Chapter 5
Greece was something of an impromptu venue for the clash between Rome and Pontus, a theatre of war which both sides entered before they were fully prepared to do so. Certainly, if Archelaus had arrived in Greece with anything resembling the strength which he later had at his disposal, then Sura would have been brushed aside, and Sulla would have found the Pontic army challenging him as soon as he landed in Illyria.
As is clear from later developments, Mithridates intended his main blow to be a right hook over the top of the Black Sea to Macedonia, whilst Archelaus’ descent on Athens and Boeotia was more of an ad hoc response to an irresistible opportunity. Therefore, even as Sulla mustered his strength in Thessaly, Archelaus was doing the same further south. However, as a cautious and competent general, Archelaus was not prepared to keep all his eggs in the basket of Athens. Instead, he made his main supply base on Euboea, the long island which runs parallel to Attica to the east. This hardly affected the Pontic supply chain, for only a short strait separates Euboea from Marathon, which is itself, as any long-distance runner knows, about 25 miles from Athens. But for the Romans, who were totally outmatched at sea, that strait might as well have been the Atlantic Ocean.
Even in Attica, Archelaus was reluctant to lose contact with the sea. He made his main base at the harbour of Athens, Piraeus, rather than in the city itself. With his supply lines secure, the walls strengthened, and reinforcements on the way, Archelaus hunkered down to weather the Roman storm.
This left Sulla with something of a quandary. He was master of most of Greece, but in order to remain master, he had to stay on the premises. He could not fight the Pontics, because there were none to fight. One lot were dug in behind the walls of the Piraeus, and the second army was currently somewhere in western Thrace, preparing to meet the two legions which the Roman governor of Macedonia was nervously bracing for the defence of his province.
Yet time was not on Sulla’s side. His army was at its best and eager for action but it expected to be paid regularly, even when it was simply sitting around. With the purse-strings in Rome firmly in the grip of Sulla’s enemies, pay had to come from booty, and booty had to come from enemies, who were currently in short supply. Furthermore, Sulla’s imperium, his official period of command, was only for a year. This might be extended unilaterally into a second year as a proconsular command, but after that it was going to dawn on even the most loyal of Sulla’s followers that their general had no actual legal basis for commanding his army. And questions about exactly what gave Sulla the right to lead an army of Rome would become more pointed more quickly if Sulla could not notch up some solid achievements whilst he was (at least in the eyes of his army, if not of the government in Rome) officially consul.
Therefore, Sulla decided to spend the autumn of 87 BC conquering Athens. Militarily, this was not strictly essential. Certainly Sulla would not want a hostile base behind him when he moved north, but his main motivation was political. He wanted to be seen as the man who had driven Mithridates out of Greece, and whilst Athens was fallen from its former glory, it still had enough lootable wealth to sustain his army until the main Pontic force arrived. Both Sulla and his men would have been encouraged by a report which reached them at about this time.
Mithridates, a connoisseur of both theatre and music, was in Pergamum at a performance in the theatre. The city fathers had staged an event where Mithridates was to stand on the stage and receive a crown from Nike, the goddess of victory. The goddess was literally a dea ex machina, a goddess from the machine - a statue which, crown in hand, was winched down from the overhead awnings. Just as the goddess was about to place the crown on Mithridates’ head, she broke apart. The crown dropped from her hand, hit the ground and shattered.x1 The symbolism did not need an expert in omens to translate, especially as Sulla was embarking for Greece at about the same time.
Athens and the Piraeus
The siege of Athens later that year was a premier league affair. The Pontic army had known nothing but victory, and was both tough and well generalled. It had strong walls and high morale to sustain it. The Romans had Sulla, now on his fourth campaign, and, like their commander, were themselves veterans of the war of 90 BC, which, having been fought between equals of the highest military ability, had brought the Roman army to a pitch of excellence not seen since the Hannibalic war of a century before.
