Chapter 7
The post-war settlement
The peace of Dardanus was realpolitik at its most brutal, a peace made by two ruthless politicians because it was in their mutual interest that the killing should, temporarily, stop. In so far as both Sulla and Mithridates identified themselves with their respective countries, the settlement was good for Pontus and Rome. It certainly was not good for the cities of Asia and it was a disaster for Fimbria, though few shed tears for Fimbria’s predicament. If Mithridates’ misgovernment of the past year had caused many of the cities of Asia Minor to regret rebelling from Rome, the violence, savagery and greed of Fimbria’s army served as a reminder of why they had rebelled in the first place.
To this the people of Ilium could give eloquent testimony. The city felt it deserved a special place in Roman hearts; better known as Troy, it was the birthplace of Aeneas, founder of the Roman race. When Fimbria besieged the city, ambassadors came to inform him that Ilium had entrusted itself to Sulla. Fimbria responded that since Ilium’s citizens were already friends of the Romans, there was no reason why he should not be permitted to enter the city. Once allowed within the walls, Fimbria proved an even greater disaster to the city than Odysseus’ wooden horse had been a millennium before. The Roman allowed his army to indiscriminately rape, pillage and slaughter the inhabitants, and to burn what was not worth stealing. Those who had been in communication with Sulla were reserved for special torture, whilst those who took shelter in the temples were burned with the temples themselves. ‘Not a house, not a temple, not a statue was left standing’, reports a later Greek writer.
Now Nemesis, the goddess of divine justice, had taken up residence outside the Fimbrian camp, her vengeance taking the shape of Sulla’s army. As Sulla’s circumvallation closed about him, Fimbria tried with ever-increasing desperation to stem the steady flow of deserters openly leaving to join Sulla, fraternizing with the enemy and even pitching in to help with the construction of the earthworks surrounding their camp. Fimbria was unable to persuade even his closest aides to swear an oath of loyalty to him. Weeping, he threw himself at the feet of his men, begging them not to abandon him; and when that failed, he tried bribing a slave to assassinate Sulla. This effort also failed as the slave confessed his mission to Sulla. Thereafter, predictably enough, Sulla was not disposed to meet Fimbria face-to-face when he requested a meeting. Instead, he passed the message that he would not bother killing Fimbria if the latter sailed back to Rome immediately and alone. Fimbria’s pride reasserted itself. Informing Sulla that he knew of a quicker way home, he went to a nearby temple and stabbed himself, though it required one of his slaves to finish the job.
Fimbria’s death and the surrender of his army removed one affliction from Asia Minor, but the region’s troubles were far from over. As well as declaring that Rome was owed the stupendous sum of 20,000 talents in reparations and back taxes, Sulla ordered his soldiers to be quartered with individual families in the various cities.1 Each family had to provide meals, an allowance and clothing to the soldiers whom they unwillingly hosted, as well as having to put up with the conduct of ‘guests’ who were less than sympathetic to the people who had killed 80,000 of their countrymen. On the other hand, those cities, such as Rhodes, which had stood by Rome were richly rewarded, partly because Sulla believed in standing by his friends, and partly to encourage resistance to any future invaders of the region.
Sulla then formally reported his settlement of the war to the senate, blithely ignoring the fact that this same senate considered him a public enemy under sentence of death. He then set off for Rome himself, leaving the administration of his settlement to Lucullus, who could at least be relied on to spread the misery equally and impartially. The Fimbrians, organized into two legions, were placed under the command of Murena, the commander who had distinguished himself at Chaeronea.2
Whilst the Romans were tidying their dominions, Mithridates too had sorting out to do at home. However much he tried to pass off the result of the war as a draw which left Pontus pretty much as it had been in 88 BC, the fact was that the king had been forced to terms by the loss of two major battles and 160,000 lives. This made Mithridates vulnerable to dissent, and this was being expressed in Colchis and the Bosporus vigorously enough to almost count as a rebellion. In part, this was probably due to poor administration as Mithridates had understandably been distracted elsewhere. To prevent this happening again, the Bosporans asked that they be given the king’s son (another Mithridates) to rule over them. This son had acquitted himself reasonably well in the fighting against Fimbria, and should therefore have had his father’s affection and attention.
