Mithridates the Great (22 page)

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.
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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, had
commanded 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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.

Chapter 8

Mithridates Attacks

Prelude to war

Bithynia had been a buffer state between Rome and Pontus. Its removal put the two states into jarring collision, and in a way that Mithridates must have considered unfavourable to his interests. He had until now possessed a virtual naval monopoly in the Black Sea and his western flank had been secured against Rome by the mountain ranges which included Paphlagonia and Phrygia. But Roman Bithynia would have ports such as Cyzicus and Lampsacus on the Black Sea. Even assuming that Heraclea was allowed to retain its precarious independence, Roman control of Chalcedon would, at best, block Mithridates fleet from the wider Mediterranean.

Even worse, a future Murena would not have to march up the valley of the River Halys to reach Sinope, as the city was immediately accessible by the coastal plain from Bithynia. This may have mattered less, were it not that Rome fully understood and reciprocated the hostility and warlike intentions of Mithridates. Despite a legal challenge to the will from a putative heir, they accepted the legacy of Bithynia and dispatched both consuls east to perform the act of financial rape that passed for Roman governance in Asia Minor. Aurelius Cotta was to take Bithynia, but, even more alarmingly, Licinius Lucullus, Sulla’s former henchman, had, after desperate intrigue, been given Cilicia as his consular province. According to Lucullus’ biographer, Plutarch, this was explicitly because he wanted to be well situated for the coming war with Pontus and the glory and spoils that a victorious campaign would bring. Few doubted that conflict was inevitable. The instructions which the consuls took with them from the senate amounted, if not to orders to start the war, then at least to mobilize for when Mithridates started it. In short, the dispatch of both consuls to Asia Minor, and the eagerness with which the consuls contrived to get themselves dispatched there, shows that few in Rome expected Mithridates to take the Roman annexation of Bithynia calmly.

Mithridates was now fifty-seven years old. He could, perhaps, by a policy of careful diplomacy and judicious bribes and surrenders have eked out another decade of independence for his kingdom. However, it was only a
matter of time before some Roman demagogue reminded the Roman people of the 80,000 Romans and Italians still unavenged, and of the fact that the treaty of Dardanus remained unratified. Better, then, to take the bull by the horns and challenge Rome now while Pontus was strong, rich and confident and Rome was still weak from its recent wars. Consequently Mithridates went to war. He did it properly, performing another mountaintop fire sacrifice to Zeus and driving a chariot pulled by splendid white horses into the sea as an offering to Poseidon. Then he mustered his army and delivered a speech which the historian Justin has immortalized, though how accurately none can now tell.
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