probably occurred to Mithridates that if Pontus did not get established in Colchis, then the Armenians would probably get around to doing so, either by themselves or at the prompting of their Parthian suzerains.
In consequence, probably some time around 115 BC, Mithridates sent a large army to the borders of Armenia Minor, and politely asked Antipater, the current ruler, to hand over the kingdom.2 Antipater wisely did so without fighting. In later years Armenia Minor was to become a Mithridatid redoubt, a fortress-studded corner of the kingdom to which Mithridates fell back when life became too perilous in the west. Probably with the same expedition and the same army with which he annexed Armenia Minor, Mithridates next descended on the port of Trapezus, of which Pontus had long been suzerain and protector. It was suggested that the citizens of Trapezus could be better protected (for example, from large armies camped nearby) if they were fully enrolled citizens of Pontus and, unsurprisingly, the citizens agreed.
Having tidied up his southeastern and eastern borders, Mithridates found that the north literally demanded his attention. Those doing the demanding were Greeks from the Tauric Chersonese, the area known today as the Crimea. The Greeks had been in the Crimea for a long time, as indeed they had been in the whole Black Sea region (they called the Black Sea ‘Pontus Euxinus’ - ‘the friendly sea’). For many years, the cities of the Chersonese had played a valuable role in the ancient economy. Not sharing the same Mediterranean climate as many other Greek cities and their colonies, they were often able to export grain to famine-blighted areas when crops failed, and (more seldom) imported grain in times of surplus elsewhere. They always provided a ready market for olive oil and wine. Fishing and bee-keeping were also major industries in the region.
However, life on the Black Sea shores was not always easy. The Greeks liked their city-state social model and did not (unlike the Macedonians) go in for large-scale kingdoms. Therefore almost every colony was perched on the coast (‘like frogs around a pond’ said Plato) and had a large and wild hinterland. Some accommodation had to be reached with the tribes of the interior, and this usually involved paying some form of tribute in return for protection. This was not a particularly stable form of peace, and recently things had become much worse. The sources for what was happening in the Crimea at this time are fragmentary and scarce, but it appears that social order in what is now southern Russia had broken down due to large-scale tribal movements and, as a result, the Scythians of the Crimean interior were under pressure.
The Scythians responded to this pressure by transferring it to the Greek cities, both in raids for booty, and demands for ever-greater sums for protection that was often not given. The Greeks fought back, sometimes militarily, sometimes politically by forming alliances between themselves or with the Sarmatians, another tribe of horse-warriors who specialized in heavy cavalry. However, the Scythians were extraordinarily well organized under a capable king, and is seems probable that at least one Greek city, Olbia, vulnerable through its northern location, surrendered itself to the direct control of the Scythians. The two most powerful city-states of the area, Chersonesus and the Bosphoran kingdom, had their backs to the wall and seemed doomed to fall. Indeed, Chersonesus was probably sacked by barbarians from the interior some time just after 120 BC. In desperation the Greeks turned to their trading partners on the other side of the Black Sea; Sinope, Trapezus, and Amisus, and asked for help. These cities passed on the request to their ruler Mithridates, who happened to have an army available at that moment.3
It is fair to say that Mithridates was delighted by this request, since his ancestor Pharnarces I had tried and failed to establish Pontic hegemony in the Chersonese, and now the very people who had led the resistance were begging for him to take charge. Pharnarces had ended his Crimean adventure by signing a treaty in which he promised to help Chersonesus in time of peril, and now his descendant cheerfully delivered on that promise. He sent his army under the command of one Diophantus of Sinope, a competent general, and, as events proved, also a capable diplomat. Diophantus might have been even more talented yet, but the literary work by a Diophantus from this period, called the Pontica, cannot be said to be his.
