Mithridates the Great (25 page)

Whilst Mithridates re-armed, Lucullus entered Cyzicus to a hysterical welcome from its citizens, who instituted the Lucullan games in honour of the occasion (these were held regularly for centuries afterwards). After Cyzicus, the Roman turned his attention to the war at sea. Every bit as much as did Mithridates, Lucullus appreciated the importance of sea power. He was, after all, the man who had risked his hide getting a fleet together for his general when Sulla belatedly realized the impossibility of finishing off the Pontic force in Greece without a navy. It would appear that even before the Romans settled down before Cyzicus, Lucullus had dispatched his agents across the islands of the Ionian Sea to commission warships. Consequently, Mithridates found that his fleet had to contend not just with the lethal
vagaries of the eastern Mediterranean in winter, but also with a nascent Roman fleet.

Mithridates had forty ships which he had sent to support Sertorius in Spain. After the Roman victory there, these ships were on their way home. Marius had another fifty ships, and the remainder, probably just under 100 ships, were with the king.
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Mithridates kept these at hand for the planned evacuation of himself and the remainder of his army from Nicomedia to Pontus itself. Such an evacuation was foreseen as the Pontic position in Bithynia was expected to become increasingly untenable.

The war which had looked as though it would climax with one decisive battle had instead degenerated into a messy series of disjointed conflicts, yet these nevertheless had a single underlying strategic theme. Lucullus wanted to drive into the Pontic heartland before Mithridates could organize a defence, and Mithridates was intent on making conditions for such a drive as difficult as possible.

Marius and his admirals on the Hellespont, Alexander and Dionysius, were not only protecting Pontus from naval attack but were also starting to cooperate with the pirates in interfering with Lucullus’ supply lines across the Aegean. This was the first and greatest roadblock placed by Mithridates in the way of the Roman advance, and this Lucullus and his new fleet set about removing.

The Romans caught Marius and his ships off a small barren island in the Ionian Sea near Lemnos. Despite a Roman effort to lure Marius into a deep-water battle by sending their ships against him in ones and twos, the Pontics beached their ships and prepared to resist on land. The Romans kept the Pontic troops engaged without fully committing themselves, while sailing a large proportion of their force to the other side of the island. When these made their appearance, the Pontics were forced aboard their ships, but were now trapped between the ships of Lucullus offshore and the army onshore. They took heavy casualties before they broke, and thereafter there was nowhere for them to run. Marius and his admirals hid themselves in a cave, where Dionysius anticipated his capture by drinking poison. Lucullus had the other Pontic admiral shipped to Rome to await his eventual triumph. Since a Roman senator, even one of an opposing faction, was no proper ornament to a triumphal parade, Marius was killed on the spot. Lucullus returned to the mainland to prepare the next stage of the Roman invasion.

This was the signal for Mithridates to evacuate Bithynia. Though he had twice marched an army into the country, the king chose to leave by ship. The
fleet was standing by anyway, in case the Romans cut off land communications, and it is possible that Mithridates decided that since the ships were there, he might as well use them. The earlier casualties inflicted on his army had evidently not convinced Mithridates that the winter sea was unsafe, so now he was to learn the lesson from personal experience.

The storm that hit his ships on the way to Pontus not only sank several Pontic transports, it threatened Mithridates’ flagship itself. With the storm-lashed vessel waterlogged and foundering, it became essential to get the king to safety. Yet ‘safety’ was a relative term – the rescue ship was not Pontic, but owned by a pirate called Seleucus. In vain, Mithridates’ advisors pointed out that pirates were, by definition, motivated by profit. Once the pirate ship had Mithridates on board there was nothing to stop Seleucus from proceeding straight to Lucullus and a huge reward. Mithridates was no coward, and he had great – usually justified – confidence in himself as a leader of men. Consequently, he felt more confidence in his ability to handle the pirates than in his flagship’s ability to handle the storm. In the prevailing weather, transferring the royal person to the pirate ship (probably a sleek little galley of the type called a ‘liburnian’, after the part of the Dalmatian coast where these ships originated) was itself no-risk free manoeuvre; but for once one of Mithridates’ gambles paid off. The pirates were true to their word and took the king to the safety of Sinope. When Mithridates’ battered fleet showed up, the pirates cooperatively took the flagship in tow and brought it safe home to Pontus. There any relief at a safe landfall and homecoming was wiped out by the news that the part of the Pontic fleet returning from Spain had been brought to battle and wiped out at Tenedos, near Rhodes.

