Chapter 4
Mehanwhile, back in Rome ...
If Mithridates had been encouraged to launch his military adventure in Asia Minor by the belief that Rome was failing as a social and political entity, the year 88 BC provided dramatic support for the theory. Because much of what happened in Asia Minor and Greece over subsequent years was determined by events in the forum of Rome, it is worth considering these events in some depth.
Although the war against the recalcitrant Italians was still a work in progress, Rome’s response to the victories of Mithridates had until this point been going as expected. Interestingly, for those uncertain of the extent to which Aquillius had been acting on orders from back home, it was only now that the senate formally declared war on Pontus. Given Rome’s straitened circumstances, raising money for war on this new front was very difficult. Eventually it was decided to sell off ancient treasures reserved for sacrifices to the gods. Since these treasures had been preserved from the very earliest years of Rome’s existence, the sale demonstrated, as Appian says, both ‘how limited were Rome’s resources at this time, and how unlimited Roman ambition’.1 A very considerable army of six legions had been raised from these funds, and was waiting at Nola in Campania for a commander. This commander was presumably going to be Sulla who had been rewarded with the consulship for his outstanding performance against the Italian rebels in the preceding years, and who was in any case an obvious choice as he had campaigned in Asia Minor successfully in the past.
However, Rome’s veteran commander, Marius, had long had an eye on the possibility of war in Asia Minor, and was desperately keen on getting the command for himself, despite the fact that he was going on seventy years old. Oblivious to the embarrassment it caused fellow Romans, he insisted on doing military exercises on the Campus Martius as a none-too-subtle hint that he was still up for the job. It did not help that he was frantically jealous of Sulla, and the supporters of each had nearly come to blows shortly before the Italian rebellion.
Marius found an ally in Sulpicius Rufus, tribune and unofficial leader of those Italians who had made their peace with Rome. Sulpicius Rufus had a radical legislative programme that he wanted to push through despite a senate which opposed radical legislative programmes on principle. The political support of Marius, an ex-consul and a man who had proposed a number of sensible reforms when himself a tribune, went a long way toward reconciling the equestrians (those Romans of aristocratic rank who were not senators) to Sulpicius’ proposals. In return, Marius demanded that Sulpicius call an extraordinary meeting of the people, and transfer command of the war against Mithridates to himself. The move was not quite unconstitutional, for Rome was a democracy, and the will of the people trumped that of the senate. However, it was almost unprecedented that a senatorial appointment should be over-ruled in this way, not least because it would replace an eminently suitable candidate for the job with one less so.
Sulla and his fellow consul responded, as they were entitled to do, by declaring a suspension of public business, which meant that Sulpicius could not immediately go ahead with his proposals. This gave Sulla and his allies a chance of talking the people round before they voted, and Sulpicius was determined to have none of it. He raised a riot (in which the son of Sulla’s fellow consul was killed) and brought about the lifting of the suspension of public business by force majeure. Sulla fled to his army and Sulpicius proceeded to push his proposals through, including the replacement of Sulla with Marius as commander of the war against Mithridates.
It was the glory and the tragedy of the Roman people that they possessed no reverse gear. Just as backing down against a foreign enemy was inconceivable, so it never seems to have occurred to Sulla to accept the fait accompli. He was a consul of Rome who had been driven out of the city by a violent and subversive mob. It was his intention - nay, his duty - to return to Rome and restore order. Fortunately he happened to have an army handy to do just that.
The ‘Asian Vespers’
Exactly what Mithridates thought when he heard that Rome was attacking itself with the army that had been raised to defeat him can only be imagined. Certainly events in Rome did little to encourage Roman allies, and much to inspire their enemies. Nevertheless, it was probable that the legions would arrive eventually, and the loyalty of Mithridates’ allies would be tested. Mithridates had thought of a solution which would bind the Greek cities irrevocably to him. This solution would damn him forever in Roman eyes, but after his treatment of Aquillius, Mithridates had little to lose on that score in any case. Essentially what he planned was to extend his treatment of Aquillius to the entire Roman population of Asia Minor, and to make his new allies accomplices in the deed.