Sulla’s first move was to rip through the lines of communication between Athens and Piraeus. The ‘long walls’ which Pericles had built half a millennium before to connect Athens to its harbour were no longer up to the job, and consequently, though Archelaus in Piraeus could still count on being supplied from the sea, the Athenians under Ariston could not. This did not stop Ariston himself from mounting the walls and mocking Sulla to the full extent of his Greek eloquence. The Athenians took to referring to Sulla’s complexion as ‘oatmeal sprinkled with mulberries’, and any Roman soldier who looked at his commanding officer could confirm for himself that the blonde Sulla had not exactly bronzed under the Greek sun.2
Athens could be left to starve, but the Piraeus needed to be stormed. Without hesitation the Romans set about doing just that. If the Pontics were surprised by the promptness and ferocity of the assault, the Romans were equally startled by the bravery and vehemence of the defence. There were substantial casualties on both sides, but in the end, the deciding factor was the walls of Piraeus. These were made of massive stone blocks and were up to fifty feet high in places. Baffled, the Romans fell back to Megara to lick their wounds, and came to the conclusion that more than mere siege ladders were going to be required to surmount this particular obstacle.
Now aware of the extent of the problem, Sulla set about preparing Plan B with skill, determination and the ruthless lack of scruples which was his trademark when crossed. This was not his first siege operation. During the Social War he had captured Praenestae by decorating his siege engines with the heads of slain enemy captains mounted on spears, so in this case he hardly hesitated before hacking down the legendary groves of Academe in the suburbs of Athens. The trees which had once shaded philosophers such as Plato and Parmenides were converted to siege engines so numerous that Plutarch says 10,000 yoke of mules were needed to haul them into position.
Thebes was pressed into service as a factory, churning out and repairing catapults and their ammunition. At the same time, the soldiers were turned into navvies and given the task of building a siege mound to nullify the advantage the Pontics gained from the height of the walls. Sulla had a secondary motive for this. According to Frontinus, a later writer, Sulla’s men had been deeply discouraged by their first attempt and had decided that Piraeus was unassailable. Their general’s response was to give them so many tedious tasks that, by the time he was ready for the next assault, not only was everything ready to the last detail but the men were positively clamouring for the attack to begin.
Sulla believed that the gods would provide funding for this massive, and correspondingly expensive, operation. Not that Sulla was particularly devout - quite the contrary. He sent messengers to the great sanctuaries of Greece, blandly informing them that in these troubled times it was not safe for so much treasure to be left about lightly guarded, and that the treasure should be handed over to him forthwith for safe keeping. Amongst the booty from Delphi, Sulla found a small statuette of a goddess that took his particular fancy and it became his habit before battle to pray publicly to the statuette for victory.
Within Piraeus Sulla found unexpected allies. Two slaves decided that their fortunes might be better served by taking the Roman side. Consequently they mounted the ramparts and enthusiastically hurled lead slingshots at the Romans. The legionaries only discovered the friendly intent behind this when they found the messages engraved on the missiles. One such message read: ‘Tomorrow expect a sally against your siege works whilst the cavalry hit your army on both flanks’. So matters did indeed come to pass and Sulla, always happy to exploit betrayal among his enemies, made sure that things went badly for both sets of attackers.
This sally was one of many mounted by the spirited Pontic defence. Archelaus had no intention of sitting passively behind his walls. Mithridates was sending him a steady trickle of reinforcements and Archelaus’ confidence grew with their numbers. The siege mound received particular attention, but, after the success of the first strikes, Archelaus observed that the mound was extremely well-guarded and any damage he inflicted was speedily repaired. He therefore took the (literally) more constructive approach of building a tower of his own opposite the mound, and as Sulla’s earthworks grew, so did the walls it was meant to surmount.
Finally, following the arrival of a particularly large contingent which Mithridates had dispatched under the command of one Dromichaetes, almost an entire army was pent up behind the walls of Piraeus. This led Archelaus to test the Roman strength. He waited until Sulla had found fault with a particular legion and sent it off on wood-gathering duties, then led his army out of the gates. He did not go too far, having reinforcements positioned at sally ports within the walls and ensuring that his entire force benefited from covering fire from the archers and slingers on the ramparts. Archelaus himself led the sally and, by force of personality, pulled his troops together when they started to buckle. A ferocious fight ensued with the advantage going first to one side and then the other, with Sulla’s lieutenant, Murena, forced at one point to plunge into the fray to steady a legion as it began to break.