The first challenge was the Scythians and Diophantus beat them convincingly. After subduing the local tribes around Chersonesus, Diophantus marched east, where he did not so much conquer the Bosphoran kingdom as have it pressed into his possession by a beleaguered king deeply grateful to be rid of it. With the south and east secure, Diophantus marched against the Scythians once more, and forced them into reluctant surrender. Mithridates later boasted that in defeating the Scythians he had achieved what Cyrus the Great and Alexander the Great had failed to do (though he failed to mention that these two had not actually tried very hard).
Nor did the Scythians remain subdued very long. They waited until Diophantus, and probably his army, had returned to Sinope, and rose in revolt. Though the Greeks alternately mocked them for their backwardness or praised their simple lifestyle, the Scythians were not ignorant barbarians. True, they wore trousers (which settled the matter as far as the Greeks were concerned), but they were skilled metal-workers, who seem (from archaeological grave finds) to have had a rich cultural tradition. The average Scythian fought on horseback, and his primary weapon was the bow (Scythian archers served as mercenary policemen in fifth-century Athens). Scythian nobles fought in armour rather in the Sarmatian tradition. Most of their cavalry were also bowmen, who carried arrows and bow in a case called the gorytas which held both together. These bows were composites, a mixture of horn, wood and metal with a range and penetration which was all the more disconcerting for being delivered by fast-moving light cavalry.
Some Scythian infantrymen used javelins, but it seems that their shock troops preferred a double-handed axe about a metre long. Secondary weapons consisted of either another smaller axe, or a belt dagger not much smaller than a short sword. Fortunately for the Chersonese Greeks, the Scythian cavalry-based army was not well adapted for storming cities. The prudent Diophantus had left a citadel (possibly called Eupatorion) to defend Chersonesus, and this held off the Scythians until Diophantus returned. The chronology of this period is hopelessly confused but it appears that the Scythians, with retribution looming, allied themselves with tribes further to the north and tried to overwhelm the Pontic army by sheer force of numbers. The geographer Strabo (who was from Pontus) relates that 50,000 Scythians and their allies took on a Pontic army one tenth of the size, and were defeated with great slaughter. A final Scythian attempt was made to take control of the Bosphoran kingdom by treachery. The plot came into operation whilst Diophantus was there, finalizing the handover of the kingdom to Pontus. The Bosphoran king was assassinated, but Diophantus escaped in a boat sent by the Chersonese. The Pontic general returned at the start of the next campaigning season with his veteran army, and a one-sided reconquest followed. Thereafter, the Crimea and its peoples was, with varying degrees of relief and reluctance among the inhabitants, made into a newly integrated part of the Pontic kingdom.4
Though not stated explicitly by our historical sources, it is almost certain that Olbia was conquered. Coinage with Mithridatic themes appears in large quantities in the archaeological record; it seems that Mithridates did as he had done outside Chersonesus and built a fortress outside Olbia which served both as a bulwark for the town against barbarian attack, and as a reminder to the citizens that their military destiny was no longer in their own hands.
It can be inferred from later events that with the Crimea as a base, Mithridates began to spread his power east and westwards around the Black Sea. Since he had gone to the effort of acquiring Trapezus as a way-station to Colchis, it can be assumed that this region fell to him soon after. Mithridatid apologists claimed that their king inherited the region from its previous sovereign. Other sources are explicit that he conquered it, so it seems probable that this ‘inheritance’ was as voluntary as those by which Pontus gained Armenia Minor and the Bosphoran kingdom. Colchis was then put under the command of a governor who ruled the region on his behalf, whilst Panticapaeum, former capital of the Bosphoran kingdom, became the seat of Mithridates government in the north.
Pontus also expanded on to the Asian side of the Bosporus, taking in those tribes and cities traditionally subject to the kingdom. Strabo describes a particularly epic battle fought on the ice of the frozen straits which brought the eastern peninsula under Pontic control. This left only a small portion of the eastern Black Sea coast out of Pontic control. This was occupied by a tribe called the Achaeans, assumed, because of the linguistic similarity with the Homeric Greeks, to be descendants of soldiers returning home from the Trojan wars who had, like Odysseus, lost their way. In fact the Achaeans were more backward and barbaric than was the norm for Black Sea tribes, and the effort-to-reward ratio of conquering them meant that Mithridates never got around to it.