However, the promptness with which the area returned to its allegiance once they had their requested ruler aroused Mithridates’ suspicions. He suspected that much of the unrest had been deliberately engineered so that his son could get himself put in charge. Consequently, the governorship of young Mithridates was revoked; he was brought back to Pontus in chains (albeit chains of gold, since he was after all, the king’s son) and executed on his arrival.
The execution of their chosen ruler aroused some dismay and anger among the Bosporans, as the wily Mithridates had foreseen and positively welcomed. To ‘suppress unrest’ on the northern shores of the Black Sea, he began assembling an army and fleet out of all proportion to the forces required to resolve the problem. That he did so not only indicates that he did not trust the Romans to stick to their peace agreement, but that he himself intended to test its limits as soon as he was able.
As part of the peace of Dardanus, Sulla had recognized Mithridates as rex socius et amicus: an allied and friendly king.3 Though this was regarded in Rome and by many later historians as mutual acknowledgement of the king’s client status, the title was a prized appellation among the kings themselves, as it obliged Rome to come to their aid if they were attacked. In theory, Mithridates could call for help to Murena and his legions of Fimbrians. In practice, Mithridates needed to become strong quickly enough to withstand the predatory interest of his so-called protectors. Sulla had a civil war to fight in Italy. This meant that Rome would be distracted by internal conflict exactly as had occurred in 90 BC, with the dangers and opportunities which this presented. And of course, if Sulla lost, then his settlement was null and void, and the war would be back on again.
The fact that he was able to kit out an army so quickly is further proof that Mithridates, foreseeing the probable outcome of the peace negotiations, had used the period before Dardanus to comprehensively loot the rest of Asia Minor before the Romans did the same with his leftovers. Add the fact that trade had been at a standstill and the cities disrupted by successive changes of power, dispossessions and repossessions, and it becomes clear why it took almost a century to make good the economic devastation thus caused.
Unlike the other leaders in Asia Minor, Mithridates was neither cowed nor submissive. Even as he ordered his troops to cease operations against Sulla, he was diverting funds and resources to the Cilician pirates. These, already a plague on the coast of Anatolia, expanded their operations accordingly. Whilst Sulla was at Samothrace on his way back to Italy, the pirates gave him a sendoff by devastating the lands around him. Sulla had no choice but to endure this, as the heavy fighting ships handed over by Mithridates were practically useless against their swarms of small fast boats.
Pirate operations extended across almost the whole the Mediterranean -the pirates who assisted Sertorius, the anti-Sullan rebel in Spain, were probably Cilicians. Inland, the unholy alliance of Mithridates and the pirates combined to make the states east of the Meander river almost ungovernable. Isauria and Pisidia openly sided with Mithridates, and in Lycia a robber baron allied with the pirates wielded greater power than the Roman-sponsored authorities. Mytilene on Lesbos more or less openly repudiated Sulla’s settlement and the Romans found it easier to accept the city’s surly defiance than risk a protracted siege in which supply ships would require close escort through pirate-infested waters.
Another sign that Mithridates intended business as usual was that he was back to his normal tricks in Cappadocia, where Ariobarzanes was having a hard time getting comfortable on his throne. Mithridates occupied large chunks of the country, whilst blandly denying that he was doing anything of the sort. He had also suborned many of the most powerful and influential aristocrats during his earlier occupation of the country. Many of these, looking askance at the Roman treatment of the lands to their west, openly preferred that the rule of Mithridates should continue.