There were several thousand Romans in Asia Minor, only a small minority of them military. Most were traders and businessmen, men who fervently hoped that Mithridates would follow the usual convention of war in the region and accept the surrender of a city as a simple transfer of ownership that had little effect on those who paid the taxes and kept the wheels of commerce turning. Whilst a foreign accent and Latin speech was hard to conceal, not all who spoke Latin were Romans. It is highly probable that many who had boasted of their Roman citizenship now earnestly assured their neighbours that they were in fact Italian, and in fact Italians who deeply sympathized with the efforts of their fellow-countrymen to destroy Rome. Nevertheless, these people were a security threat. If and when the legions came, could these people be trusted not to throw open city gates at a crucial moment, not to supply the Romans with intelligence about Pontic forces and dispositions, and not, when the going got tough, to seduce the city fathers with honeyed promises of special treatment to those who surrendered in a timely manner?
It is uncertain to what extent the peoples of the region distinguished between those Latin speakers who had come to despoil their land as Romans and those who did so as Italians. There seems no reason to believe that the Italians of Asia Minor did not use what Roman connections they had to gain an advantage over their local rivals in business, or use their greater affinity with Roman culture to gain favourable judgements where the writ of Roman law ran. In short, for many of the peoples of Asia Minor, Italians and Romans were merely different flavours of barbarian, equally insensitive, grasping and exploitative. If it was difficult to distinguish between them, Mithridates’ solution was straightforward and breathtakingly inhumane. He would kill them all, Romans and Italians, men women and children, all 80,000 of them.2
Mithridates dispatched secret letters to the city councils and provincial governors, telling them that in thirty days from the sending of the letters all Romans and Italians, without exception, were to be massacred. By way of encouragement, he offered the city councils a share in the property of those they were about to kill (the rest going to the crown). It was to be proclaimed that any slaves who killed their Roman masters and their families were to receive freedom, but even freed slaves were to be killed if they were of Italian origin. Debtors were invited to kill off their Roman creditors. This would relieve them of half their debts; the rest still needed to be paid, but to the Pontic treasury. It is evident that Pontus would obtain a massive financial windfall from this mass murder, not least because the Romans and Italians were in Asia Minor to get money out of the place, and by and large they had been doing so very successfully. However, it was about more than money, as is shown by the instruction that the bodies were to be thrown out of town and left unburied. The Latin peoples placed great importance on the reverent interment of the dead, so this insult meant that those following Mithridates’ orders could expect the full vindictive wrath of Rome should Asia Minor ever fall under its control.
So bitterly were the Roman peoples hated throughout the region that not a single city council appears to have even quietly tipped off a favoured few about these terrible orders until the day ordained for the massacre. In fact, the zeal with which the orders were obeyed when the time came shows that hatred of Rome, rather than fear of Mithridates, was the driving force. In one city in southwest Asia Minor, the Romans fled to their goddess of Vesta for protection. Those clinging to the statue were pulled forcibly away, and then the parents were forced to watch as their children were killed. Then husbands had to watch the murder of their wives, and then they were killed themselves.
At the coastal city of Adramyttium, some Romans tried to escape into the sea, but their killers followed them out and drowned them. Most Romans did as people in their situation traditionally did, fleeing to the temples for sanctuary. At Pergamum, they used archers to shoot down their victims even as they clung to the statues of the gods. The citizens of Tralles were more scrupulous about avoiding blood-guilt, and hired a Paphlagonian thug to do the dirty work for them. Rather than drag those clinging to the statues away to be slain, as the Ephesians and many others did, he simply lopped off their hands on the spot. The example of Tralles shows clearly that what was happening in this massacre was not simply the work of a blood-crazed rabble; the deed here shows careful planning and (literal) execution by the city authorities. This massacre is known to modern historians as the ‘Asian Vespers’ (or ‘Ephesian Vespers’ after the city where Roman casualties were the highest). Casualties have been estimated at between 50,000 and 150,000 Romans, Italians and their families.3
The effects of the massacre were highly significant. Firstly, it removed any doubts in Rome and Italy that Mithridates was to be destroyed. His crime was literally unforgivable. Secondly, if any cities had been wavering in their support of Mithridates, the Pontic colours were now nailed to their collective masthead. More insidiously, the peoples of the region were aware that the sanctity of their temples had in many cases been violated, and in their tens of thousands the spirits of the deceased, with justice squarely on their side, were currently presenting their petitions for revenge to the gods. When these same allies of Pontus came to face Rome in battle, this knowledge – on the part of soldiers facing imminent sudden death – acted as a drag on morale.
