Mithridates the Great (30 page)

This showed considerable restraint, for Lucullus probably felt like lynching Triarius himself. Zela was a very substantial defeat, and the fact that it had been incurred by a lieutenant of Lucullus totally undermined his only remaining grounds for continuing to wage war in the region – namely that he was doing so successfully. The sad thing is that Lucullus, had he been as uninhibitedly brutal as Sulla, could have become wildly popular by allowing his men far greater freedom to plunder and quartering them on the unfortunate cites of the region during the winter. He could also have taken the approach of many of his contemporaries, which was that the barbarism of the tax-collectors was dangerous to interfere with, and was in any case no harm to him personally. As it was, by restraining his troops and forcing them to winter in tents, Lucullus had alienated his army; and by protecting those he had conquered from the full avarice of the tax-collectors he had lost vital political support at home. In short, whilst his enemies claimed that he was prolonging the war in Asia minor for his own benefit, the real case against Lucullus was that he was not being greedy and brutal enough whilst doing so.

After Zela, there was a slight air of unreality about the campaigning. Troops were deployed, positions offensive and defensive were taken up, but everyone was waiting to hear what the reaction would be in Rome to one of the city’s most substantial defeats for decades. Mithridates withdrew toward a fortress called Talaura in the direction of Armenia Minor, there to await reinforcements from Tigranes, who had finished mopping up after the
Roman invaders had left his territory. Indeed, an advance guard of cavalry under one of Tigranes’ relatives was already operating in the area. The tide seemed to be turning in Mithridates’ favour. Attidius, one of the Roman senators in Mithridates’ entourage, had been planning to betray Mithridates when the time was right. However, the increasing strength of the Pontic position encouraged waverers to betray the plot. The senator was killed quickly through virtue of his rank and Mithridates excused the freedmen and servants, saying there was no fault in following one’s master. All others involved met a horrible end by torture.

Meanwhile, Lucullus, desperate for the chance to pull his men’s morale together by a successful battle, turned to meet the Armenian force. In the event, he turned alone. As soon as it reached a relatively secure position, his army downed tools and refused to advance a step further. The arguments of Clodius rang in their ears. The soldiers of Pompey, who had fought a brisk campaign in Spain before mopping up the remains of Spartacus’ uprising, had been discharged and were now living on the grants of land which their commander had secured for them. In many cases called to the standards whilst Pompey’s recruits had still been schoolchildren, the soldiers of Lucullus had chased Mithridates across the length of Anatolia, and all about Armenia. Now, after his victory at Zela, Mithridates looked set to take them around again and the exasperated soldiery were having none of it. When the distraught Lucullus came to them, sometimes taking individuals by the hand and pleading with them to continue the fight, his soldiers responded by throwing their empty purses at his feet. Since Lucullus was the only one making a personal profit from the war, they told him he could continue it on his own.
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This also seemed to be the attitude of Lucullus’ official successors. Marcius Rex, proconsul of Cilicia and Lucullus’ direct replacement, refused to do anything. He had a small fleet and three new legions, but his soldiers had heard of the merry dance Lucullus’ men had been on and he claimed that they would refuse to march if he ordered them eastward. Acilius Glabrio, who had been appointed governor of the new province of Bithynia et Pontus, was making light work of taking control of the Bithynia part of his command. That was, however, the limit of his interest. Not even the Pontus part of his new province concerned him, let alone a nasty-looking war on the borders of Armenia.

It was all that Lucullus could do to keep his army together for the duration of the summer, with the newer legionaries extracting from the Fimbrians the promise that they would fight if attacked. Naturally, Mithridates (fully
occupied with making himself at home once more in Pontus) and Tigranes (engaged in his customary occupation of kicking Ariobarzanes off the throne of Cappadocia) took care to offer no such provocation. Therefore, at the end of the summer, a good part of Lucullus’ army packed its bags and unilaterally discharged itself. To complete the misery of Lucullus, a commission arrived from Rome. During the full flush of his victories he had earlier asked that this commission be sent to settle the affairs of Pontus and bring it into working order as a Roman province.