It is probably at this point that Mithridates gave some thought to the reorganization of his army. The comprehensive defeat at Chaeronea had followed similar victories of legion over phalanx in the Macedonian and Syrian wars, and Mithridates seems to have come to the conclusion that this formation was fatally flawed, at least as far as fighting Romans was concerned. He now concentrated on building up his forces in the areas where the Romans were weakest: missile troops and cavalry. Militarily, this combination could work, as the Parthians were to prove by conclusively defeating the Romans at Carrhae in 53 BC, but it required lots of flat open terrain which was easier to find in Syria than Pontus. Plutarch reports on the reforms:
Instead of an inefficient army which made a good show but was less than useful...he knocked his forces into a leaner, more serviceable shape...gone were the mixed multitudes and howling threats of barbarian tribes with their jewelled ornaments of gold which the enemy found more tempting than threatening. Now the men were armed and formed up in Roman style, with horses better suited for service than show.4
This army was taken to the Bosporus and practiced its skills on the native tribes of the interior, who had been exploiting the confusion to launch pillaging raids. Since the Bosporans seemed happiest when ruled directly by the Mithridatids, another of the king’s sons, Menchares, was made governor. Archelaus was pointedly left out of these arrangements. The general’s closeness to Sulla had been noted, as had been the Roman offer to make him Archelaus I of Pontus. And whatever his loyalty, Mithridates may have felt that there was no reason to give Archelaus, who had lost him two armies, the chance to lose a third.
Archelaus evidently felt that loss of influence was the precursor to loss of life, and he pre-empted matters by defecting to Murena. Possibly he may have considered whether the offer of kingship was still open, for he immediately attempted to move Murena in the direction of war. He claimed that Mithridates was developing his army for use against the Romans, which he certainly was, and that he intended to deploy it at any moment, which Mithridates almost certainly was not.
Hostilities resume
Murena did not need convincing to go to war so much as an excuse to do so. He had gained his present command through extraordinary circumstances and it would be years before such an opportunity came again. Pontus, just over the River Halys, was stuffed with the booty of Asia Minor and Murena was itching to get his hands on some of it. The restive Fimbrians were easier to manage in war than in peacetime, and had already proved that they could handle the Pontic army. And of course, not only riches but political kudos would go to the man who finished Sulla’s war and avenge the Roman and Italian victims of the Asian Vespers.
Murena had already moved against the pirates, and annexed the city of Cybria. It might be at this time that he founded, as a deliberate provocation, a settlement right against the Pontic border which he gave his family name of Licinia. Therefore Archelaus’ arrival in his camp provided the match to a fire already set. There was no point in waiting for authorization from Rome, as Sulla was currently campaigning in Italy with the object of conquering the place, so in the late summer of 83 BC Murena and his army crossed into Pontus. This was less an attempt at conquest than a massive plundering raid on the temple complex of Ma at Comana, the booty from which would have gone some way to fulfilling Murena’s ambition of becoming very rich.
Mithridates sent a detachment of cavalry to find out what was going on and discovered that the Romans were hostile when he lost a large proportion of that force. He indignantly sent ambassadors to Murena, pointing out that his conduct was directly contrary to the agreement at Dardanus. Murena was unimpressed, possibly because Mithridates, in haste, had chosen Greek ambassadors who spent as much time denigrating the king as they did putting forward his views. Murena mockingly sent back to Mithridates asking him to show the provisions of the treaty in question, knowing full well that the agreement with Sulla had never been committed to writing.
All that could be said for the diplomatic interlude was that it lasted until the end of the campaigning season and allowed Mithridates to gather his forces and send vehement representations to Sulla, as well as a stern warning to the independent city of Heraclea to stay out of the brewing confrontation.
Perhaps word that an ambassador had come from Rome caused Murena to kick off the next campaigning season early. He had to cross the flood-swollen waters of the River Halys before he could start a massive plundering raid which swept through an alleged 400 villages. Mithridates did nothing but noisily protest about the injustice done to him, not least as Murena’s repeated harassment allowed him to reinforce his claim that he was the victim of Roman aggression. It is quite probable that Mithridates still retained control of part of Cappadocia and that Murena was combining personal enrichment with politics, using the raids on Pontic territory to loosen Mithridates’ bulldog grip on lands he should have given up immediately after Dardanus.