Finally the wood-cutting detail returned and, perceiving the situation, exchanged firewood for swords to make a concerted charge. By now the Pontics were tiring and the arrival of fresh enemies forced them back within the walls, having suffered some 2,000 casualties. Archelaus himself stood his ground for so long that the gates had to be closed in his face to stop the Romans following him into the fort, and the furious general had to be hauled over the ramparts on a rope.
Winter set in but there was no slackening the pace of the siege. As fast as the Romans constructed entrenchments and earthworks, Pontic sallies knocked them down and filled them in. Winter storms came laced with additional showers of arrows, javelins and lead shot, ferried in by regular supply convoys from Euboea. Unfortunately for the Athenians, the plenty in Piraeus was mirrored by desperate want in Athens. Cut off by Sulla’s armies, the Athenians were starting to boil leather boots and belts, and to gather edible weeds from about the temples. Negotiators sent to Sulla got a few paragraphs into their prepared speeches when the Roman general curtly informed them that he was there to teach the rebels obedience, not to learn rhetoric from them.
The contrast between the situation in Athens and Piraeus finally convinced Sulla, who was, like many Romans, a landlubber to the core, of the importance of sea power. He sent to Rhodes, Rome’s traditional naval ally, demanding ships with which to choke off the Pontic naval supply line. The Rhodians replied that they had too few ships to break the Mithridatic blockade on their island, let alone give Sulla naval superiority in Athens. Unstated but implicit in this reply was the observation that the Romans might like to think a little more deeply next time before they decided their allies were too unreliable to be trusted with a navy.*
It was a sign of the importance that he now attributed to sea-power that Sulla chose his second-in-command, Lucullus, for a mission to gather ships. Basically, Lucullus’ task was to assemble a scratch navy from whatever he could find floating in the eastern Mediterranean, and to extort, bribe or demand ships from allied and neutral states, starting with Egypt. Sulla hoped that the Ptolemies were suitably nettled by the loss of their treasure to Mithridates at Cos, and were in any case sufficiently worried about the extent of Mithridates’ new empire and further ambitions to help the Romans. Accordingly, Lucullus was ordered to make for Alexandria, notwithstanding that the sea between him and his destination was swarming with pro-Pontic pirates and Mithridates’ own ships.
There was no slackening of the pace of the siege. Both sides showed considerable energy and initiative, as was shown by the incident in which a Roman patrol observed that the guards on a particular section of wall had dozed off. They promptly alerted the rest of their cohort, who furtively returned with siege ladders. The sleep of the sentries was converted to a more permanent repose, but, before the promising opportunity could be exploited, the Romans were spotted and thrown off the walls in a fierce and chaotic fight. Some of the Pontics, observing that the Romans were distracted, charged out and took the opportunity to ignite a few siege engines. With honours even after this spirited exchange, everyone settled down for the rest of the night.
Soon afterwards came the long-awaited battle of the two towers, as Sulla moved his machine to take on the Pontic tower within the Piraeus fortifications. An epic battle of men and siege engines followed, which was eventually won by the Romans, who used a sort of spring-powered blunderbuss to fire huge lead balls at the enemy in volleys of twenty at a time. With the Pontic tower becoming distinctly wobbly, Archelaus was forced to pull it out of the fight.
Then it was the turn of the siege mound. This had been going up faster than the wall opposite, and now had reached the point where Sulla could mount a formidable array of catapults on his new firing point. Infuriatingly, just as all was ready, the mound subsided into the earth. The Pontics had been digging under the mound as fast as the Romans had been piling the earth on top, so it all had to be done again. First, however, there came the grim business of counter-mining, in which groups of soldiers fought vicious battles underground, swapping shovels for swords as they dug into the enemy’s tunnels. Finally, when the mounds were able to support battering rams securely, the Romans launched another major assault and managed to break part of the wall and set a tower on fire. Another hellish fight followed for possession of the building whilst it was still ablaze.