As 67 BC came to an end, it appeared that after twenty-one years of intermittent warfare costing hundreds of thousands of lives, with a front line that had moved over a thousand miles from west of Athens to east of the Euphrates, Mithridates of Pontus was right back where he had started.

Pompey and the pirates

This situation did not go unremarked in Rome. Standing before the assembly of the Roman people, the orator Cicero thundered:

He [Mithridates], already conquered, has just been able to accomplish that thing, when he was in the full enjoyment of his powers, he never even dared even to wish for!’ [ie victory over a Roman army in battle]).The kingdom of Ariobarzanes... is wholly in the power of the enemy ... and that man, who in one day marked down for slaughter all the Roman citizens in all Asia, ... has not only never yet suffered any punishment worthy of his wickedness, but, now, twenty-three years later, is still a king. Not only a king, but so much a king that he is not content to hide himself in Pontus, or in the recesses of Cappadocia, but seeks to expand once more from his hereditary borders.
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Cicero was speaking in support of a law proposed by the tribune Manlius, which suggested that powers greater than any heretofore awarded be given to a Roman general. The lucky recipient of these powers was to be Gnaeus Pompeius, better known to posterity as Pompey. Pompey was later to try to persuade his contemporaries to call him Pompeius Magnus - ‘Pompey the Great’ - though one senator on hearing the new title asked interestedly ‘Really? How big is he then?’
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Pompey was an ambitious man who deeply scared many in the senate. As a teenager, he had thrown his support behind Sulla when the latter returned to take control of Italy after the peace of Dardanus. Pompey’s enthusiastic and
unscrupulous endorsement of Sulla’s philosophy earned him the unofficial title of ‘carnifex adulescens’ – the ‘teenage butcher’. But when young Pompey went to fight in Spain, he made a chilling discovery. He was a brilliant general. He was a master of logistics and manoeuvre. His strategic vision was unequalled. Tactically, however, he was weak and he could not win battles. When he tried in Spain, Sertorius came close to terminating his promising career on the spot and Pompey was only saved by the timely arrival of his colleague, Metellus Pius.

Consequently, Pompey appears to have decided that henceforth he would win his wars without major battles. Given that battles were in his day the customary way of deciding wars, this was no easy thing to do. But it was certainly possible and Pompey, as mentioned, was a brilliant general.

This brilliance had its full chance to shine in Pompey’s next command, which was against Mithridates’ old allies, the pirates. With Rome preoccupied with rebellion, Mithridates, civil war and then the uprising of Spartacus, the pirates had been left to grow from an irritant to a problem to a fully-fledged menace. Their dominance of the sea now seemed complete, to the extent that they were now extending their operations, storming minor cities and staying there for weeks at a time as they plundered far inland.

They no longer confined their operations to the Cilician coast, or even to the Aegean. The west coast of Italy now offered the most profitable plunder, and there the pirates had even kidnapped two praetors off the roads of Italy as they travelled in their full state and regalia. On another occasion a female relative of Mark Antony was captured and only freed after the payment of a substantial ransom. Clodius (as related already) and Julius Caesar were among others who had involuntarily experienced pirate hospitality. So profitable had their occupation become, says Plutarch, that their ships had sails coloured with expensive purple dye and oars plated with silver.

Now Pompey, who had successfully brought the war in Spain to a conclusion, was given a command which overrode that of all Roman magistrates, both along the coast and for a considerable distance inland. His orders were to wipe out the pirates and their stranglehold on maritime trade (which was in danger of ceasing altogether). Currently, Roman efforts against the pirates consisted of a campaign in Crete by a general called Metellus, and he was making heavy weather of it.