Back in Phrygia, and considerably richer, Murena was met by the expected ambassador. This was Calidius, a member of Sulla’s entourage. Mithridates’ old foe was now dictator at Rome and the (violently pruned) senate was only too happy to convert Sulla’s orders into senatorial decrees. It was odd, therefore, that their message to Murena to leave Mithridates alone was not, in fact, couched as an official decree. Contemporary conspiracy theorists -Mithridates foremost amongst them - made much of the fact that Calidius spent far longer cloistered with Murena in a private conference than he did at the official meeting. The upshot of the intervention from Rome was that Murena invaded Pontus again.
This time Mithridates was compelled to act. Firstly, he had established his victim status beyond all doubt and further failure to react to the repeated Roman incursions would erode the bedrock of support in his native land. Secondly, the government in Rome had finally intervened and its intervention was apparently worse than useless. Thirdly, and most importantly, Murena seems to have moved from mere punitive raids to an attempt at conquest. His troops were driving north, almost certainly up the valley of the River Halys, with the apparent intention of capturing Sinope; in short, as Mithridates explicitly said, the Romans had now started an out-and-out war.5
Murena may have believed that he was following in the footsteps of Sulla, but in taking on Mithridates with an army composed mainly of Bithynian, Galatian and Cappadocian levies he was closer to the unfortunate Manius Aquillius. Murena in his turn was to discover how dangerous the Pontic army was when campaigning on home ground. His army was shadowed from across the river by Mithridates’ general Gordius, and it soon became apparent that Gordius was keeping in touch with the Romans until Mithridates could arrive with the main Pontic army. When Mithridates did arrive, his men promptly crossed the river and soundly thrashed the Roman force. A startled Murena retreated to a strong position on a nearby hill, but before he could dig in the Pontic army swept over this too. There was nothing for it but for the remnants of the Roman expeditionary force to fall back through the trackless mountains of Phrygia, harassed all the way by Pontic skirmishers.6
As usual when he fell out with Rome, Mithridates helped himself to Cappadocia, driving out the Roman garrisons there. Then the king celebrated his victory with a massive bonfire to Zeus Stratios. Following the tradition for such bonfires, the king himself helped to carry the firewood. Milk, honey, oil and incense went on the wood as a sumptuous meal for the god, whilst the king treated his followers - their numbers considerably augmented by his victory –to a substantial banquet of their own. When the fire was lighted, Appian claims that the flames were visible over 100 miles away.7 In part, this celebratory ritual was significant because with this fire on a mountaintop Mithridates followed the Persian tradition, in marked contrast to the Hellenistic image he had heretofore cultivated. This was a sign that he now intended to base his support more on his own people, and less on the fickle Greek cities. Another remarkable change of policy was that Mithridates, for only the second time in his three decades as monarch of Pontus, hadcommanded the Pontic army in person. At the age of fifty, the king seems to have decided that the general on whom he could best rely was himself.
Further opportunities for Mithridates to practice his new profession were prevented by the arrival of Gabinius, a much more senior representative of Sulla, who wanted to make it unambiguously clear that Sulla genuinely wanted the fighting to stop – or else. Given the speed with which this second ambassador arrived, it is probable that Gabinius was dispatched as soon as word arrived that Murena was attacking Pontus again, rather than as a response to the Roman defeat. Murena knew his master well enough to stop fighting as soon as he got the message, and whilst Mithridates truculently kept the extra slice of Cappadocia he had occupied so far, his experience of Sulla was enough to prevent him trying to do more.
Murena was put on the next boat home. Possibly Sulla felt his lieutenant had done enough damage to the Roman cause in Asia Minor, or perhaps Murena had simply completed his allotted time of duty. Or both, as the two reasons are not mutually exclusive. Sulla, who was as loyal to his friends as he was merciless to his enemies, allowed the man who had stuck with him through the Greek campaign the privilege of celebrating a totally undeserved triumph.