Meanwhile, Sulla had been doing some undermining of his own. A number of tunnels had reached the foundations of Piraeus’ walls, and these walls were now supported by solid Roman props of timber. The props were soaked in oil and ignited at random intervals, so that the defenders could never be sure whether the section of wall they were fighting on might not suddenly cave in and take them down in the collapse. Archelaus rallied his men magnificently, even as Sulla threw wave after wave of attackers at the breaches. Between the irresistible Roman army and the immovable Pontic defence, something had to give. In the end it was the exhausted Romans who called it a day.
As soon as the Romans pulled back, Pontic stone workers swarmed over the breaches, knowing that the Romans would be back to try again before the damp masonry could properly set. Sure enough, the next day the Romans threw themselves at the walls once again and smashed their way through the Pontic repairs – just as Archelaus had expected. Behind the breaches were new fortifications, curved like dam walls to hold back the Roman flood. But these curves were concave, so the attacking Romans faced a hail of missiles not only from the front, but from the sides as well. Realizing that these defences (known in the siegemaster’s trade as ‘lunettes’) were literal death traps, Sulla pulled his army back, and turned his malevolent attention on Athens.
The situation in Athens was desperate. Three times Archelaus had tried to get supplies to the city’s starving people, and each time his plans had been betrayed from within. After his second attempt failed, Archelaus suspected what was happening. To confirm his suspicions, he ordered, in the strictest secrecy, an attack on the Roman lines at the same time as a further push was to be made to get supplies to the Athenians. Sure enough, the Romans were away attacking the Pontic supply train when Archelaus’ attack took place. The Romans returned to find that the defenders of the Piraeus had made a bonfire of their siege weapons for them to cook their captured food on.
To make sure the famine within Athens was effective, Sulla had built forts and surrounded the city with a ditch to make sure that no-one got out. Consequently, hunger had weakened the defenders to the point where rumours of cannibalism abounded, and the walls were no longer adequately defended.3 Hearing that there were no longer any guards on a particularly vulnerable section of the walls, Sulla first reconnoitred the spot personally to ensure this was not another diabolical Pontic trap, and then, on 1 March 86 BC, he sent a storming party over the walls. Plutarch describes what followed:
At around midnight, Sulla entered the breach, accompanied by the triumphant howl of an army turned loose to rape and slaughter. They swept through the streets with naked swords ... even without mentioning what happened in the rest of the city, the blood from the Agora spread across the area of the Ceramicus, poured under the Double Gate and ran through the gutters of the suburbs.4
Eventually, the extent of the slaughter turned even Sulla’s stomach and he ordered an end to the killing. In a reference to the city’s glorious past, he magnanimously announced ‘I shall spare the living for the sake of the dead’, though one Greek historian bitterly remarked ‘by then there were few enough living to spare’. Ariston and his cronies took refuge in the Acropolis, the ancient citadel of Athens. The Romans saw no point in losing lives in storming the place, and waited until thirst did their work for them. Ironically, an hour after Ariston surrendered, a squall descended on the hill and deluged it with water whilst the Romans were busily helping themselves to the Athenian gold and silver reserves stored within.
With Roman morale boosted, the attack on the Piraeus resumed with renewed fury. Catapults, siege towers and rams hit the walls in a coordinated wave, while a rain of arrows and javelins sought to clear the walls of defenders. The Romans smashed through the lunette, only to discover that Archelaus had built another lunette behind that, and others in sequence almost the entire way back to the dockyards. There was, however, a maniacal determination behind the Roman attack which forced the slightly-stunned Pontics to give ground despite themselves. Finally, Archelaus pulled back right to the Munychia, the central harbour of Piraeus, which, for the time being, was out of the Romans’ reach.
