Mithridates the Great (17 page)

Of course, achieving this desirable goal necessitated beating Mithridates, the master of the double-cross, at his own game. The devious king of Pontus invited the tetrarchs, rulers of Galatia, to join their hostage families at a banquet. The invitation implied that a weakened Mithridates had chosen to attempt the conciliation of his restless subjects. In fact Mithridates had a more radical solution in mind. His men massacred everyone who attended. Regrettably (from the Pontic viewpoint), killing off most of the Galatian leadership simply removed the rivals of those who were left. This allowed the Galatians to respond with a degree of coherence and coordination which political infighting had previously rendered impossible. The satrap whom Mithridates sent to rule Galatia did not have enough troops to withstand the wave of rebellion raised against him. Within months he and the Pontic garrisons had been expelled and Galatia was on its way to becoming a unified kingdom.

The citizens of Ephesus, another city of dubious loyalties, carefully noted these events, and when a Pontic force appeared at the city gates, the soldiers found those gates firmly closed against them. The fact that the commander of the Pontic soldiers was Zenobius, the same man who had masterminded the stealthy takeover of the defences of Chios, probably
added to Ephesian paranoia. Zenobius tried to ease the suspicions of the Ephesians by asking for a conference with the leading pro-Pontic citizen in the city, the father of one of Mithridates favourite wives, Monima. Zenobius was allowed into the city with a few attendants, and he promptly called a meeting of the Ephesian assembly. The Ephesians equally promptly adjourned the meeting until the following day, and in the meantime threw Zenobius into prison. At the meeting the citizens decided on revolt, killed Zenobius, and sent envoys to Sulla, explaining that they had cooperated with Mithridates whilst they must, but were now throwing off his shackles at the first opportunity.

A slew of cities followed the example of Ephesus, leaving Mithridates with a dilemma. He had assembled another large army in haste immediately after receiving the news from Chaeronea. Now he could either send that army to deal with the rebellion in Asia Minor, or he could stick with his original intention and send it to Greece to give Archelaus another go at beating Sulla. Eventually Mithridates decided that, while Pontus itself remained steadfastly loyal, there would be more rebellions among the Greeks unless Sulla was beaten; if Sulla was defeated, the Greeks would fall back into line on their own. He sent the army to Greece, but kept back a detachment to harass the rebels in the countryside and make a gruesome example of anyone they caught outside their city walls.

Whilst so far Mithridates had attempted to govern the Greek cities well, he now set about making them ungovernable. Probably this was a deliberate tactic which assumed that if the Greek cities were worthless as allies, they should be rendered equally ineffective as enemies. He declared the cancellation of debts, the freeing of slaves, and citizenship for the resident aliens of each city. Predictably, the winners and losers from these declarations became respectively and fervently pro- and anti-Mithridates, and their cities were paralyzed by the resulting civic strife (appropriately known in Greek as ‘stasis’.)

Nor was undivided loyalty to be found in Pergamum, which Mithridates had made the seat of his rule. Several high-ranking courtiers formed a cabal to plot the overthrow of the king. They were betrayed by one of their number, a man called Asclepiodotus. Mithridates was not prepared to have these men killed on the word of an accuser alone, so he personally eavesdropped on a meeting of the conspirators, who cheerfully discussed their plans unaware that their intended victim lay seething quietly under one of the couches.

Arrest and torture of the cabal led to the discovery that another eighty leading Pergamenes were engaged in a similar enterprise. After this Mithridates abandoned his former restraint and sent out inquisitors to all the major cities. Evidence was collected from informers in return for rewards, and some 1,600 people died messily in the purge which followed. Not unexpectedly, this did not greatly increase the loyalty or affection of the king’s Greek subjects.

Mithridates could at least console himself that Sulla too was feeling the political heat. Even before Chaeronea, Sulla was joined by his wife and family in Greece. Things had become too dangerous in Rome, where Sulla had been declared a public enemy. His rival, Marius, had returned from exile and was energetically exterminating Sulla’s supporters in Rome even as Mithridates was doing in the same in Asia Minor.

A further item of news which would have pleased neither Sulla nor Mithridates was that the government in Rome had prepared a rival army under the consul Flaccus and were preparing to send this across the Adriatic to join the fray. Given that Sulla was officially an outlaw, this raised the spectre of a three-sided war in which Roman army would fight Roman army whilst Mithridates fought the pair of them.