Evidence for Pontic expansion to the west is lacking, but as Mithridates is recorded as fighting the Bastarnae, a tribe in the region of Byzantium, and as that tribe later fought in his army as allies, it can be assumed that Pontic arms also enjoyed considerable success in the west. This is confirmed by coinage from nominally independent cities which bore Mithridatic themes, and the boasts of Pontic propaganda, which proclaimed Mithridates as master of all the tribes and cities around the Black Sea. One reason why it is hard to determine whether cities came under Pontic control is that Mithridates did not attempt to change the system of government at the local level. Petty kings remained in charge of their kingdoms; those Greek cities ruled by oligarchies continued to be so ruled, whilst in democratic cities, the peoples assemblies met and voted as before. The principal difference was that tribute was no longer paid to an unpredictable barbarian chieftain. Instead, that barbarian chieftain, like themselves, paid tribute to Pontus.
The tribute from the Crimea alone came to 200 talents of silver and 180,000 medimni of corn. Since a medimnus could keep a man fed for a month and a half, and 200 talents of silver would support an entire army for considerably longer, it can be seen that Mithridates’ Black Sea campaigns greatly increased the military power of his kingdom, even before the very valuable reserves of manpower are taken into account. Yet in the long run, the greatest gain yielded by these early conquests was not measurable in concrete terms. By his salvation of Greek cities from barbarian peril, Mithridates came to be seen as the protector of the Greek cities of Asia Minor. This provided him with immense help in his later campaigns, and allowed him to garner support long after his later behaviour had ceased to merit it.
Bithynia, Cappadocia and Rome
As king of Pontus, Mithridates was expected to follow the conventions set by his royal predecessors. One of these was that a king did not go to war in person, but sent his generals to do the actual fighting. It was one of Mithridates’ strengths that he selected highly competent subordinates, and another that he seems to have been one of the few ancient commanders with a genuine appreciation of the value of military intelligence.
In the case of Asia Minor, Mithridates seems to have decided that the best way to get the lie of the land was to see for himself. His kingdom was stable, his army was constructively engaged elsewhere, so Mithridates took himself on a tour or the region. He travelled incognito, with just a few friends, and would have been encouraged by what he found.5 Bithynia was under the rule of Nicomedes III, and though Bithynia was a strong and well-organized kingdom which had grown from the wreck of the Seleucid empire much as had Pontus, Bithynia’s greater proximity to Pergamum and consequently-greater exposure to Roman culture had left both king and people seething over the arrogance and greed of Roman debt-collectors.* Despite a history of rivalry between their kingdoms, Mithridates would have marked Nicomedes as a potential ally, and an important one, as Bithynia controlled naval access to the Black Sea. Both Nicomedes and Mithridates were worried and angered by the Roman decision to rule Phrygia directly, using the excuse that Phrygia had once been part of the kingdom of Pergamum. Mithridates felt he had at least as good a claim to the place as the Romans had, on the basis that one ancestor had received it as part of a marriage settlement, and Mithridates V, father of the current Mithridates, had received it again as a reward for helping the Romans to defeat Aristonicus. To add insult to injury, Pontus had paid a substantial bribe for possession of Phrygia to the Roman commission which had settled affairs after the revolt of Aristonicus.
