Mithridates the Great (6 page)

On rough ground, where the phalanx feared to tread, it was the job of the
peltast
to rush in. Because they required rather less training than the rigorously drilled phalanx, peltasts were often recruited from semi–Hellenized tribes, or newly levied citizens. Because their mobility was the peltasts’ prime asset, it was also easy for the peltasts to rush out again if they encountered opposition stronger than they could handle. They wore minimal armour, and carried a spear twice as tall as themselves (so about 11 feet), the better to deal with cavalry. (Cavalry, though useless against formed troops, was death on hooves to skirmishers and troops which had broken ranks.) The prevalence of bowmen in oriental armies meant that peltasts also needed large, light shields and metal helmets. By contrast, the phalangites had discovered that raising their pikes to
between forty-five degrees and vertical managed to deflect a surprising amount of incoming arrows, and they therefore coped with just a minimal shield strapped to a forearm.

Dealing with enemy bowmen, as opposed to enduring them, was the job of
psiloi
. These were very lightly-armed, highly mobile troops, often armed with missile weapons themselves. The close ties between the Mithridatids and Crete meant that Pontus always had a good supply of Crete’s famous mercenary archers on tap, and within Pontus itself, it was a rare shepherd who was not proficient with a sling.

A special class of mercenaries were the Galatians. Thanks to their warrior culture, the Galatians were usually happy to fight against anyone, and between themselves if no-one else was available. The wealth of Pontus meant that the Galatians could combine business with pleasure, and large numbers of them were usually available to fight under the Mithridatid standard. It appears that the Galatians still fought in traditional Gallic style. Though skilled metal workers, all but tribal leaders generally fought naked. This is less silly than it seems when one considers that many deaths in ancient battles resulted from dirty clothing being forced into the bloodstreams of the wounded. Slashers to a man, every Gaul who could afford it wielded a long sword which some did not even bother putting a pointy end on to. The Gauls made excellent shock troops, as it took experienced opponents to stand firm against a headlong charge by hundreds of large sword-wielding warriors who wore nothing but spiky lime hairstyles and ferocious expressions. The bad news was that the Galatians had only a rudimentary grasp of military discipline, and tended to regard setbacks as an invitation to go home.

The perfect mixture for an ancient army was generally regarded as about fifty-five percent heavy infantry, twenty percent light infantry and skirmishers and twenty-five to thirty percent cavalry. Not many ancient armies managed to get to the thirty percent cavalry mark, but thanks in part to the south Pontic Cappadocian plains and the plains of Lycaonia, the Pontic army managed this without difficulty. Because horsemen in the ancient world fought without stirrups, any attempt to charge at high speed with a couched lance would have propelled the lancer backward over his horse’s buttocks on impact. Therefore cavalrymen fought with swords or with long spears which they wielded at shoulder height. The exceptions were heavily-protected horsemen known as cataphracts (literally ‘covered-overs’), who were virtually an armoured phalanx on hooves. However, Mithridates seems not to have made much use of this innovation in warfare.

His cavalrymen still varied as much as did the infantry. From the very east of the country, Armenia Minor provided both armoured heavy cavalry able to stand and fight all but heavy infantry, and light horse archers, capable of emulating their Parthian cousins and firing over the rumps of their horses even as they galloped away from their attackers.

The Galatians made use of the fact that they occupied some fine horse country, and were considerably better horsed than their compatriots in Europe. Because the horsemen tended to be from among the aristocracy, they were armoured, and usually carried sword and shield. In this they were similar to Cappadocian cavalry who seem to have been kitted out as were the average Greek horsemen, on unarmoured horses with riders wearing cuirass or mail, and carrying javelins and/or
xyston
(a kind of long thrusting spear). As will be seen, Mithridates expansion of his kingdom was to increase the variety of the cavalry arm even further.