In very short order, Pompey assembled a fleet of 500 ships,and divided the Mediterranean into thirteen areas of operation. Starting around Rome, he swept the Mediterranean from end to end, rolling the pirate fleets back before
him all the way to Cilicia. From start to finish, the entire operation was accomplished in three months, with the greater part in forty days; all with minimal loss of life and only a single minor battle. In part, Pompey was successful because he allowed the pirates to surrender on terms. All who came to him as supplicants were allowed to live and many were settled on lands in Greece and other areas still depopulated after the ravages of the war with Mithridates had passed across them. All this was accomplished, as Cicero effusively commented, with ‘god-like’ speed and efficiency.
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Now, with Lucullus undone, and Pompey sightseeing in the east of the Mediterranean where his campaign had concluded, it seemed a natural step to give Pompey a further extension of his command, and make him responsible for stamping out the resurgent Mithridates and Tigranes. In addition to his present powers, Pompey was to be made commander of Phrygia, Lycaonia, Galatia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, upper Colchis and Armenia – quite a swathe of territory, when one considers what Lucullus had got up to when he was merely in command of Cilicia. Exactly how much control Pompey had over Bithynia is disputed, and in any case moot, as he did not operate there.

The law was carried, mainly because Pompey was very popular with the people, for whom the cost of imported materials had dropped sharply since the defeat of the pirates, and because Lucullus was unpopular with those of the upper classes who considered that he had curtailed their right to plunder Asia. It should also be noted that the territory allocated to Pompey in Asia Minor was less substantial than it appeared. Apart from western Anatolia and the allied kingdom of Galatia, anywhere else that Pompey wanted to command would have to be wrenched from the grasp of Mithridates and his son-in-law.

It was hardly to be expected that Lucullus would take all this calmly, though he tried. When he met with Pompey, he started by complimenting the man on his achievements. Then he discovered that Pompey had rearranged his settlement of Asia; partly in such a manner as to show clearly that he, Pompey, was now in charge, and partly, one suspects, to reward those in Rome who had contrived to organise his present command for him. At this point cordiality broke down.

Pompey claimed that Lucullus had merely been playing at fighting Mithridates whilst he used the war to enrich himself (and Lucullus was by now fabulously wealthy). Only now that a proper general was in charge would the war be fought in earnest. Lucullus responded by calling Pompey
a ‘vulture’ who gorged on the winnings of other men.
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Metellus Pius had saved Pompey’s bacon in Spain, Crassus had won the slave war in Italy that Pompey claimed to have torn up by the roots, and Metellus had been winning in Crete against the pirates. Now, despite Mithridates’ temporary resurgence, Lucullus’ war was all but won and Pompey had come to claim the spoils.

These pleasantries exchanged, the two men had to be physically kept from each other’s throats by their friends. Thereafter Lucullus took himself homeward in a huff, leaving Pompey and Mithridates to square off for the latest round of the drawn-out war.

The Dasteria campaign

Whilst the Romans politicked, Mithridates was rearming for the inevitable confrontation. He had learned at Cyzicus and Tigranocerta that sheer numbers do not a conquering army make, and he was experimenting with a Roman-style force that emphasized quality and mobility. Despite his best efforts he was low in cavalry, partly because the Sarmatians of the Black Sea were now loyal to his undutiful son Menchares. He had some 30,000 infantry, the hard core of which was made up of Roman exiles prepared to fight to the death rather than fall into the hands of their mother city. However, the remainder consisted of raw recruits of fragile morale. He was also re-fortifying his cities for a further round of sieges.

The new round of conflict opened with diplomatic sparring. Tigranes, like Mithridates and any Hellenistic monarch, needed sons to prevent opportunistic aristocrats from fancying themselves as successors to the throne and forthwith expediting the death of the current monarch. Parenthood restricted the potential beneficiaries of regicide to royal sons, but made the lives of these sons correspondingly more dangerous. The necessarily-paranoid eye of Tigranes had lingered on one of his offspring long enough to cause that son to bolt to the court of the Parthian king, Phraates. With an Armenian heir in his keeping, Phraates began to consider championing the son against his father and gaining a compliant puppet king on his western border. When diplomats arrived from Pompey promising generous Roman support for the invasion he was already contemplating, Phraates decided to launch his attack.