Galatia was quiet, its people subdued by a series of defeats against the better-organized kingdoms of the region, and the state itself demoralized and disorganized. Cappadocia was more of a problem. The kingdom was nominally under the rule of Ariarathes VI, but Ariarathes had been married to the elder sister of Mithridates - with the Pontic army in attendance to ensure that the wedding went ahead. At the time Ariarathes had been younger and easily controlled. But Roman ambassadors made it clear to Ariarathes that they would support a Cappadocian bid for independence in fact as well as in name, and Ariarathes was becoming increasingly self-assertive. Prompt action was required if Pontic control of Cappadocia was to not to slip away. Another invasion was out of the question as it would antagonize Rome and, in any case, the people of Cappadocia (as Mithridates would have established) showed little taste for direct rule from Pontus. Nevertheless, appropriate steps were taken. The independent-minded Ariarathes was assassinated, and whilst his sister continued to rule in the name of her son, Ariarathes VII, Mithridates ensured that true power lay with the tool through whom the assassination was accomplished, a courtier named Gordias.6
Looking further afield, Mithridates would have been encouraged to note that Rome was looking less invincible than usual. Jugurtha, an African usurper, had made a career of defying Roman settlements of his kingdom, and usually managed to bribe his way past any Roman objections. When he went too far by killing Italian traders, he withstood a Roman invasion in 111 BC, and comprehensively defeated another sent against him in 109 BC. In the same year, Rome suffered a string of defeats at the hands of German invaders who looked as though they might succeed in eliminating Rome altogether.
With much to ponder, Mithridates returned home some time in 108 BC. He discovered that his wife had been busy in his absence. Not only had she produced a son, but, inspired by her mother’s example, had plans of ruling Pontus as regent in that son’s name. She had irrevocably committed some courtiers to her side by the simple technique of sleeping with them, and was understandably eager to remove Mithridates before he caught up on the news from home. Either Mithridates had sensibly neglected to inform his sister-wife of his acquired immunity to poison or he was tipped off in advance. In either case a poisoning attempt failed, with fatal consequences for the would-be poisoners.
The new rapport between Bithynia and Pontus manifested itself soon after Mithridates returned home, when, in a spirit of international cooperation, the pair invaded and occupied Paphlagonia. The excuse was probably the traditional Pontic allegation that Paphlagonia had been given to Pontus by the previous king (as with Colchis, Armenia Minor and the Bosphoran kingdom). However, Bithynia had always maintained a grip on a part of Paphlagonia, and probably took the lion’s share of possession. Certainly it fell to Nicomedes to install the puppet king, who took the name Pylaemenes. This was the name of the traditional ruling house of Paphlagonia. Though it is probable that the new king was in fact related to Nicomedes, giving him a traditional family name reassured his subjects - a trick that Mithridates filed away for future use.
The expected growl of protest came from the Roman wolf, in the form of a delegation ordering both kingdoms to quit their new conquest forthwith. The delegates were blandly informed of the fullest friendship and regard which the two kingdoms had for the Romans, and their orders were totally ignored. Whilst he was at it, Mithridates ignored a demand to ‘return the Scythian princes to their kingdoms’, which the Romans apparently made at the same time. Rome was preoccupied with Jugurtha to their south and preparing to fight for survival against the Germanic invasion from their north, so had precious little time or resources to defend the interests of faraway minor statelets about which the voters knew little and cared less. Encouraged by the lack of vigour in the Roman response, Mithridates calmly helped himself to a large slice of that part of Galatia adjoining his borders. There he repeated the policy used in the Crimea and built a fortress, Mithridateum, to hold down the local populace.7
Also apparently inspired by the success of his Paphlagonian adventure, Nicomedes attempted a yet more ambitious project. Probably some time in 103 BC, he made a daring march across northern Galatia, right against the Pontic border, and swooped on Cappadocia. It is probable that the Galatians, being highly peeved with Mithridates at that point, made no objection to the Bithynian army crossing their territory. Nor was Mithridates particularly popular in Cappadocia. Laodice took the opportunity to make plain how she felt about her brother Mithridates having organized the murder of her husband. She welcomed the Bithynian invasion with such enthusiasm that she immediately married Nicomedes. Indeed, it may well have been at Laodice’s invitation that Nicomedes came in the first place.