Finally, Mithridates seems to have been the first of his line to give serious consideration to a navy, although the raw material in the form of well-forested hillsides and Greek expertise had been available for decades. In part, Pontus had not needed a fleet, because the kingdom made a point of being friendly with the pirates who infested the coast of Crete, and more recently, Cilicia. Now, with mastery of the Black Sea in mind, Mithridates began to recruit shipbuilders. It might also have occurred to him that if the questions of Phrygia and Paphlagonia could not be amicably resolved, Pontus and the Romans were probably going to have a serious falling out at some point.

Given that the Roman navy was as bad as the Roman army was good, and that the only practical way of getting an army to face Mithridates in Asia Minor was to bring it by sea, it would be a good idea to face the Romans on the water rather than on land. The problem was what to do about the Romans and their allies already in Asia Minor. From the later evidence, it appears that the young Mithridates spent a substantial part of his early reign considering this question.

Chapter 2

Building a Kingdom

The North and Northeast

It would have been extraordinary if the young Mithridates had not given considerable thought before he came to power as to what sort of kingdom he wanted Pontus to be. He had before him the examples of his two immediate predecessors, the reign of his father and the regency of his mother. The foreign policy of both was based on friendship with Rome. Mithridates V had actively assisted the Romans during the rebellion of Aristonicus, and his mother had complacently acquiesced whilst Rome stripped the kingdom of the rewards it had received for that help. On the other hand, Pontus had kept its conquests to the east, and retained hegemony over Cappadocia – gains acquired without, and in the case of Cappadocia, despite, Rome. Mithridates seems to have drawn the obvious conclusion. Whilst enmity with Rome was unproductive, and possibly fatal, the friendship of Rome was not worth having either. A further example of this fact was the former kingdom of Pergamum, which had once been Rome’s most loyal ally in the region, and was now a Roman province being methodically raped by tax-collectors.
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Mithridates would also have noted that Rome was an aggressively expansionist power which had moved in less than two generations from the shores of Italy to those of Africa, Spain and Greece. There was nothing in Rome’s recent history to suggest it was going to stop there, and being too hard to conquer was the best defence that Pontus could have. In short, Mithridates seems to have concluded that Pontus had to get big, and become strong, or die. Such a policy would in any case have appealed to young Mithridates, who was refreshingly free from a victim mentality. His view appears to have been that the Romans were doing what he would have done in the same situation; the same, in fact, as he intended to do once he had budged the Romans from the picture. As the Romans themselves were later to note with a large degree of respect, Mithridates saw himself not as a victim of Rome but as a rival for mastery; certainly in Asia Minor, and after that, who knows?

Yet the question remained. If Pontus was going to build itself an empire,
where was the new territory going to come from? The Romans, whilst helping themselves to the spoils of Asia (as they termed their new acquisition of Pergamum), kept a jealous eye on the balance of power amongst their new neighbours. From the Roman point of view, the westernmost borders of over-powerful Pontus had been trimmed back, and the kingdom had borne the humiliation with commendable fortitude. A major war in the west was only going to happen over strong Roman objections, and with Rome itself taking sides against the aggressor. Perhaps a coalition of all the powers in Asia Minor might have been able to deprive Rome of its possessions in the region, but for a herd of country bumpkins the Romans were proving annoyingly good at diplomacy. Anyone attempting to take on Rome would almost certainly suffer the fate of Aristonicus, with the other powers of Asia Minor piling in on the Roman side for whatever rewards they could get. Mithridates was probably sophisticated enough to recognize tactics of divide and conquer when he saw them in operation, but he was neither militarily strong enough in his own kingdom nor diplomatically trusted enough among his neighbours to be able to do anything about it.

The only alternative was to take advantage of the Roman obsession with the status quo. If Rome would not permit Pontus’ rivals to attack him from the west, Mithridates could rely on the
Pax Romana
to secure that flank of the kingdom while the military power of Pontus was deployed elsewhere. South was Cappadocia, satisfactorily cowed at present, and anyway, another area where Rome frowned on explicit interference. East was Armenia. Mithridates and his advisers probably contemplated this rich and growing kingdom with predatory interest. But Armenia was hard to invade and easy to defend, closely linked with Parthia, and currently a useful buffer between Pontus and the expansionist Parthian empire.

