The Grass Crown (11 page)

“Perhaps,” said the ethnarch, “we have grown too isolated from the world of the Middle Sea. And the taxes Bithynia levies for passage through the Hellespont are very heavy.”

“I think,” said Mithridates to his uncles, “we will have to do what we can to help these excellent people, don’t you?”

An inspection of the fabulously fertile near-island called the Tauric Chersonnese by the Greeks and Cimmeria by the Scythians was all the further proof Mithridates needed; these lands were ripe for conquest, and must belong to Pontus.

However, Mithridates was not a good general, and was wise enough to know it. Soldiering intrigued him for short periods, and he was no coward, far from it; but somehow the knowledge of what to do with many thousands of troops evaded him, and that before ever he tried it in practice. Whereas he found that he enjoyed organizing a campaign, assembling armies. Let others better qualified than he lead them.

Pontus yielded troops, of course, but its King was aware that their quality left much to be desired, for the Greeks who inhabited the coastal cities despised warfare—the native peoples, descendants of the Persic strains who had once lived around the south and west of the Hyrcanian Sea, were so backward they were almost impossible to train. So, like most eastern rulers, Mithridates was forced to rely upon mercenaries. Most of these were Syrians, Cilicians, Cypriots, and the hot-blooded citizens of those quarrelsome Semitic states around the Palus Asphaltites in Palestina. They fought very well and very loyally—provided they were paid. If the pay was one day late, they packed up and started to walk home.

But having seen the Scythians and Sarmatians, the King of Pontus decided that from these peoples he would in future obtain his soldiers; he would train them as infantry and arm them like Romans. And with them he would set out to conquer Anatolia. First, however, he had to subjugate them. And for this task he chose his uncle Diophantus, son of his father’s blood sister and a baron named Asklepiodorus.

His pretext was a complaint the Greeks of Sinde and the Chersonnesus had made about raiding incursions by the sons of King Scilurus, dead now, but the craftsman of a Scythian state of Cimmeria which had not entirely collapsed after he died. Thanks to the efforts of the Greek outpost at Obia to the west, they were farming Scythians, but they were warlike.

“Send to King Mithridates of Pontus for help,” said the false merchant visitor before he left the Tauric Chersonnese. “In fact, I’ll carry a letter on your behalf, if you like.”

A proven general from the time of the fifth King Mithridates, Diophantus espoused his task with enthusiasm, and took a large and well-trained army to the Tauric Chersonnese in the spring following the visit of Mithridates. The result was a triumph for Pontus; the sons of Scilurus crumbled, as did the inland Kingdom of Cimmeria; within the first year Pontus possessed all of the Tauric Chersonnese, huge Roxolani territory to the west, and the Greek city of Olbia, much reduced by constant Sarmatian-Roxolani incursions. In the second year the Scythians fought back, but by its end Diophantus had subjugated the eastern parts of Lake Maeotis, the inland Sindian Maeotians under their king, Saumacus, and had established two strong fortress towns facing each other across the Cimmerian Bosporus.

Home sailed Diophantus, leaving his son Neoptolemus to settle the affairs of Olbia and the west, and his son Archelaus to regulate the new Pontic empire of the northern Euxine. The job had been splendidly done, the spoils considerable, the manpower for Pontic armies bottomless, the trade possibilities most promising. All this did Diophantus report to his young King in tones of pride; whereupon his young King, jealous and afraid, executed Uncle Diophantus.

The shock waves traveled through every level of the Pontic court and eventually reached the northern Euxine, where the sons of Diophantus wept in mingled terror and grief, then bent with redoubled energy to finish what their father had started. Down the eastern seaboard of the Euxine marched and sailed Neoptolemus and Archelaus, and one by one the little kingdoms of the Caucasus yielded to Pontus, including gold-rich Colchis and the lands between the Phasis and Pontic Rhizus.

