Mithridates the Great (11 page)

It is not known whether he intended to defend the river crossing or retreat to Pergamum, but the question became irrelevant as the Pontic army caught up with him on the way and forced him to give battle. As Aquillius had feared, his smaller army was overwhelmed, and some 10,000 foot and 4000 cavalry were lost to the enemy. Along with a substantial amount of prestige (this was a Roman general who was defeated, after all) came another financial windfall, as Mithridates helped himself to the booty of another enemy camp and its pay-chest. Aquillius personally escaped to Pergamum, perhaps making a mental note of the defects in Rome’s original deployment. By scattering the Roman and allied forces about the periphery of western Pontus, they had allowed Mithridates, who had the advantage of internal lines of communication, to move swiftly to defeat each of their armies individually. Though in total the Roman and allied armies had outnumbered Mithridates, his army was larger than any one of theirs – and it was certainly larger even than the armies left to Cassius and Oppius combined.

Quite possibly the army of Oppius did the same arithmetic. When we last heard of him, Oppius was master of an army of 40,000 men. He next appears in the historical record with a small band of cavalry and some mercenaries, and with these he was rather optimistically trying to hold the town of Laodocia on the River Lycus. What happened to his army is unknown. It is possible, but unlikely, that there had been another major battle in which Oppius was defeated, or more probably, those who had signed up for a quick and easy looting expedition into Pontus deserted as soon as they discovered that this war was going to be no such thing. This left the Roman forces looking even thinner, which caused the realists to carefully reconsider their options and depart, until finally the only soldiers remaining were those with personal loyalty to Oppius, or mercenaries determined to take their wages until the last moment that it was safe to do so.

In recent years, new evidence has come to light of Oppius’ frantic troop-raising activity whilst he was in Laodocia. This is in the form of a letter from
Oppius to a Greek city (Aphrodisias), thanking them for raising auxiliary troops, a letter which the Greeks carefully committed to stone in case they needed to prove their good intentions to the Romans later.
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Sadly, it appears that these and other troops unaccountably failed to turn up.

To defeat Oppius, Mithridates merely needed to send an envoy. When promised that if they handed over the Roman commander they would receive the same beneficent terms as the numerous Greek cities which had already surrendered, the Laodocians jumped at the offer. Thenceforth, the retinue of Mithridates included one captured Roman magistrate, convincing proof for doubters of the power of Pontus and the vulnerability of Rome.

And then there was one. Cassius was in Phrygia, but uneasily aware that Pontus was now fully in control of Bithynia, and that Mithridates, once he had reorganized that kingdom, would turn his attention to the last bastion of Roman resistance. Desperately trying to recoup lost numbers, Cassius recruited or press-ganged as much of the local population as he could persuade to carry a spear; but, probably when he received news of the capture of Oppius and the loss of his army, he disbanded his rag-tag force of artisans and yokels in disgust and pulled back to Apameia. Mithridates followed at his leisure, folding Phrygia into his expanding empire, and pointedly staying at the same inn as that in which Alexander the Great had lodged on his journey eastward. Like Phrygia, Apameia surrendered without a fight, and Cassius, who had received substantial help and funding from the wealthy citizens of the town, hurried off to find shelter further west, eventually ending up in Rhodes.
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With the loss of Rome’s last effective field army in Asia Minor, the trickle of defections to Pontus became a flood as cities and provinces hastened to ingratiate themselves with the region’s new master. Mithridates had already shown what he could do for his new friends by landing a large sum of cash on Apameia to help them rebuild after earthquake damage. It occurred to one and all that handing over Aquillius would endear whoever did so to Mithridates. The Roman commissioner was trying to get to Rhodes, the nearest point which had unambiguously declared for Rome, but the distance was too great, and the countryside too hostile. Aquillius was captured and added to Mithridates’ collection of captured Roman officials. By some reports Mithridates also captured Cassius at Apameia and thus briefly had the full set, though he released Cassius on the grounds that he had no quarrel with the man. Certainly Oppius was later released, and allowed to avail himself of the famous medical facilities on the island of Cos whilst he recovered from the shock of his ordeal (though Cos, too, later fell to Mithridates).