Gabinius stayed to effect yet another reconciliation between Ariobarzanes and Mithridates. This time Ariobarzanes was welcomed into the Pontic royal family by marrying himself or his son to a young daughter of Mithridates. The so-called Second Mithridatic War thus came to an end in a huge party thrown by the two kings. Significantly, the festivities were again in the Persian, rather than the Greek style, with prizes for eating, drinking, singing and telling jokes. Gabinius did not join in the jollity and Ariobarzanes’ enthusiasm for his in-laws dimmed yet further when he discovered that Mithridates had unilaterally awarded himself a further slice of Cappadocia as a wedding present from his daughter. Nevertheless, after three years of intermittent hostility and a single significant battle, Mithridates was again at peace with Rome. On the whole, Mithridates could claim to have come out best from the war. The Romans were re-established as the prime villains in the region, and militarily, Mithridates had won the fighting on points. His star seemed to be in the ascendant once more.
The Cold war
As before, when blocked from expansion in Anatolia, Mithridates turned his attention to his empire around the Black Sea. His intention was to link Colchis in the east with the lands he held around the Bosporus by conquering the backward and recalcitrant Achaeans. The expedition against them was not a success and two thirds of the army of conquest never returned. They were victims of attrition, hostile conditions and, says Appian, ‘an Achaean stratagem’, though it is nowhere explained what this stratagem was.
Whilst Mithridates was attempting to tidy up the lands around the Black Sea, the Romans were doing the same with their lands in Asia Minor. Mytilene was finally brought to heel by a force which included the young Julius Caesar.8 Antonius, the genial but incompetent father of the triumvir Mark Antony, made a floundering effort to stamp out the pirates, in the course of which he managed to start and lose a war in Crete. Antonius then died whilst the pirates, still flushed with Pontic money, continued to flourish. The Romans had more luck in southern Anatolia, where they went some way to sorting out Isauria, though the pirate heartland of Cilicia remained unaffected.
Meanwhile, the Pontic king had embarked on a series of foreign policy initiatives. He secured the neutrality of the Ptolemies by marrying off Nyssa and Mithridatis (two of the offspring which he produced with startling regularity from a string of concubines) to Ptolemy Auletes and his brother the king of Cyprus. As a further goad to the Romans, Mithridates subsidised the efforts of tribes in the eastern Danube region to harass Roman territories there and in northern Macedonia.
Meanwhile, after numerous plaintive embassies from Ariobarzanes, Sulla finally sent a peremptory message to Mithridates, telling him to give back the parts of Cappadocia he had seized. Mithridates did so, but having been reminded that the Peace of Dardanus had still not been put into writing, he sent ambassadors to Rome. These returned in 77 BC with the disturbing news that Sulla was dead and the senate was ‘too busy’ to see them. No-one, including Mithridates, had dared to go against Sulla even when he had ‘retired’ from the dictatorship and was living as a private citizen. But now that Sulla was dead, it would have occurred to many that the Peace of Dardanus had been made whilst Sulla was an outlaw disowned by Rome and that it had never been formally ratified afterward. Legalistically, it could be argued that Mithridates and Rome were still at war, which made the refusal of the senate to talk to the Pontic ambassadors all the more alarming. It was also a snub, and Mithridates was not the man to take insults meekly.
Urged on by deserters to his cause from the disaffected Fimbrians, he sent ambassadors across the Mediterranean to where the anti-Sullan rebel, Sertorius, was still holding out, and secured from him recognition of Mithridatic suzerainty over Bithynia, Cappadocia and Galatia. Mithridates had wanted the Roman province of Asia as well and had offered forty ships and three thousand talents in exchange, but Sertorius replied bluntly that he was a Roman and was not going to give up Roman territory, in Asia Minor or anywhere else. Nevertheless, Mithridates could feel content that with his Fimbrian deserters and representatives from Sertorius among his entourage, he was slowly driving wedges into the ever-widening gaps in the Roman body politic. By providing support and encouragement to the losers in Rome’s ferocious political battles he could foment and sustain confusion and unrest in the enemy camp.