Now Mithridates was to find who his friends were. He sent an ambassador with a huge war chest of gold to recruit the Scythians. Instead of undertaking this risky mission, the ambassador, a man called Diocles, defected to Lucullus. In return he probably received a generous cut of that same gold. Diocles was not alone in his treachery. For another example of how the Pontic elite began to consider an accommodation with Rome, the later geographer of the region, Strabo, admits that his own maternal grandfather defected at this time, handing over to Lucullus the fifteen forts of which he had command. If courtiers could not be trusted, family were just as unfaithful. Tigranes, the son-in-law of Mithridates, sheepishly admitted that it was not in Armenia’s interests to go to war with the Romans. Even more wounding, Mithridates’ own son, Menchares, remained deaf to
his father’s messengers. Menchares had apparently decided that though Pontus was a lost cause, he could still set himself up very nicely as a small independent kingdom in the Bosporus. Indeed, it later became apparent that he was already negotiating with Lucullus to achieve this objective.

Bereft of fleet, army and allies, Mithridates and his kingdom stood alone against the vengeance of Rome.

Chapter 9

Defeat and Exile

In 72 BC Mithridates was in his sixtieth year, and the seventeenth of his struggle with Rome. Among the levies now facing him might be found the children of the Roman legionaries he had fought in 88 BC. Certainly, one of his opponents - the Murena now cruising the Propontis with the Roman fleet - was the vengeful son of the Murena who had so spectacularly failed to defeat Mithridates in the war of a decade previously.

Mithridates grimly continued to keep faith in the eventual political collapse of the Roman polity. As well as the continued exertions of Sertorius and the depredations of the pirates, Italy itself was now racked by the rampaging Spartacus. It is probable that Mithridates, like almost everyone else, underestimated Spartacus’ military genius. Otherwise he would undoubtedly have attempted to give a fellow enemy of Rome substantial support. However, even if the phenomenon of Spartacus was considered a slave revolt of the type that the Romans quashed with monotonous regularity in Sicily, the sheer scale of this insurrection meant that no reinforcements would be coming to Lucullus in 72 BC. In fact, with Spartacus in Italy, Mithridates in the east, Sertorius in the west, and the pirates right across the ocean in between, the Roman colossus was beleaguered on all sides. Hope was by no means lost.

Out of consideration of the stringency facing Rome, Lucullus had declined an offer from the senate to help his war effort with 3,000 talents of silver. The Roman had decided to use the resources of Pontus to finance the war against that country’s king, but first he had the challenge of getting there. He had by now established that Mithridates had evacuated Bithynia, and had no doubt that the king was preparing to resist his advance through Paphlagonia or Phrygia. This left the choice of routes as either through Galatia or along the Black Sea coastal plain.
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The coastal route was straightforward as far as Heraclea, but going further involved taking that city out of the war, and this probably meant another protracted siege – something that Lucullus could ill afford. His Fimbrians had already endured the gruelling siege of Cyzicus, and were unimpressed by the thanks of the grateful citizenry. After almost a decade in Asia Minor, they wanted plunder and to go home. In the event, the siege of Heraclea was left to
Cotta. Through a mixture of Pontic determination and Cotta’s woeful military ineptitude, the siege dragged on for two years. It was only brought to a halt when Menchares, on the other side of the Black Sea, was persuaded to become an official ‘friend’ of the Romans and to stop smuggling supplies to the besieged citizens.