In fact the Pontic army had already engaged the advance guard of Flaccus. Archelaus was not taking his defeat lying down. In the absence of an army he had turned pirate and passed his time harassing enemy naval traffic and sending commando-style raids against the Romans. Using the island of Euboea as a base, he attacked and besieged the island town of Zacynthus and sent his ships into the Adriatic where they harassed the transports of Flaccus as he attempted to cross with his army.

The beleaguered Sulla could only await events. He made camp at Melitaea, a position which enabled him to keep a weather eye for any appearance of hostile Romans on the approaches from Thessaly, yet which was still close enough to Boeotia for him to be able to return in a hurry if word came that Archelaus was on the move. In fact, Archelaus was already embarking from Euboea, his 10,000 men reinforced by 80,000 troops brought over from Asia Minor by Dorylaus, another of Mithridates’ generals. The return of a large Pontic army automatically meant the revolt of Boeotia from the Romans, so Sulla immediately returned to give his old enemy a rematch.

However, Archelaus had learned his lesson from Chaeronea. He had no intention of going through another head-on encounter with the Roman
legionary meat grinder. Instead Sulla was frustrated to find his enemy was using the strategy that the legendary Roman general, Fabius the Delayer, had used against Hannibal, and refusing to engage in battle. This move demonstrates that Pontic intelligence was well aware of Sulla’s predicament. Sulla needed both victories and money for his position to be tenable. By refusing to fight, Archelaus denied Sulla the victory he needed, whilst Sulla’s army still needed to be paid.

The Battle of Orchomenos

Sulla’s response was to offer Archelaus an all-or-nothing shot at the battle he desired. Instead of fighting within the confines of a rocky valley such as that of the Cephisus at Chaeronea, Sulla took up station near Orchomenos, some fifteen miles away. Here the valley opened out into the Boeotian plain, offering Archelaus’ cavalry a treeless playground which stretched from the small city of Orchomenos across to the marshy banks of the River Melas some thirty miles to the east. Archelaus took the bait and moved his army on to the plain, though taking care to leave a well-fortified camp to his rear in case anything went wrong.

The battle which followed was a more confused affair than the set-piece of Chaeronea and this is reflected by the descriptions in the ancient sources. Though these are not so much contradictory as giving emphasis to different aspects of the battle, they are nevertheless hard to follow. All accounts agree that having got Archelaus on the plain where he could use his cavalry, Sulla immediately set about cancelling the cavalry’s advantage by setting his men to digging long ditches ten feet wide, thus making parts of the plain impassable to horsemen.

Archelaus was not going to yield his treasured edge over the enemy lightly, and his cavalry came boiling out of the Pontic camp so quickly that the Romans did not have time to properly form up. Seeing the Pontic cavalry coming down upon them in their thousands, Sulla’s men began to panic and break for the safety of their camp - which most had no hope of reaching before the cavalry took them to pieces. At this point the battle was almost lost before it had properly begun.

Sulla saved the day single-handedly by taking his stand at the earthworks and bellowing at his wavering troops. ‘Orchomenos! Remember the name. I’m ready to fight and die here. When people ask you where you ran away and left your general, tell them: at Orchomenos!’
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Abashed, Sulla’s officers came to join him, and with their encouragement
the legionaries made a stand. These held out long enough for two unengaged cohorts to hurry to their rescue. The Pontics fought fiercely and it is probably at this point that Diogenes, the son of Archelaus, died in combat. However, the Pontic cavalry stood little chance in a stationary battle against infantry, especially with more Sullan troops joining the fight all the time, and they were eventually forced to retire. The Romans followed up into the Pontic archers who were attempting to support the cavalry, and these fought back with fistfuls of arrows which they wielded as impromptu swords.