The siege of Rhodes
With the mainland of Asia Minor securely in his possession, Mithridates moved on to the Greek islands of the Aegean. It is probable that at this point he was still working on the principle that the first stages of the coming campaign would be fought at sea, and that therefore he might as well make the Romans fight for any naval bases they could use as a springboard for attacking Asia Minor proper.
Cos was his first target, and a lucrative one too. The Ptolemies of Egypt, like any good Hellenistic royal family, were wracked by internecine in-fighting. The mother of the current monarch had stashed her insurance policy, in the form of a grandson and a large dollop of the royal treasure on Cos. Mithridates was received on that island with the same enthusiasm which made many of his conquests simple triumphal processions into whatever place he was occupying. The Ptolemaic princeling was adopted into the Pontic royal household, and the Ptolemaic gold, rare art and precious stones were adopted into the bulging coffers of the Pontic treasury (Mithridates also helped himself to some money which the Jews had left there fore safe-keeping). The people of Cos distinguished themselves by insisting that they should honour the sanctuary sought by the Romans on the island, who thus escaped the general massacre of their fellow-countrymen on the mainland. By then Mithridates had moved on to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, which cheerfully surrendered without a fight.
The next target was Rhodes, now the lone outpost of Roman power. To here the Roman provincial governor, Lucius Cassius, had already found his way, and now was grimly marshalling a defence. The surviving Italians and Romans were gathered here, and they assisted the Rhodians in strengthening the walls and harbours, and in constructing and carefully positioning catapults and other siege weapons. When word came that Mithridates was on his way, the Rhodians destroyed those houses that were outside their walls, and braced themselves for the assault.
The city, however, was not relying on a purely passive defence. Rhodes had been the dominant sea power in the region until the Romans (probably to their present regret) had jealously ordered the reduction of the fleet. National pride demanded that the islanders put up at least a show of resistance at sea, and accordingly their fleet sailed out to meet that of Pontus.
The ships of the two opposing fleets would have been much alike, for the art of shipbuilding was shared among Hellenistic artisans across the eastern Mediterranean. Warships were based on the trireme, which as the name implies (tri – ‘three’; reme- ‘oars’) had three banks of oars. Under the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kings, warships had reached a level of sophistication that was not to be re-attained for centuries. The trireme remained the basic fleet vessel, but larger ships, including quinquiremes and even ‘sixteeners’, now existed. Despite the names, it is unlikely that these referred to extra banks of oars, but instead to different arrangements of the rowers who propelled these ships in battle.
Accustomed to the gentle tides of the Mediterranean, ancient warships were not particularly seaworthy. Some ships had complete decks, and were known as cataphract (covered over) ships, and even a basic trireme had a gangway running down the middle and a platform at the back for the captain and the steering oarsman. It was their habit to remain near the coast, and run for shore when faced with inclement weather (it has been estimated that swells more than a metre high would get a trireme into severe difficulty). Even ships built mostly out of pine tended to have oak keels, and ancillary keels on the sides so that these keels could support the weight of the ships when they were run up the sand onto a beach, which was the usual method of parking a ship in the absence of a harbour.
Under sail, a warship was a slow and cumbersome beast capable of making an average speed of two knots on a typical journey. Sails were useless in combat, and usually left ashore. Battle speed was provided by rowers who could get their machines up to seven knots. The more skilled a crew the faster the ship could go, and the better it could manoeuvre. This was important, because warships had a huge and cumbersome ram on the front just below the waterline, and every captain’s dream was to hit an enemy dead amidships with the ram, thus finishing the combat with a single blow. Cruising down the side of an enemy ship, snapping its oars and causing chaos among the rowers within, was generally considered a satisfactory prelude, but both manoeuvres required the attacking ship to get into the right position in the first place, so sailing ability was at least as important as the size and number of the ships in the fleet.