Mithridates also decided to have a word with his son-in-law. During the years that the fortunes of Mithridates had waxed and waned, Tigranes had prospered.9 He had given strong but indirect support to Mithridates during his war with Rome, but had concentrated his efforts on keeping Parthia out of Armenia, almost as Mithridates was intent on keeping Rome out of Pontus. In a sense the two kings were fighting back-to-back against pressure from east and west, and it is no coincidence that once their power was broken Rome and Parthia came directly into conflict. However, unlike Pontus, Armenia had the failing remnants of the Seleucid empire to batten upon. Tigranes had also made forceful and intelligent use of Parthian weakness after the death of the Parthian king Mithridates II and had advanced his borders well toward Ecbatana, the Parthian capital. By annexing parts of the Seleucid empire, Tigranes had extended his power far into Syria and, in about 83 BC, he took over part of Cilicia as well. As holder of the largest kingdom in the east, Tigranes now called himself by the ancient title of ‘king of kings’ and made a point of never appearing in public with less than four lesser kings in attendance.
This was the instrument with which Mithridates decided to test the Roman senate’s assertion that they were impossibly busy. He invited Tigranes to help himself to Cappadocia. It was a typical Mithridates move, in that no-one would have doubted who was behind the initiative, yet it continued to give lip service to the treaty to which the king had agreed. Tigranes was happy to help because he was in a Hellenistic phase. He had begun to mint his own coinage (a first for an Armenian monarch) and had decided to build for himself a capital city worthy of Armenia’s new power. This new city needed a population and the inhabitants of Cappadocia were elected to supply it. Some 300,000 Cappadocians found themselves rounded up and compelled to start a new urban existence on the border between Armenia and Mesopotamia (probably near present-day Silvan in Turkey).10
In Asia Minor itself, even Mithridates was looking like a benevolent ruler compared to the terrible exactions of the Romans, whom even later Roman historians likened to a flock of ravening harpies. The massive initial indemnity had been paid twice over, yet, thanks to the wonders of compound interest at exorbitant rates, the peoples of the region were even more indebted than before. Municipal properties were mortgaged to the hilt and private citizens first prostituted their offspring and then sold them into slavery in an attempt to pay their debts. It was not uncommon for Roman creditors to torture defaulting debtors to ensure that they had extracted the last of their assets before selling them on as slaves. A series of Roman governors, each more corrupt and venal than the next, paid scant attention to the suffering of the provinces they were maladministering. Some administrators, such as Verres (later prosecuted by Cicero for doing the same in Sicily), added to the woes of the region with flagrant injustice in the courts. Amid the misery moved the agents of Mithridates, whispering that the king had learned his lesson and was preparing to give the cities of Asia their freedom once he had thrown off the Roman yoke for them.
By the winter of 74 BC, Mithridates had an army of 140,000 infantry and 16,000 cavalry, as well as a fleet of 400 ships.11 Mithridates had consulted his Roman advisors and this time his forces were designed less with the aim of overawing the enemy and more toward killing them. Drill and efficient practice became part of the Pontic military experience. This was all paid for because, in contrast to the misery in the west, Pontus had an efficient and well-organized economy. Ironically, this economy prospered all the more because the wealth flowing to Rome from Asia had stimulated the market for luxury goods from the east and the trade routes for this passed through the eastern ports of Mithridates’ kingdom.
Mithridates was probably rather startled that the Romans had reacted tamely to Tigranes occupation of Cappadocia. The Romans were preoccupied with Sertorius and had been deeply embroiled in a succession question in Cyrene in Lybia, which finally ended up with them annexing the place, so their excuse that they were very busy had some validity. Furthermore, after virtually emptying Cappadocia of its population, Tigranes had withdrawn again, so the senatorial nominee, Ariobarzanes, was once more ostensibly in charge.Mithridates also knew that the Romans were desperately attempting to shore up their weakened presence in Anatolia as far as their stretched resources would permit, and they would never be so vulnerable as they now were. In short, Mithridates was ready to go another round with Rome. The time was right and he needed only a pretext. Then, at the end of the year, Nicomedes IV of Bithynia died. Claiming that he had left it to them in his will, the Romans annexed his kingdom.