There was no way that the proud Mithridates would calmly accept a diplomatic slap in the face of this magnitude. Perhaps Nicomedes assumed that he, as the husband of Laodice, had a claim to the kingdom which Rome would recognize as legitimate, especially as the Romans were none too keen on Pontic influence in Cappadocia in the first place. If he hoped that such considerations would at least cause Mithridates to hesitate, he was disappointed. Mithridates gathered an army and briskly bundled the newly-weds out of the country, setting his nephew, the son in whose name Laodice had been ruling, as king in his own right. It would then have occurred to Mithridates that the Romans needed bringing up to speed on the latest developments. Accordingly, he dispatched an embassy to Rome to explain his side of the story. This seems to be the most probable cause of the embassy which arrived in Rome in 101 BC; an embassy which the Romans treated with such undiplomatic contempt that the senate tried to bring capital charges against the tribune mainly responsible for this.8 That the senate were so sympathetic is partly explained by their extreme antipathy to the tribune concerned. But also Mithridates had followed the career of Jugurtha with careful attention, and realized the value of equipping his embassy with a goodly sum of money with which to bribe senators.
Either the bribes worked, the Romans were sufficiently embarrassed by their treatment of the Pontic embassy, or they were just too preoccupied with the problems of their failing Republic to worry much about Cappadocia at that point. In any case, Mithridates was temporarily left with a free hand. Which he needed. The new, young Cappadocian king was not prepared to return to the status quo and adamantly refused to let his kingdom be ruled by Gordias, the man who had assassinated his father.
Possibly with the help of Armenia, and almost certainly with covert assistance from Nicomedes and Laodice, the young king managed to assemble an army in remarkably short time. With this at his back, he boldly asserted his independence and that of his kingdom. Mithridates accepted the challenge. Nevertheless, he professed his admiration for the skill and energy of his relative, and asked for a chance for the two to meet in person, and see if the diplomatic crisis could not be sorted out by uncle and nephew talking face-to-face.
Ariarathes agreed, but knowing his family well, added the provisos that neither was to be accompanied by a bodyguard, and his uncle should undergo a thorough body search before the meeting. So comprehensive was this body search that it verged upon the intimate, and only ended when Mithridates irritably asked exactly what kind of ‘weapon’ his searcher was hoping to discover in the king’s trousers. In fact, as the unfortunate Ariarathes was to discover, the correct answer should have been ‘the short, but quite adequately effective knife which his majesty has strapped to his private parts’. Given that Mithridates was a physically powerful individual even when unarmed, it can be assumed that the family meeting was brief, brutal and bloody. Afterwards Mithridates informed the opposing army that they no longer had a king to lead them, and the enemy melted away without a fight.9
All this left a vacancy for the throne of Cappadocia. Mithridates chose to fill the post with his eight-year-old son, perhaps hoping that his own child might be inspired by the family loyalty so lacking in his mother, sister/wife, brother and nephew. Taking a leaf from Nicomedes’ book, he gave the child the name Ariarathes IX. Undeterred, Nicomedes produced another Ariarathes of his own, the brother of the murdered king who had been hoping to live out his life peacefully in Asia. For a while the two kings each ‘ruled’ Cappadocia, issuing coins as though sole monarch – a situation which lasted as long as it took the generals of Mithridates to find and defeat the Bithynian claimant. With this man’s death the line of genuine Ariarathid kings came to an end, though this did not stop the enterprising Nicomedes from producing another ‘Ariarathes’, albeit one of patently synthetic pedigree and setting him up in opposition to the (equally false) Pontic Ariarathes.
It was inevitable that once the German menace had been seen off, the Romans would return their attention to the shenanigans in Cappadocia. The general principally responsible for defeating the Germans was Marius, and some time in 99 or 98 BC Marius travelled to Asia Minor, allegedly to fulfil a vow made during the German war. More probably, Marius either correctly divined that Asia Minor would be the scene of Rome’s next major war, or he was assessing the chances of discreetly provoking that war himself and so earning greater wealth and glory as the commander who won it. Plutarch says that when Marius met with Mithridates, though Mithridates treated him with all deference and respect, the king was bluntly warned by the Roman that Pontus would come to grief ‘unless it became greater than Rome, or did as it was commanded in silence’.10
Shortly thereafter came news that the Romans were thoroughly unimpressed by the fake genealogies with which both Mithridates and Nicomedes had equipped the embassies sent to Rome to argue the case for their different versions of Ariarathes. Mithridates was to get out of Cappadocia at once, and take his puppet king with him. Bithynia was to stop interfering with the succession, leaving the Cappadocians free to be ruled as they pleased. And while they were about it, Nicomedes and Mithridates could get out of Paphlagonia and allow self-rule to that region as well.