In fact, by this time Archelaus was only in the Piraeus at all because the Romans were so determined to take casualties by smashing themselves against its walls. The Pontic general was well aware that the entire bloody episode at Athens was something of a diversion from the main contest. Mithridates’ main army had now arrived. Under the command of Arcathias, a son of Mithridates, this huge force (estimated in the Roman sources at 100,000 men, 10,000 horse and 90 scythed chariots) had effortlessly swept the Roman legions of Macedonia aside, conquered the province, and hurried down to Greece. Even given the enthusiasm with which Roman historians over-estimated the size of Asiatic armies, there is no doubt that this was a formidable force. Archelaus had been a distraction to keep the Romans from interfering whilst the army of conquest arrived. Now it was here, Archelaus embarked his troops and sailed to join the main army, probably as he had always intended.
The Roman army took possession of the Piraeus and Sulla, in a fit of evil temper, ordered the burning of the famed Athenian dockyards. Then, like the Pontic army, he abandoned Athens and the Piraeus, and took his men to Boeotia where the decisive battles for Greece would be fought.
There was good reason why Sulla, having fought so hard for possession of Attica, was in a hurry to leave the place. The environs of Athens had been host to a Roman army for the better part of a year, and a Roman army which was not getting supplies from home at that. Consequently almost anything edible that grew or walked had ended up in the bellies of Sulla’s soldiers. Athens was certainly not going to supply any more food, so, unless Lucullus was able to eventually return with sufficient ships to beak the Pontic stranglehold on the sea, Sulla had to move. Boeotia was flatter and much better suited to cavalry in which the Mithridatic army had overwhelming superiority. Even so, facing the enemy there was better than remaining in Attica and waiting for the Pontics to take up a strong position and wait until hunger forced the Romans to attack it. Besides, Sulla had achieved his objective and knocked Athens out of the war – so thoroughly that it would be a generation before the place achieved even a shadow of its former glory.
There was a final reason for moving out, and that was the significant Roman force in Thessaly under the legate Hortensius – quite probably the remnant of the Roman force in Macedonia which had fought its way southward.* Hortensius had some six thousand men under his command and Sulla was desperate enough for the extra manpower to run considerable risks, especially given the other pressing reasons for leaving Athens already mentioned. Hortensius had his own problems, as the Pontic vanguard was pressing him hard. Using native guides, he made his trip laboriously through the mountains, taking care never to cover ground wide or flat enough for the Pontic superiority in numbers to be brought to bear. Fighting by day and retreating by night, the small Roman force eventually joined with Sulla’s on a defensible hill on the Plain of Elatea, near the opening to the Boeotian plain.
Even united, the Roman forces were hardly sufficient to strike terror into Pontic hearts, numbering some 15,000 foot and well under 2,000 cavalry. On the other hand, every one of these men was a hard-bitten veteran, and in ancient warfare quality counted for much more than quantity. It was only possible to bring a certain number of men face-to-face in a battle line and, because the Romans fought more or less shoulder-to-shoulder, it was not uncommon for them to have local superiority over more numerous enemies who fought in more dispersed formations.
Mithridates’ son, Arcathias, had died at some point in the march into Greece, and the army fell under the command of one Taxiles until Archelaus took over once the Pontics joined forces at Thermopylae. Archelaus was unable to bring the Romans to battle. His men, deployed in battle order, almost covered the plain – a splendidly-armoured, multi national force, with the chariots and cavalry dashing about in front of the main army. This so intimidated the Romans that they refused Sulla’s demands that they go out and fight. Sulla responded with his usual tactic of giving the men hard labour that made fighting seem the easier option. While the Romans were making up their minds what to do, Archelaus employed his army in devastating the towns and cities about him. He had no inhibitions about this, as they had changed sides to Rome when Sulla had arrived in the country.
The first sign that the Romans were girding for battle came when Archelaus sent a unit called the Brazen Shields to take a hilltop fortress, and the Romans, urged on by Sulla, managed to beat the Pontic unit to take possession of the position. Thereafter, when the Pontic force descended on Chaeronea, a Roman detachment managed to get in ahead of it and garrison the town against attack.