Lesser Armenia—which the Romans called Armenia Parva—was not actually a part of Armenia proper; it lay to the west and on the Pontic side of the vast mountains between the Araxes and the Euphrates Rivers. To Mithridates it was rightfully his, if for no other reason than that its king regarded the Kings of Pontus as his suzerains rather than the Kings of Armenia. As soon as the eastern and northern Euxine belonged to him in fact as well as in name, Mithridates invaded Lesser Armenia, leading his army in person because he was sure nothing more than his presence would be necessary. He was correct. When he rode into the little town of Zimara, which called itself the capital, he was hailed by the whole populace with open arms; King Antipater of Lesser Armenia advanced toward him in the garb of a suppliant. For once in his life Mithridates felt like a general, so it was not surprising that he became entranced with Lesser Armenia. He eyed its ranks of snow-clad peaks, its boiling spring-fed torrents, its remoteness and inaccessibility, and decided that here he would house the bulk of his rapidly accumulating treasure. The orders went out immediately; fortress repositories would be built on any insurmountable rock, atop the cliffs of some great alpine wall, on the far banks of murderously swift rivers. For one whole summer he amused himself riding about selecting this chasm, that gorge; by the time the project was finished, over seventy strongholds had come into being, and word of his fabulous wealth had traveled as far as Rome.

Thus it was that, not yet thirty years old but already the owner of a far-flung empire, the custodian of staggering riches, the commander-in-chief of a dozen armies now made up of Scythians, Sarmatians, Celts and Maeotians, and the father of a large brood of sons, the sixth King Mithridates of Pontus sent an embassage to Rome to ask that he be awarded the title of Friend and Ally of the Roman People. It was the year that Gaius Marius and Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar beat the last division of the Germans at Vercellae, so Marius himself had only heard of events secondhand, mostly through the medium of letters from Publius Rutilius Rufus. King Nicomedes of Bithynia had complained at once to the Senate that it was impossible for Rome to name two kings Friend and Ally of the Roman People when those kings were at permanent loggerheads, and pointed out that he had never varied in his allegiance to Rome since his assumption of the Bithynian throne over fifty years before. Tribune of the plebs for a second time, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had sided with Bithynia, and in the end all the money the envoys of Mithridates had paid out to needy senators went for nothing. The Pontic embassage was refused, and sent home.

Mithridates took the news hard. First he had a temper tantrum which saw his court scatter, shaking in terror, while he roared up and down his audience chamber calling down curses and frightful imprecations upon Rome and all things Roman. Then he lapsed into an even more horrifying quiet, and sat for many hours alone on his royal lion seat, brooding. Finally, after a brief instruction to Queen Laodice that she was to rule the kingdom in his absence, he left Sinope, and was not seen again for over a year.

He went first to Amaseia, the original Pontic capital of his ancestors, where all the early kings were buried in tombs hewn from the solid rock of the mountains ringing Amaseia round, and stalked up and down the corridors of the palace for several days, oblivious to the presence of his cowering servants and the seductive pleas of the two wives and eight concubines he kept permanently installed there. Then, as suddenly and completely as a storm was blown away across the mountains, King Mithridates emerged from his furor and settled down to make plans.

Conquests of Mithridates 113 - 100 B.C.

He did not send back to Sinope for more courtiers, nor ride to Zela, where his nearest army was encamped; instead, he summoned those barons who lived in Amaseia and sent them to choose him a detachment of one thousand crack troops. His instructions were well thought out, and issued in tones which brooked neither argument nor defiance. Forth he would go to Ancyra, the biggest town in Galatia, but with a bodyguard only, his soldiers many miles behind. The barons he dispatched ahead of his own progress were under orders to bring every Galatian tribal chieftain to a great congress at Ancyra, where the King of Pontus would have interesting proposals to make.

It was an outlandish place, Galatia, a Celtic outpost in a sub-continent peopled by those of Persic, Syriac, Germanic and Hittite strains; all save the Syriacs tended to be fair, at least of skin, but not fair like these Celtic immigrants descended from the second King Brennus of the Gauls. For almost two hundred years they had occupied their big piece of the Anatolian heartland, a rich place and roomy, and lived the lives of Gauls, heedless of the cultures surrounding them. Their intertribal contacts, even, were tenuous; they owned no overall king, and were not interested in banding together to conquer additional territory. For a while, indeed, they had acknowledged the fifth King Mithridates of Pontus as their suzerain, an empty kind of business that yielded them nothing and the fifth Mithridates the same, for they never produced the tithes and tributes Pontus had demanded, and Pontus died before he could exact retribution. No one tampered with them; they were Gauls, far fiercer than Phrygians, Cappadocians, Pontines, Bithynians, Ionian or Dorian Greeks.