With their customary tactlessness, the Romans made it plain that this was not a matter for discussion or prevarication. They had a large veteran army available, and nothing pressing for it to do at that moment. Mithridates considered his options, and the advice of Marius, and did as he was commanded in silence. The Cappadocian nobility, unaccustomed to any other form of government, chose to remain a monarchy. They selected a king from their own number: Ariobarzanes, the first of his line. It is unknown how Ariobarzanes felt about his elevation, but he would have been very unwise to assume that he would be left to rule his new kingdom in peace. In fact Mithridates was already working to depose him, and had elected to do so by invoking a force heretofore quiescent in the affairs of the region –Armenia.
Armenia
Armenia had been quiet because it had been thoroughly under the thumb of the Parthians, and the Parthians had enough problems with digesting their new conquests without looking for trouble with the well-organized, militarily competent and relatively inaccessible kingdoms of Asia Minor.
Though virtually a client kingdom, Armenia still required a king, and so, about 100 BC, the Parthians released the heir to the Armenian kingdom, who had grown up in Parthia as a hostage to his future realm’s good behaviour. This was Tigranes II, son of the previous ruler, the first Tigranes. In return for coming into his kingdom, Tigranes II had to yield to Parthia the rule of ‘seventy valleys’, though it is uncertain where these valleys were and how much of a loss they represented to Armenia.
By now aged about forty, Tigranes almost immediately started to make up for lost time. His first task was to take his kingdom in hand and wrest control from the powerful barons who were virtually kings in their own fiefdoms. Demonstrating the ability and ambition which was to earn him the suffix of ‘the Great’, Tigranes quickly rallied the kingdom behind him. He boosted his military credibility and compensated for the loss of the seventy valleys by conquering the principality of Sophene on the southeastern border of Cappadocia. It was probably this which brought him to the attention of Mithridates, whose kingdom abutted Armenia in Armenia minor, east Pontus and Colchis. The two kings recognized one another as kindred spirits and, soon after, Tigranes married Mithridates’ daughter. This lass was called Cleopatra, a name to be made famous by a later queen of Egypt, but at the time recalling a sister of Alexander the Great – an interesting pointer to how Mithridates portrayed himself in his early propaganda.
Tigranes was deeply interested in affairs to the south of his borders, where the collapse of the Seleucid empire seemed to offer considerable potential for expansion. At the same time, Tigranes’ contacts in the Parthian court would have brought him word of Parthian distraction on their eastern borders due to invading tribes of horsemen (the ancestors of Atilla the Hun). Yet for all this wealth of opportunity, one was conspicuous in its temptation. That was for Tigranes to accept the invitation of his new father-in-law to invade and conquer Cappadocia. There can be little doubt that this invasion was paid for with Pontic silver. Three years after Ariobarzanes accepted the Cappadocian throne, he was on the run and Gordias, henchman of Mithridates, was back in charge.11
Mithridates had scrupulously obeyed Roman orders. He had kept out of Cappadocia while Armenia invaded it and placed a Pontic puppet in power, and he could disingenuously claim total innocence for the actions of his son-in-law. In short, Mithridates had contrived to simultaneously obey Roman orders and make Rome look foolish to its allies and subjects in the region. This was a dangerous game to play, and Mithridates must have been aware that Roman patience was wearing very thin.
* Nicomedes was later to reply tartly to a Roman request for military help by saying that he had no population left to help with - Roman debt collectors had hauled the lot off into slavery.