The move on Chaeronea gave an indication of Archelaus’ thinking. Sulla was secure on his hill and had plenty of fresh water (indeed, one of the tasks he had given his legionaries as a cure for timidity had been to divert a nearby river to a more favourable course). However, 18,000 men and horses needed a lot of feeding but Sulla, without enough cavalry to protect his men, could not let them forage for supplies. The Roman supply lines ran through Chaeronea – block these and the Romans could be starved into battle.
Sulla in his turn was more than ready to transfer operations south to Chaeronea. This fortress town was on a massif, the highest point of which was Mount Thurium. With Mount Hedylium opposite to the north and the river valley of the Cephisus between, Chaeronea controlled access to the northern plain of Boeotia. Because of its strategic position it had seen a major battle once already in its chequered history, in 338 BC when Philip II of Macedon had conquered the Thebans. Its position meant that Chaeronea needed to be defended for its own sake, but, as Sulla’s advance party would have made clear, the rocky plain between the mountains was much less suitable for the manoeuvring of large bodies of men and cavalry – a situation which favoured the Romans.
Nevertheless, having got himself into the northern part of the plain, Archelaus had either to get through the Roman army which now blocked his passage to the south or abandon the current position altogether and make his way into Boeotia by a completely different route, an option which involved a long and tortuous journey. A third alternative was to stay put and await developments. Given that Sulla was a thoroughly proactive commander who had realized that he had his enemy in as advantageous a position as he was likely to get, developments were not long in coming.
The Battle of Chaeronea5
The troops whom Archelaus had sent to seize Chaeronea in the first place had retreated to a fortified position on Mount Thurium, above the town, while the main Pontic army had established itself in a pocket where the River Cephisus bent northward past Mount Hedylium and Mount Acontium blocked the end of the valley. This meant that Archelaus’ forces were in a highly secure position, having Mount Thurium to their right, Acontium behind and the River Cephisus to the left with Hedylium beyond that.6 However, as the modern military maxim explains, ‘make it too hard for them to get in, and you can’t get out’. The only escape for the Pontic forces lay to the left, where the River Cephisus flowed between the mountains. This was certainly too small for a large army to leave in a hurry, but then, given the numbers involved, a Pontic defeat was unthinkable.
Sulla was a general with a lot of practice at thinking the unthinkable, and fighting the cavalry armies of Numidia had given him considerable experience about the options available to an infantry army faced with a mobile enemy. Regarding the Pontic infantry, he, like other contemporary commanders, knew what any traveller on the London Underground can confirm: push a large body of men closely enough together and they cannot even scratch their noses, let alone defend themselves. The Pontic cavalry could be countered given the right terrain (as Archelaus had just done for Sulla) and the large number of enemy infantry could work against itself.
Whilst Sulla was girding himself for battle, Archelaus was not yet certain that Sulla was serious about fighting. The opening engagement of the battle appeared more like the sort of skirmish which had been part of the background noise over the previous fortnight. What Archelaus probably had not yet realized was to be the Second Battle of Chaeronea (Spring, 86 BC), kicked off with fighting around Mount Thurium. A group of native Chaeroneans had approached Sulla, offering to use their local knowledge of the terrain around the mountain to outmanoeuvre the Pontic force ensconced there. The idea was to get above the Pontics and throw and roll rocks down on them until they abandoned their position.
Reconstruction of the opening phase of the Battle of Chaeronea based largely on the description by Plutarch
Sulla agreed to the proposal and drew up his forces for battle in such a way that the Pontics, as they left the mountain, would receive a warm welcome from his lieutenant, Murena, who commanded the Roman left flank on the plain below. Murena had the support of whatever cavalry Sulla could give him, whilst Sulla took the rest to guard the right (river) flank. As the plain sloped slightly downhill towards the main Pontic army, Hortensius and his Macedonian veterans, in reserve to the rear, had a view of where they should prepare to deploy themselves.