Pontus, blessed by the abundant forests on the southern seaboard of the Black Sea, had a huge number of vessels, some three hundred warships and a host of minor craft and transports as well. The abundance of timber meant that these ships were triremes and above, whilst the wealth of Pontus meant that such a fleet could be sustained for long periods. Maintaining an ancient fleet was not cheap. Even a basic trireme had a crew of between two and three hundred men, and for most of antiquity rowing was a skilled art. The slave ship with rowers sweating under the lash belonged to a later era –Mithridates’ rowers expected to be paid, and at times like these good rowers came at a premium.
From the first encounter it became plain that the contest at sea would be between Rhodian naval experience and the Pontic advantages of larger and more numerous ships. Fortunately, Appian has given us a good description of what followed, and it is from his report that this account of events is largely drawn.
Mithridates was in personal charge of the Pontic attack, having made one of the quinquiremes his flagship. On seeing the Rhodian fleet moving out to meet him, he ordered his fleet to extend its line of battle, and for the ships on the wings to row faster. However, the Rhodian sailors were canny enough to understand the meaning of the manoeuvre and backed off quickly enough to avoid being surrounded. The opposing ships slowly approached the main harbour of Rhodes. Eventually, unable to discern any weakness in the Pontic line, the Greeks fell back into the harbour itself, though keeping themselves and their ships ready for any opportunity which presented itself.
This was probably all that Mithridates has wanted at this point, for with the Rhodian fleet safely penned in, it was safe for him to order his highly-vulnerable transports to take to sea with his main force of assault infantry. In the meantime he set up camp near the city, and set his forces to probing the defences and skirmishing with the Rhodians on the walls.
At this point there occurred one of those opportunities the Rhodian fleet had been waiting for. Secure in the belief that the enemy warships were safely caged by the Pontic fleet, a royal supply ship came close enough to the harbour for a fast bireme to streak out and capture it. The indignant Pontic fleet hurried to retrieve the situation, but they were met with Rhodian ships that reinforced their own side as fast as the Pontics could arrive. As Appian reports:
A severe engagement followed. Both in his fury and in the size of his fleet, Mithridates was superior to his opponents, but the Rhodians circled skilfully and rammed his ships to such effect that the battle ended with the Rhodians retiring into harbour with a captured trireme in tow and other spoils besides.4
Soon after, the Pontic forces got their revenge by bagging a Rhodian quinquireme. They kept this minor triumph to themselves, perhaps in the hope that the Rhodians would venture out to find their missing ship. When, in due course, a search party of six ships emerged from the harbour, Mithridates sent twenty-six ships after them, perhaps trusting that odds of over four to one would more than compensate for any lack of seamanship. Maybe in daylight this would have been the case, but the wily Rhodian admiral used the superior speed of his ships to avoid action until sunset. Then, when the Pontic ships wearied of their fruitless chase and turned in disgust to rejoin the main fleet, the Rhodians suddenly wheeled and hit them hard from behind.
In the near-total chaos which followed, the Rhodians sank two Pontic ships, scattered others, and slipped back into port almost unscathed. Not so Mithridates, who had sent his ship scurrying to and fro trying to organize the fleet against this sudden attack. In the darkness and confusion an allied ship from Chios slammed into the side of his flagship. The incident shook both Mithridates’ confidence in his navy and his confidence in the loyalty of his allies, for though he made light of the incident at the time, a festering suspicion began to take root regarding the loyalty of the Greeks in general and the Chians in particular.
After these alarms and excursions, the morale of the Rhodian fleet was sky-high, and that of the Pontics at a correspondingly low ebb. Therefore when the large and vulnerable Pontic troop transports appeared on the horizon, the Rhodian fleet raced out to meet them, exactly as Mithridates had feared. The transports had arrived sooner than planned, and in considerable disorder, as they had been swept to Rhodes on the back of a strong storm – something which Mithridates might have expected as it was getting late in the sailing season.