Back in the safety of his camp, Archelaus saw that Sulla had again returned to constructing earthworks at a furious pace. Consequently he led out his troops once more, this time in more formal battle array, and it is quite likely that we have this array from the memoirs of Sulla himself, via Frontinus who recorded it in his Stratagems.
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The first line consisted of the scythed chariots, which finally had a perfect run-up against the Roman lines. Then, ready to follow up the confusion the chariots should create, came the Macedonian-style phalanx, and behind the phalangites came the escaped Italian slaves who had proven their ability for dogged resistance at Chaeronea, though now these renegades were armed in the manner of Roman auxiliaries. The cavalry were massed on each flank, though their effectiveness was crippled by those earthworks which Sulla had succeeded in constructing, each terminating on the farthest point of the flank with an earthen redoubt.

Sulla’s own army was arranged in three lines, though there were spaces between the files through which light infantry, and even cavalry, could rush if need be. Sulla had also arranged his
postsignati
(those drawn up behind the eagle standards) differently to his
antesignati
, with the latter forming a denser frontage, but with more space behind. The reason for this peculiar formation became apparent to the scythed chariots once they were hurtling irrevocably toward the Roman lines. The front-rank legionaries stepped smartly sideways and backward to reveal serried rows of stakes driven into the ground at angles carefully contrived to achieve maximum impalement. As the first chariots raced to their doom, Roman javelinmen rushed through the back ranks to take pot shots at those chariots which managed to skid around and head for safety. ‘Safety’ proved a relative term, as the phalanx was hurrying forward to exploit the confusion created by the scythed chariots. Chariots met phalanx head-on to their mutual detriment, though the collision did at least prove that scythed chariots could indeed create chaos when they hit poorly-prepared infantry.

With Sulla urging his men forward, Archelaus had little choice but to
throw his cavalry into the fray in the hope that his phalanx could pull itself together whilst the Romans braced to receive the horsemen. Here Sulla’s considerable military experience came into play. He had foreseen this move and countered it by hurling his own cavalry through the paths in the Roman ranks that had now been cleared of javelinmen. Sulla’s cavalry were vastly outnumbered, and could only hope to check the hordes of Pontic horsemen for a moment, but a moment was all that was needed. The infantry had not faltered in their advance, and they hit the Pontic cavalry standing as it engaged in a mêlée with Sulla’s horsemen.

Cutting through the cavalry, the legionaries closed with the phalanx, which had not, as Archelaus had hoped, been given time to reorganize. However, the Pontic general was a quick learner, and this time he had made sure that the phalangites had a clear line of retreat into the camp. Consequently, his infantry losses were relatively light – some 5,000 men, but each phase in the battle so far had led to butchery among the cavalry which was down by some 10, 000 horsemen.

This ended the proceedings for the day. Sulla was well aware that even after the mauling he had given Archelaus’ army, that army outnumbered his own forces. If he allowed Archelaus to get away, the Pontic general would return to imitating Fabius the Delayer, and Sulla’s victory would have been pointless. Consequently he kept a substantial portion of his men on stand-to overnight, and as soon as day broke, he set about constructing a further set of earthworks less than 600 feet from the camp.

Archelaus, meanwhile, harangued his men, pointing out that they still outnumbered an enemy who had the audacity to put them under siege. The Pontic force responded with the indomitable spirit which characterized that army in battle and surged over the ramparts just as the Romans, urged on by Sulla, attempted a sortie of their own. The result was another titanic and highly-confused struggle in which the discipline and flexibility of Sulla’s legionaries was balanced against the numbers and spirit of their adversaries.

Finally the Romans succeeded in tearing down a corner of the Pontic ramparts. They were faced by another wall within, this one consisting of grimly-determined Pontic soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder. The Romans hung back until a junior officer called Basillus hurled himself at the Pontic soldier opposite and killed him. The Romans surged into the gap and a massacre began.

Trapped against the marsh, the remnants of Archelaus’ army which abandoned the camp had nowhere to run, and the waters turned slowly red
with blood. Plutarch reports that even in his day, two hundred years later, bows, breastplates and barbarian swords were still regularly unearthed from the mud. Sulla’s men were in no mood to take prisoners (there was no boasting of the lightness of Roman casualties after this battle) and in any case, being a renegade army, the Sullans could not have done much with any captives that they did take. Consequently a Pontic army was yet again chopped to pieces by Roman swords. Archelaus survived the defeat, managing to slip away from the battlefield and get back to Euboea in a small boat , doubtless pondering how Mithridates would take the news of this latest catastrophe.