The leaders of the three Galatian tribes and their tribelets came to Ancyra to answer the summons of Mithridates, looking more forward to the great feast they had been promised than to whatever projected campaign of mayhem and booty the sixth Mithridates was undoubtedly going to offer them. And in Ancyra—little more than a village—they found Mithridates waiting for them. He had scoured the countryside all the way from Amaseia for every delicacy and kind of wine money could buy, and spread before the Galatian chiefs a feast grander and more delicious even than their imaginations had conjured up. Already in a state of affable content before they made inroads upon the food and drink, they succumbed blissfully to the twin snares of full bellies and whirling heads.

And while they lay amid the shambles to which they had reduced the feast, snoring and twitching in drunken stupor, the thousand handpicked soldiers of King Mithridates spilled silently into the compound, went among them, and killed them. Not until the last Galatian thane was dead did King Mithridates move from his lordly chair at the head of the head table, sitting with his leg thrown over its arm, wagging his foot, his big smooth bland face displaying a keen interest in the slaughter.

“Burn them,” he said at the end, “then spread their ashes on top of their blood. This place will grow superb wheat next year. Nothing makes soil more fruitful than blood and bone.”

He then had himself proclaimed King of Galatia, with no one left to oppose him save leaderless and scattered Gauls.

And then he suddenly and completely disappeared. Not his most senior baron knew where he had gone, or what he was up to; he simply left a letter ordering them to tidy Galatia up, return to Amaseia, and send to the Queen at Sinope to appoint a satrap for the new Pontic territory of Galatia.

Clad in the garb of a merchant, astride a mediocre brown horse and leading a donkey upon which he had placed spare clothing and a rather stupid young Galatian slave who didn’t even know who his master was, Mithridates rode down the track to Pessinus. At the precinct of Kubaba Cybele the Great Mother he revealed his true identity to Battaces and brought the archigallos into his service, obtaining from Battaces much information he would need. From Pessinus he proceeded into the Roman Asia Province down the long valley of the Maeander River.

Scarcely one town in Caria did he leave uninvestigated; the big, curious, slightly-vague-about-his-business eastern merchant rode from one place to another administering an occasional beating to his dullard slave, eyes everywhere, mind filing every item of information away. He supped with other merchant travelers at inn tables, he lingered in the market squares on market days talking to anyone who looked to have something interesting to impart, he strolled the quays of Aegean seaports poking his fingers into bales and sniffing at sealed amphorae, he flirted with village girls and rewarded them most generously when they gratified his fleshly urges, he listened to tales of the riches in the precinct of Asklepios on Cos, in the Artemisium at Ephesus, the sanctuary of Asklepios at Pergamum, and the fabulous treasures of Rhodes.

From Ephesus he turned north to Smyrna and Sardis, and eventually arrived in Pergamum, capital of the Roman governor, glittering from its mountaintop like a jeweled box. Here for the first time he saw genuine Roman troops, a small guard belonging to the governor; Asia Province was not considered a military risk, so its soldiers were made up of local auxiliaries and militia. Long and hard did Mithridates study the eighty members of the real thing, noting the heaviness of the mailed armor, the short swords and tiny-headed spears, the well-drilled way in which they moved, seconded to soft duty though they were. Here too he saw his first purple-bordered toga upon the person of the governor himself. This worthy, escorted by lictors in crimson tunics, each bearing the bundle of rods upon his left shoulder with the axes inserted because the governor had the power to deal out death, seemed to the watching Mithridates to defer very humbly to a small number of men in plain white togas. These, he discovered, were the publicani, executives of the companies which farmed the provincial taxes; from the way they strutted through the exquisitely planned and laid out streets of Pergamum, they seemed to think they owned the province, rather than Rome.

Not, of course, that Mithridates presumed to strike up a conversation with any of these august fellows, they were obviously far too busy and important to take heed of a lone eastern merchant; he simply noted them as they passed by in the midst of their small armies of clerks and scribes, and did his talking to Pergamites across friendly tables in little taverns far beneath the notice of the publicani.