Before they had time to pull themselves together, the Rhodians were in among them, burning some ships, ramming others and taking hundreds of Mithridates’ men prisoner. The overwhelming weight of the Pontic fleet eventually brought order to the chaos, and the Rhodians, who knew exactly how far to push their luck, retired into harbour whilst they were still well ahead.
Despite enduring this further setback, Mithridates now at least had his army, albeit a somewhat bruised and shaken one. With the persistence which was later to become legendary, he pushed on. He constructed a sambucca for an assault on the harbour. As far as can be established, the sambucca was a sort of pontoon built between two ships on which a siege tower was mounted.* Other soldiers were given ladders and ordered to make their assault from smaller boats. Meanwhile, a further attack would take place on the landward side, where deserters had shown the king a suitable spot for attack. The plan was to hit the Rhodians at night, attacking from both land and sea, and to swarm over the walls before the enemy could coordinate a defence. The signal for the attack was to be a fire lit on nearby Mount Atabyrius.
Unfortunately, a fire was also the signal which the Rhodians had decided upon as a warning of attack. When they perceived the Pontics sneaking upon them, the Rhodians lit their warning fire, whereupon the Pontic army rushed forward noisily, assuming they had been given the signal to attack. Since no-one was properly in position, and the Rhodians were thoroughly alerted anyway, Mithridates sensibly pulled his army back before it was committed. It took until the next morning to get everything sorted out. Though the assault went ahead anyway for form’s sake, there was no chance of the Rhodians being even slightly surprised, and they rebuffed the landward attack with ease.
The sambucca was a problem for the defenders though. By their nature, city walls are remarkably static, whilst being mounted on a ship gave the Pontic siege tower considerable mobility. Armed with a formidable array of siege weapons, the sambucca was backed up by a mass of soldiers in small boats, who stood ready to defend the tower against a sally, and being equipped with their ladders, these soldiers were equally ready to follow up any breach the sambucca might make in the Rhodian defences. The chosen site of the sambucca‘s assault was against the temple of Isis, which was apparently built into the walls. Later the Rhodians were to swear that the goddess took the Pontic assault personally, and herself appeared on the walls to heave a massive fireball at the attackers. Evidently this did the trick. Either that, or the rough seas left over from the storm meant that the pontoon supporting the tower was none too stable, and the sambucca started to collapse under its own weight as it approached the walls and encountered the higher waves near shore. Either way, Mithridates’ assault collapsed as comprehensively as his floating siege tower.
This was the last straw. Leaving a flotilla to keep the Rhodian fleet out of mischief, Mithridates returned home. He had found personal command of his army a none-too-encouraging experience, and he was determined, for the present at least, to return to his core competencies of raising troops and money. This task had become particularly pressing, for a new vista of opportunity had suddenly opened up in Greece.
Athens
Mithridates was a man who liked to know how things were going beyond his borders, and even before the start of the war with Rome his agents were active in Greece. For example, the Roman governor of Macedonia had his hands full coping with a sudden spate of Thracian incursions, and there is no reason to disbelieve the Roman suspicion that these were encouraged and sponsored by Mithridates. It is unlikely that Mithridates had any immediate plans for the area, but he was aware that any Roman attack on his lands would probably start from there, and it was his intention to make things as uncomfortable for the Romans as he could.
Athens had finished the 90s BC in the grip of a tyranny. In the ancient world ‘tyrant’ did not mean a cruel and oppressive ruler, but rather a dictator who had seized power to which he had neither a constitutional nor hereditary right. This tyrant was called Medeius. He followed a pro-Roman policy, almost certainly because he hoped that this would encourage the Romans to recognize his rule and thus give it some legitimacy. Consequently, almost by reflex, the party opposed to Medeius took an anti-Roman stance, which in those times was by definition a pro-Pontic stance.