For Aquillius there was no relief. Mithridates needed a scapegoat, and he really was very disappointed in Aquillius and the uncompromising stand he had taken at the start of their relationship. The unfortunate commissioner was paraded through each town that Mithridates visited, often tied backwards on the back of a donkey; his humiliation symbolizing that of the power he represented. Aquillius’ suffering reached a dramatic end at Pergamum, where Mithridates had him killed with molten gold poured down his throat.
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This brutally-effective propaganda gesture showed all Asia Minor both Mithridates’ contempt of Roman money-grubbing ways and the fact that Mithridates had no intention of negotiating with Rome once he had made his point, for everyone knew that the senate would not readily forgive such mistreatment of one of its own.

As 89 BC drew to a close, Mithridates could look back on a year well spent. Pontus and his lands across the Black Sea were secure, Cappadocia was finally and unambiguously his, and his flanks to the south and east were secured by the bulwark of Armenia. Bithynia and Pergamum were now as much the possessions of Pontus as Pergamum had once been of Rome. Once deprived of their land base, the small Roman squadron of ships blocking the Hellespont had been easily pushed aside, and commerce was flowing through the Black Sea ports again. Yet more to the point, the large Pontic navy of some three hundred decked ships now guarded the seaboard of Asia Minor, and there was no friendly ally to provide the Romans with the kind of bridgehead which they had been given for the campaign of Magnesia against the Seleucids.

The nearest Rome had to an ally was Rhodes in the southwest, and resistance to Pontus increased the nearer one came to that island. Some cities of Caria held out – some surrendering after a prolonged siege, others maintaining their resistance through the whole of the war. Some cities, such as Magnesia-ad-Sipylum, put up more than a token resistance (Archelaus was wounded there). However, many others were like Ephesus, where the citizens helped the Romans as long as they could, providing many with safe passage to Rhodes, but, when the Pontic army turned up, they opened the gates and outdid themselves in finding ingenious ways of demonstrating how fervently anti-Roman they had been all along. Mithridates gave the loyalty of his new allies a further boost by proclaiming a five-year amnesty from tribute. Perhaps he was feeling particularly benevolent as he was a husband again, having married Monima, a pretty girl who caught his eye at Stratonice, a recalcitrant town which he personally brought to heel on the way back from Ionia (Ionia was the general term for the historically-Greek western seaboard.)

Having won and secured Asia Minor, Mithridates waited with some confidence for the Roman counter-strike. Having undoubtedly studied Roman history, Mithridates knew that the Roman response to the loss of a medium-sized army in one year was to gather forces, elect a commander, and return the next year with a considerably larger army. Rather to his surprise, this did not happen.

Chapter 4

Imperial Pontus

Mehanwhile, back in Rome ...

If Mithridates had been encouraged to launch his military adventure in Asia Minor by the belief that Rome was failing as a social and political entity, the year 88 BC provided dramatic support for the theory. Because much of what happened in Asia Minor and Greece over subsequent years was determined by events in the forum of Rome, it is worth considering these events in some depth.

Although the war against the recalcitrant Italians was still a work in progress, Rome’s response to the victories of Mithridates had until this point been going as expected. Interestingly, for those uncertain of the extent to which Aquillius had been acting on orders from back home, it was only now that the senate formally declared war on Pontus. Given Rome’s straitened circumstances, raising money for war on this new front was very difficult. Eventually it was decided to sell off ancient treasures reserved for sacrifices to the gods. Since these treasures had been preserved from the very earliest years of Rome’s existence, the sale demonstrated, as Appian says, both ‘how limited were Rome’s resources at this time, and how unlimited Roman ambition’.
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A very considerable army of six legions had been raised from these funds, and was waiting at Nola in Campania for a commander. This commander was presumably going to be Sulla who had been rewarded with the consulship for his outstanding performance against the Italian rebels in the preceding years, and who was in any case an obvious choice as he had campaigned in Asia Minor successfully in the past.

However, Rome’s veteran commander, Marius, had long had an eye on the possibility of war in Asia Minor, and was desperately keen on getting the command for himself, despite the fact that he was going on seventy years old. Oblivious to the embarrassment it caused fellow Romans, he insisted on doing military exercises on the Campus Martius as a none-too-subtle hint that he was still up for the job. It did not help that he was frantically jealous of Sulla, and the supporters of each had nearly come to blows shortly before the Italian rebellion.