However, if Armenia was a sleeping dog best left to lie, there was still Armenia Minor. For generations Armenia Minor had been subject to Pontus without really being part of it. It lay snuggled between northeast Cappadocia, Armenia proper and southeast Pontus. Not only was it a rich area with an excellent supply of cavalry, but it offered access to the lands on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, especially the legendary lands of Colchis, north of Armenia. And it had probably occurred to Mithridates that if Pontus did not get established in Colchis, then the Armenians would probably get around to doing so, either by themselves or at the prompting of their Parthian suzerains.

In consequence, probably some time around 115 BC, Mithridates sent a large army to the borders of Armenia Minor, and politely asked Antipater, the current ruler, to hand over the kingdom.
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Antipater wisely did so without
fighting. In later years Armenia Minor was to become a Mithridatid redoubt, a fortress-studded corner of the kingdom to which Mithridates fell back when life became too perilous in the west. Probably with the same expedition and the same army with which he annexed Armenia Minor, Mithridates next descended on the port of Trapezus, of which Pontus had long been suzerain and protector. It was suggested that the citizens of Trapezus could be better protected (for example, from large armies camped nearby) if they were fully enrolled citizens of Pontus and, unsurprisingly, the citizens agreed.

Having tidied up his southeastern and eastern borders, Mithridates found that the north literally demanded his attention. Those doing the demanding were Greeks from the Tauric Chersonese, the area known today as the Crimea. The Greeks had been in the Crimea for a long time, as indeed they had been in the whole Black Sea region (they called the Black Sea ‘Pontus Euxinus’ - ‘the friendly sea’). For many years, the cities of the Chersonese had played a valuable role in the ancient economy. Not sharing the same Mediterranean climate as many other Greek cities and their colonies, they were often able to export grain to famine-blighted areas when crops failed, and (more seldom) imported grain in times of surplus elsewhere. They always provided a ready market for olive oil and wine. Fishing and bee-keeping were also major industries in the region.

However, life on the Black Sea shores was not always easy. The Greeks liked their city-state social model and did not (unlike the Macedonians) go in for large-scale kingdoms. Therefore almost every colony was perched on the coast (‘like frogs around a pond’ said Plato) and had a large and wild hinterland. Some accommodation had to be reached with the tribes of the interior, and this usually involved paying some form of tribute in return for protection. This was not a particularly stable form of peace, and recently things had become much worse. The sources for what was happening in the Crimea at this time are fragmentary and scarce, but it appears that social order in what is now southern Russia had broken down due to large-scale tribal movements and, as a result, the Scythians of the Crimean interior were under pressure.

The Scythians responded to this pressure by transferring it to the Greek cities, both in raids for booty, and demands for ever-greater sums for protection that was often not given. The Greeks fought back, sometimes militarily, sometimes politically by forming alliances between themselves or with the Sarmatians, another tribe of horse-warriors who specialized in heavy cavalry. However, the Scythians were extraordinarily well organized under a capable king, and is seems probable that at least one Greek city, Olbia, vulnerable
through its northern location, surrendered itself to the direct control of the Scythians. The two most powerful city-states of the area, Chersonesus and the Bosphoran kingdom, had their backs to the wall and seemed doomed to fall. Indeed, Chersonesus was probably sacked by barbarians from the interior some time just after 120 BC. In desperation the Greeks turned to their trading partners on the other side of the Black Sea; Sinope, Trapezus, and Amisus, and asked for help. These cities passed on the request to their ruler Mithridates, who happened to have an army available at that moment.
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It is fair to say that Mithridates was delighted by this request, since his ancestor Pharnarces I had tried and failed to establish Pontic hegemony in the Chersonese, and now the very people who had led the resistance were begging for him to take charge. Pharnarces had ended his Crimean adventure by signing a treaty in which he promised to help Chersonesus in time of peril, and now his descendant cheerfully delivered on that promise. He sent his army under the command of one Diophantus of Sinope, a competent general, and, as events proved, also a capable diplomat. Diophantus might have been even more talented yet, but the literary work by a Diophantus from this period, called the
Pontica
, cannot be said to be his.