Since Rome in 90 BC had other preoccupations than supporting Athenian usurpers, Medeius slips quietly off the pages of history, his fate unknown, when the pro-Pontic party became ascendant. A philosopher called Athenion was sent on a diplomatic embassy to Mithridates, and after his meeting sent back word to his countrymen that Mithridates was proposing to restore democracy, cancel debts, and spread largesse generously among one and all.
Athenion immediately became a local hero. When the ship bringing him home was blown off course, he was given a flotilla of warships to escort him home. Cheering crowds turned out to see Athenion carried into the city in a silver-gilded litter, to be received by the priests of Dionysius who claimed that Athenion had met with the reincarnated spirit of their God. The aristocracy, who had probably been supporters of Medeius, tried to make the best of it, and seem to have agreed to make Mithridates the eponymous archon of the year. The Athenians named their years after one of the city’s elected leaders – archons – and later made desperate efforts to persuade the Romans that the year had in fact been an anarchia, a year in which no archon was selected.
Athenion rode a wave of popularity to put himself into a position of power. He was a firm democrat, not to say a demagogue, and rapidly alienated the Athenian elite. The claim that Athenion himself was the son of an Egyptian slave dancer is standard political rhetoric of the time, and it cannot be established now whether he was as corrupt and larcenous as the sources claim.6 It is certain that the Athenian upper classes fled to the nearest Roman authorities for support, which made it equally certain that Athenion would swear loyalty to Mithridates.
The days of the Athenian empire were long gone, and the military support of Athens was hardly worth having. But the harbour of Athens, the Piraeus, was perhaps the finest anchorage east of Brundisium. Athens itself served as a gateway to the rest of Greece, both physically and morally, because the endorsement of Mithridates by Athens, the spiritual home of Hellenism, was a propaganda gift beyond price and one that swayed the sentiments of many other Greek cities in Mithridates’ favour. All this the intricacies of Greek politics had handed to Pontus on a plate, without Mithridates having to send a single soldier to win it.
Strategically, Greece presented Mithridates with a dilemma. His original intention had almost certainly been to fight the Romans on the beaches of Asia Minor, assuming the Roman landing force made it past his fleet in the first place. It was to make this task harder that Mithridates had tried to subjugate Rhodes, and why his general Archelaus was currently mopping up the rest of the Cyclades with a large fleet and larger army. Occupying Greece meant tying up these forces and probably more beside, and also taking on the veteran Roman army currently holding down Macedonia as soon as that army had disentangled itself from the Thracians.
On the other hand, how could the self-proclaimed leader of Hellenism shy away from the task of liberating the motherland? More cynically, since it was necessary to fight the Romans somewhere, why not in Greece? A hard-fought war in antiquity was devastating to the local countryside (southern Italy had still not fully recovered from the war against Hannibal three generations before) and a devastated Greece was far preferable to a devastated Asia Minor; even if Pontus was pushed out of Greece, Rome would have still lost a productive province. Also there was the question of momentum. Rome had been hard hit by the Italian rebellion and the loss of its lands and influence in Asia Minor had followed. Now the Greek isles were falling like dominoes. If Greece went too, who knows what might be next? Rome’s power seemed to be unravelling. Sulla’s coup had already delayed the expected Roman army of reconquest by a year. The pressure had to be kept up; it would surely be foolish to give Rome space to pull itself back together.
Athens launched an enterprising assault on Delos (another major naval trading centre), but was given a bloody nose by the island’s Roman defenders. This hardly mattered in one way, because Archelaus took the place soon afterwards in any case, but it is possible that the defeat caused Athenion to be replaced in Athens. Hereafter, Athens was led by one Ariston - another allegedly low-born philosopher, who may, however, simply be Athenion under a different spelling (by now most upper class Athenians - the only people who wrote local history - had either abandoned the city or been killed, and internal events in Athens are very unclear).
Boeotia, the state next to Attica, collapsed quickly, with only the little city state of Thespis holding out. Pontic troops poured into Athens, and easily took Euboea. When Sparta fell into Pontic hands, it seemed as though the tide that had swept across Asia Minor and the Aegean was about to claim all of Greece as well.