This left Galatia, and across Galatia went the Fimbrians, complaining bitterly about the lack of supplies as they went. Deiotarus had foreseen this problem. As many as 30,000 Galatians followed the Romans, not as reinforcements but as a supply chain. Every one of these men carried a bushel (a measure equivalent to about eight gallons) of wheat on his back, and in this way the Roman army crossed the barren highlands of Galatia, and descended into the unprotected heartlands of Pontus.
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This fertile and well-populated area had been Pontic for generations, and had thrived under the aegis of the Mithridatic dynasty. With Mithridates still attempting to gather an army at Cabira to the east across the river Lycus, the Fimbrians were finally free to plunder the abundance of the countryside to their heart’s content. In the Roman camp the price of an ox dropped to under a day’s wages, and a slave could be had for four drachmas. When the Romans could plunder no more they simply pillaged and despoiled what was left. The degree of human and economic damage that this entailed partly explains why Mithridates had opted to fight Sulla in Greece rather than in his Anatolian conquests, which he had been more confident of holding. Warfare was more damaging than any typhoon for the lands a hostile army passed over.

With plunder aplenty, the Fimbrians became more particular about their choice of loot. Agricultural produce was all very well, but retirement pensions needed gold, and gold was to be had from the cities and towns. These, annoyingly, Lucullus refused to take by storm. Instead he camped before them and negotiated their surrender, giving easy terms to encourage the next fortification down the line to give itself up as well. This far-sighted strategy was both intended to expedite the surrender of Pontus and to allow the province, once yielded, to become as much a cash cow for Rome as it was for Mithridates. The problem lay in explaining all this to an army fixated on pillage and plunder. It did not help that by and large the Roman leadership shared the Fimbrian outlook. Lucullus later attempted to prevent further uprisings in Asia Minor by fixing the payment of the Sullan indemnity with a twenty-five per cent tax (on virtually everything) and freezing interest rates at twelve per cent. As Lucullus also ruled that interest should not accrue beyond the amount of the original debt, the ravages of galloping compound interest
were cut at a stroke. It also meant that if Mithridates were to arise, vampirelike once more from defeat, Asia would be less likely to succumb to his promises of financial relief. By these measures the foundations were laid for the economic recovery of Asia Minor, and by way of thanks Lucullus incurred the bitter enmity of those at Rome who had been making their fortunes from the suffering of the region – a group which included many senators and their equestrian partners in extortion.

The Cabira campaign

Mithridates could not prevent the despoiling of his lands, because he lacked an army with which to do so. However, he had the cavalry which had survived Cyzicus, and the largely-intact forces which had been defending the southern approaches to Pontus during the Bithynian campaign. This probably totalled some 40,000 men – not enough to defeat Lucullus, but certainly enough to trouble him.
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Certainly, there was no way that Pontus could be considered conquered whilst this force remained in the field. By way of reminding the Romans that he was far from a spent force, Mithridates began raiding with a goodly proportion of his cavalry over the Lycus. He engaged a Roman force on the other side and soundly defeated it. Plutarch relates that one of the leading Romans captured was a man called Pomponius (possibly a relative of Pomponius Atticus, the friend of Cicero). Mithridates offered to spare the man’s life in return for his friendship. Pomponius defiantly replied that he would remain Mithridates’ enemy as long as Mithridates was an enemy of the Romans. ‘The king was amazed by the man, and did him no harm’, reports Plutarch.
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In the hope of bringing Mithridates to battle, Lucullus settled down to a leisurely siege of Amisus. There was not much else he could do. The ever-strengthening cavalry of Mithridates meant that the Romans could no longer plunder the plains with impunity, and Pontic irregulars would make life difficult in the hills. If pushed, Mithridates would retreat to the fastnesses of Armenia Minor, and Lucullus certainly did not relish persuading the Fimbrians to undertake the unrewarding task of chasing a highly-mobile Mithridates around the mountains. Mithridates knew that Lucullus was already facing criticism for dragging out the war, and believed that Amisus –fortified as it had been – was capable of outlasting Lucullus.
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Therefore Mithridates remained at Cabira and waited for the Romans to come to him. He placed a small garrison, commanded by a relative called Phoenix, on the mountain passes and gave orders for a signal fire to be lit if the
Romans moved, as he felt Lucullus would be forced to do. Eventually, in the spring of 72 BC, Lucullus left the siege of Amisus to Murena and two legions, and reluctantly made his way to Cabira with the rest of the army.