The Chaeronean ambush was a disaster for the Pontic troops on the hill. They were driven off in confusion and lost some 3,000 men without striking a blow. Archelaus, hastily drawing up his men to meet the Roman challenge, was in time to see his force from the mountain run into Murena’s welcoming party, and from there break in confusion to run pell-mell for the shelter of their own ranks. This was frustrating because the Pontic scythed chariots were ready to go and the clear field they needed for their run-up was cluttered with fleeing friendlies. To make matters worse, the Romans were following-up fast; by the time Archelaus was able to unleash his chariots they were unable to get up the momentum they needed. When they saw the chariots coming, the well-drilled Romans opened their ranks in the manner their forefathers had once practised with Hannibal’s elephants; rather than creating carnage in the Roman ranks, the chariots rushed madly through the Roman lines without actually hitting anyone. Once through, Mithridates’ men screeched to as much of a halt as the maddened horses could manage and attempted to wheel round and take the Romans in the rear. Sulla, however, had anticipated this and had laid on javelinmen to take down the chariots at their most vulnerable moment. Archelaus saw a bad day getting worse as his vaunted chariots vanished into the Roman ranks, their disappearance followed by howls of derision and the traditional chant of spectators at the Circus Maximus in Rome, demanding that the next set of riders come out to race.
Having hardly paused for the chariots, the Romans came on and launched their trademark shower of pila (heavy javelins) at the Pontic phalanx. Archelaus had put freed slaves in the front line, and these, knowing that victory or crucifixion were the only alternatives, fought like men possessed. Sulla’s men in turn were incensed that they had been matched against slaves, and tried frantically to break through the hedgehog spears of the Pontic phalanx. Meanwhile, the Romans put to use some of the lighter engines left over from the siege of Athens. Making good use of their position on slightly higher ground, they lobbed assorted ordnance, including ‘fiery bolts’, over the heads of their own men into the Pontic phalanx, which, given the confined space at the end of the valley, was necessarily drawn up in depth.7 Whilst making life uncomfortable, the engines were less effective than they might have been because the soldiers in the back ranks left their 16ft spears pointing upward at an angle, creating a sort of wall which deflected arrows and broke the force of heavier objects on their way down.
Despite his early setback, Archelaus had achieved the classic Hellenistic battle plan. His phalanx had pinned the main block of enemy infantry and it was now time for him to sweep, Alexander-like, around the flanks with his superior cavalry, take out the enemy reserves and bring the battle to a climax as his massed cavalry crashed into the backs of the main Roman force and crushed them against the phalanx.
Of course, Sulla had read of Alexander as well, which is why he had made sure his flanks, being the side of a mountain and a river respectively, were not ideal for sweeping around. In any case, a Roman cohort was not a phalanx and on running into mounted opposition its members were able to group into tight hedgehog formations about which cavalry could only swirl ineffectively.
Archelaus’ first target was Murena’s corps, still overstretched and disordered from following up the routed troops from the mountain. Hortensius saw the danger and came rushing down the slope with five cohorts, intending to hit the Pontic horse in the flank. However, he had underestimated the superb control and discipline of the Pontic cavalry, which swerved violently and hit Hortensius men in mid-charge, though not before they could stop and brace for it. This, in turn presented Archelaus’ flank to Murena, but Murena’s men were busy reforming, and once they had done that they had urgent business approaching in the form of Taxiles, who was following up with his Brazen Shields. For the moment, Hortensius was on his own.
Sulla, on the river flank (the Roman right), had not yet engaged. Realizing how desperate things were getting on the left, he pulled what forces he could spare from the battle line and hurried to retrieve the situation. Meanwhile, Hortensius’ infantry formations had evidently kept their shape in the face of Archelaus’ charge and were beginning to contemplate a counterattack. As infantry will generally beat cavalry in a static situation, Archelaus decided to pull back in the face of Sulla’s reinforcement and try his luck on the weakened Roman right wing. There followed a race to the river flank. Sulla ordered Hortensius to join Murena in throwing back the Brazen Shields and took his reserves back across the rear of the main battle line (still fruitlessly trying to get to grips with the Pontic phalanx) to meet Archelaus again on the Roman right. For the first time in the battle, Pontic numbers told against Archelaus. He had to get his cavalry around the mass of his army, reform and hit Sulla’s right wing. Before he could manage it, Sulla’s right wing hit him. Archelaus found himself trying to steady troops reeling from the Roman assault. Despite his efforts, these eventually fell back in disorder toward the gap between the river and Mount Acontium, where Archelaus had fortified his camp in order, as he had expected, to stop the Romans escaping from the valley.