The Greek campaign of 88-87 BC
The Roman governor of Macedonia, Caius Sentius Saturninus, already had a lot on his plate, but he could hardly allow Greece to fall to Mithridates by default. Fortunately for Rome, the very competent Q[uintus] Bruttius Sera was on Sentius’ staff, and this man was sent south with whatever troops could be spared. Bruttius’ brief was almost certainly to remind the locals that there was a Roman military presence in Greece and to make as much of a nuisance of himself as he could.
He started well, with a brisk naval engagement which pitted his tiny flotilla against an equally-small arm of the Pontic fleet. Bruttius used his temporary victory at sea to seize the island of Sciathos, which the Pontics were using as a storehouse for their booty from Euboea. Those escaped slaves whom Bruttius caught on the island were crucified as a reminder to slaves elsewhere in Greece that freedom under Pontus was not a risk-free option. Free men had their hands cut off. This action showed how Rome intended to counter Mithridates’ propaganda measure of allowing those Greeks who opposed him to go home unpunished. If opposing Rome involved severe penalties, and opposing Mithridates did not, then all other things being equal, choosing a side became easier for the undecided.
Now reinforced by a further 1,000 horse and foot from Macedonia, Bruttius pushed into Boeotia, perhaps hoping to take the pressure off Thespis, which Mithridates’ general Archelaus was besieging. Ariston and Archelaus took the bait and a military action followed which lasted for the next three days. Bruttius took care not to become fully committed and to keep his lines of retreat open. When, as expected, the Greek cities committed to the Pontic cause were coerced into adding their weight to the forces opposing him, he pulled back.7
Bruttius had done his job, which was to keep Pontic forces busy and out of northern Greece. It must have been with immense relief that he received messengers from Sulla’s subordinate, Lucullus, who announced that the Roman advance guard had arrived and that Sulla himself was following with five full legions. Bruttius was thanked for his efforts and ordered to take his small army post-haste back to Macedonia, where Sentius needed every man available to prepare for a second Pontic army which was reported to be closing in on Macedonia via the north shore of the Black Sea.
Sulla’s five Roman legions represented a massive reality check for those heady dreams of Greek freedom. With eighty thousand dead Romans and Italians and a brutal war in Italy still smouldering, no-one expected Sulla to try diplomacy or clemency to bring the Greek cities to his side. Sulla was currently levying auxiliaries and cavalry from the cities of northern Greece which Bruttius had saved for him. As soon as he had adequate numbers, especially of cavalry, he would head south, and Mithridates’ new allies would have to decide whether they were prepared to sacrifice themselves for his cause. Thebes was among the first cities to surrender the moment it was given the option, and soon little Thespis found that its pro-Roman stance suddenly reflected the new majority opinion in Greece.
Until now, Rome had fought its war through allied proxies. The encounter with Bruttius had been enough to show Archelaus that fighting actual Romans was a different game altogether. Furthermore, Sulla had battle-hardened veterans of the Italian war among his legionaries, making his army one of the most frightening propositions in the known world. It appears that, after a single bruising encounter (if even that – only one source, Pausanius, reports this clash), Archelaus decided to fall back on Athens, and let Sulla’s army beat itself to death against that city’s walls.
Certainly, Roman legions in the field changed the odds for the worse, but the Pontic situation was far from desperate. The Pontic army was large, well-commanded, experienced and loyal. Greece had shown itself a weathercock, ready to side with whoever could muster the greatest force at a given moment, and would therefore drop back into Pontic hands once Sulla had been dealt with.
Athens was strong defensively and Pontic naval supremacy meant that it, or at least its port of Piraeus, could be supplied from the sea. Sulla’s own supply lines were far from secure and his political situation in Rome could hardly have been worse; as soon as he had left Italy, Sulla’s enemies in Rome had assumed power and declared Sulla an outlaw and leader of a renegade army. Sulla could be certain that neither money nor reinforcements were on the way from Rome, whilst Mithridates was busily raising large amounts of both in Asia Minor. For the moment Pontus was checked, but no-one yet knew whether Sulla’s arrival represented a temporary setback or the turn of the tide.
* The device got its name from a contemporary musical instrument, but the design of the instrument is also uncertain.