Marius found an ally in Sulpicius Rufus, tribune and unofficial leader of
those Italians who had made their peace with Rome. Sulpicius Rufus had a radical legislative programme that he wanted to push through despite a senate which opposed radical legislative programmes on principle. The political support of Marius, an ex-consul and a man who had proposed a number of sensible reforms when himself a tribune, went a long way toward reconciling the equestrians (those Romans of aristocratic rank who were not senators) to Sulpicius’ proposals. In return, Marius demanded that Sulpicius call an extraordinary meeting of the people, and transfer command of the war against Mithridates to himself. The move was not quite unconstitutional, for Rome was a democracy, and the will of the people trumped that of the senate. However, it was almost unprecedented that a senatorial appointment should be over-ruled in this way, not least because it would replace an eminently suitable candidate for the job with one less so.

Sulla and his fellow consul responded, as they were entitled to do, by declaring a suspension of public business, which meant that Sulpicius could not immediately go ahead with his proposals. This gave Sulla and his allies a chance of talking the people round before they voted, and Sulpicius was determined to have none of it. He raised a riot (in which the son of Sulla’s fellow consul was killed) and brought about the lifting of the suspension of public business by
force majeure
. Sulla fled to his army and Sulpicius proceeded to push his proposals through, including the replacement of Sulla with Marius as commander of the war against Mithridates.

It was the glory and the tragedy of the Roman people that they possessed no reverse gear. Just as backing down against a foreign enemy was inconceivable, so it never seems to have occurred to Sulla to accept the
fait accompli
. He was a consul of Rome who had been driven out of the city by a violent and subversive mob. It was his intention - nay, his duty - to return to Rome and restore order. Fortunately he happened to have an army handy to do just that.

The ‘Asian Vespers’

Exactly what Mithridates thought when he heard that Rome was attacking itself with the army that had been raised to defeat him can only be imagined. Certainly events in Rome did little to encourage Roman allies, and much to inspire their enemies. Nevertheless, it was probable that the legions would arrive eventually, and the loyalty of Mithridates’ allies would be tested. Mithridates had thought of a solution which would bind the Greek cities irrevocably to him. This solution would damn him forever in Roman eyes, but
after his treatment of Aquillius, Mithridates had little to lose on that score in any case. Essentially what he planned was to extend his treatment of Aquillius to the entire Roman population of Asia Minor, and to make his new allies accomplices in the deed.

There were several thousand Romans in Asia Minor, only a small minority of them military. Most were traders and businessmen, men who fervently hoped that Mithridates would follow the usual convention of war in the region and accept the surrender of a city as a simple transfer of ownership that had little effect on those who paid the taxes and kept the wheels of commerce turning. Whilst a foreign accent and Latin speech was hard to conceal, not all who spoke Latin were Romans. It is highly probable that many who had boasted of their Roman citizenship now earnestly assured their neighbours that they were in fact Italian, and in fact Italians who deeply sympathized with the efforts of their fellow-countrymen to destroy Rome. Nevertheless, these people were a security threat. If and when the legions came, could these people be trusted not to throw open city gates at a crucial moment, not to supply the Romans with intelligence about Pontic forces and dispositions, and not, when the going got tough, to seduce the city fathers with honeyed promises of special treatment to those who surrendered in a timely manner?

It is uncertain to what extent the peoples of the region distinguished between those Latin speakers who had come to despoil their land as Romans and those who did so as Italians. There seems no reason to believe that the Italians of Asia Minor did not use what Roman connections they had to gain an advantage over their local rivals in business, or use their greater affinity with Roman culture to gain favourable judgements where the writ of Roman law ran. In short, for many of the peoples of Asia Minor, Italians and Romans were merely different flavours of barbarian, equally insensitive, grasping and exploitative. If it was difficult to distinguish between them, Mithridates’ solution was straightforward and breathtakingly inhumane. He would kill them all, Romans and Italians, men women and children, all 80,000 of them.
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