Now under the ramparts of his camp, he ordered his men to stand and fight and it is a tribute to his personality and the discipline of the Pontic forces that they gamely attempted to do so. However, the Romans followed up too fast for the Pontic forces to pull themselves together and the tightly-packed, confused soldiers stood little chance against the wall of Romans hemming them ever closer. Satisfied that the river flank was under control, Sulla made a third commute across the rear of his battle line to see how Murena was getting on. On arrival, the Roman commander was greeted by the gratifying sight of the backs of Taxiles’ Brazen Shields in open rout.
With the left and right flanks gone, the phalanx stood little chance. Whilst its multiple ranks of spears made it almost invincible from the front, the Romans, hardened by years of fighting the similarly-armed Macedonians, had long known that there was nothing that phalangites hated more than hostile troops at the sides and rear. Those same massed ranks of spears made turning sideways to fight extremely difficult, while dropping the spears to achieve this pitted lightly-armed men with tiny shields against well-armed legionaries. The phalanx crumbled into a mass of panicked men scrambling for the safety of the camp; a safety which the guards at the gates were reluctant to give without orders, and Archelaus was still rabidly insisting that his men fight to the last.
When, finally it became apparent, even to Archelaus, that the day was lost, the gates of the camp were opened. But the Pontic commander had left it too late. The Romans burst in on the heels of their fleeing enemies, and once they were in the camp the rout was complete.
The slaughter did not end when the final remnants of the Pontic army managed to squeeze out of the bottleneck at the end of the valley. Though a phalangite who had dropped all the tools of his trade could outrun the most enthusiastic legionary, Sulla’s cavalry had come through the battle intact and made the most of a relatively open plain and a defenceless, fleeing enemy. Safety for the Pontic troops was only found far to the northeast at Chalcis in Euboea, to which point the Pontic navy brought those they were able to evacuate from the Greek mainland, some 10,000 men in all from an army that was originally estimated at 120,000 strong.
Sulla’s estimate that he lost fourteen men in the battle (two of whom were not dead and returned later) sounds wildly optimistic under any circumstances. However, it was a truism in ancient warfare that the serious casualties came when a unit broke. In fact, apart from the serious fighting against the Brazen Shields on the left, much of Sulla’s army had spent the battle being held off by the spears of the phalanx; a process which – if the Romans did not press too hard – would have done little harm to the front ranks of either side. If, as is assumed here, Hortensius’ men did manage to brace for Archelaus’ cavalry charge, then again, casualties would have been minimal, for the cavalry would have been no more able to penetrate the Roman formations than the Romans were able to get through the front of the phalanx. In short, Sulla’s propaganda claim is more plausible than it first seems.
Archelaus had lost a huge number of men and materials to the Romans (Sulla burned what captured supplies he could not make use of), but thanks to the tireless logistic work of Mithridates, plenty more of both were forthcoming. Pontic command of the sea made transporting these from Asia Minor relatively straightforward, whilst lack of sea power meant that the Roman attempt to finish off the remains of Archelaus’ army ended at the mainland shore, despite Chalcis being clearly visible across the strait.* Though defeated, Archelaus could try again. If Sulla was defeated, he was finished. As Archelaus probably reassured his men, one victory would be enough; the Greek campaign was far from over.
* As explained in Chapter 1, the Romans had severely limited the size of the Rhodian fleet after they suspected the city of leaning towards the cause of Philip VI of Macedon.
* Sadly, because none of the characters in whom the ancient sources were interested fought in the Macedonian campaign, the story of Rome’s unsuccessful defence of the province is unknown, especially as the Romans were not particularly keen on discussing their failures.
* It is reached by bridge today.