Mithridates the Great (14 page)

Even in Attica, Archelaus was reluctant to lose contact with the sea. He made his main base at the harbour of Athens, Piraeus, rather than in the city itself. With his supply lines secure, the walls strengthened, and reinforcements on the way, Archelaus hunkered down to weather the Roman storm.

This left Sulla with something of a quandary. He was master of most of Greece, but in order to remain master, he had to stay on the premises. He could not fight the Pontics, because there were none to fight. One lot were dug in behind the walls of the Piraeus, and the second army was currently somewhere in western Thrace, preparing to meet the two legions which the Roman governor of Macedonia was nervously bracing for the defence of his province.

Yet time was not on Sulla’s side. His army was at its best and eager for action but it expected to be paid regularly, even when it was simply sitting around. With the purse-strings in Rome firmly in the grip of Sulla’s enemies, pay had to come from booty, and booty had to come from enemies,
who were currently in short supply. Furthermore, Sulla’s
imperium
, his official period of command, was only for a year. This might be extended unilaterally into a second year as a proconsular command, but after that it was going to dawn on even the most loyal of Sulla’s followers that their general had no actual legal basis for commanding his army. And questions about exactly what gave Sulla the right to lead an army of Rome would become more pointed more quickly if Sulla could not notch up some solid achievements whilst he was (at least in the eyes of his army, if not of the government in Rome) officially consul.

Therefore, Sulla decided to spend the autumn of 87 BC conquering Athens. Militarily, this was not strictly essential. Certainly Sulla would not want a hostile base behind him when he moved north, but his main motivation was political. He wanted to be seen as the man who had driven Mithridates out of Greece, and whilst Athens was fallen from its former glory, it still had enough lootable wealth to sustain his army until the main Pontic force arrived. Both Sulla and his men would have been encouraged by a report which reached them at about this time.

Mithridates, a connoisseur of both theatre and music, was in Pergamum at a performance in the theatre. The city fathers had staged an event where Mithridates was to stand on the stage and receive a crown from Nike, the goddess of victory. The goddess was literally a
dea ex machina
, a goddess from the machine - a statue which, crown in hand, was winched down from the overhead awnings. Just as the goddess was about to place the crown on Mithridates’ head, she broke apart. The crown dropped from her hand, hit the ground and shattered.x
¹
The symbolism did not need an expert in omens to translate, especially as Sulla was embarking for Greece at about the same time.

Athens and the Piraeus

The siege of Athens later that year was a premier league affair. The Pontic army had known nothing but victory, and was both tough and well generalled. It had strong walls and high morale to sustain it. The Romans had Sulla, now on his fourth campaign, and, like their commander, were themselves veterans of the war of 90 BC, which, having been fought between equals of the highest military ability, had brought the Roman army to a pitch of excellence not seen since the Hannibalic war of a century before.

Sulla’s first move was to rip through the lines of communication between Athens and Piraeus. The ‘long walls’ which Pericles had built half a
millennium before to connect Athens to its harbour were no longer up to the job, and consequently, though Archelaus in Piraeus could still count on being supplied from the sea, the Athenians under Ariston could not. This did not stop Ariston himself from mounting the walls and mocking Sulla to the full extent of his Greek eloquence. The Athenians took to referring to Sulla’s complexion as ‘oatmeal sprinkled with mulberries’, and any Roman soldier who looked at his commanding officer could confirm for himself that the blonde Sulla had not exactly bronzed under the Greek sun.
²

Athens could be left to starve, but the Piraeus needed to be stormed. Without hesitation the Romans set about doing just that. If the Pontics were surprised by the promptness and ferocity of the assault, the Romans were equally startled by the bravery and vehemence of the defence. There were substantial casualties on both sides, but in the end, the deciding factor was the walls of Piraeus. These were made of massive stone blocks and were up to fifty feet high in places. Baffled, the Romans fell back to Megara to lick their wounds, and came to the conclusion that more than mere siege ladders were going to be required to surmount this particular obstacle.

Now aware of the extent of the problem, Sulla set about preparing Plan B with skill, determination and the ruthless lack of scruples which was his trademark when crossed. This was not his first siege operation. During the Social War he had captured Praenestae by decorating his siege engines with the heads of slain enemy captains mounted on spears, so in this case he hardly hesitated before hacking down the legendary groves of Academe in the suburbs of Athens. The trees which had once shaded philosophers such as Plato and Parmenides were converted to siege engines so numerous that Plutarch says 10,000 yoke of mules were needed to haul them into position.

Thebes was pressed into service as a factory, churning out and repairing catapults and their ammunition. At the same time, the soldiers were turned into navvies and given the task of building a siege mound to nullify the advantage the Pontics gained from the height of the walls. Sulla had a secondary motive for this. According to Frontinus, a later writer, Sulla’s men had been deeply discouraged by their first attempt and had decided that Piraeus was unassailable. Their general’s response was to give them so many tedious tasks that, by the time he was ready for the next assault, not only was everything ready to the last detail but the men were positively clamouring for the attack to begin.

Sulla believed that the gods would provide funding for this massive, and correspondingly expensive, operation. Not that Sulla was particularly
devout - quite the contrary. He sent messengers to the great sanctuaries of Greece, blandly informing them that in these troubled times it was not safe for so much treasure to be left about lightly guarded, and that the treasure should be handed over to him forthwith for safe keeping. Amongst the booty from Delphi, Sulla found a small statuette of a goddess that took his particular fancy and it became his habit before battle to pray publicly to the statuette for victory.

Within Piraeus Sulla found unexpected allies. Two slaves decided that their fortunes might be better served by taking the Roman side. Consequently they mounted the ramparts and enthusiastically hurled lead slingshots at the Romans. The legionaries only discovered the friendly intent behind this when they found the messages engraved on the missiles. One such message read: ‘Tomorrow expect a sally against your siege works whilst the cavalry hit your army on both flanks’. So matters did indeed come to pass and Sulla, always happy to exploit betrayal among his enemies, made sure that things went badly for both sets of attackers.

This sally was one of many mounted by the spirited Pontic defence. Archelaus had no intention of sitting passively behind his walls. Mithridates was sending him a steady trickle of reinforcements and Archelaus’ confidence grew with their numbers. The siege mound received particular attention, but, after the success of the first strikes, Archelaus observed that the mound was extremely well-guarded and any damage he inflicted was speedily repaired. He therefore took the (literally) more constructive approach of building a tower of his own opposite the mound, and as Sulla’s earthworks grew, so did the walls it was meant to surmount.

Finally, following the arrival of a particularly large contingent which Mithridates had dispatched under the command of one Dromichaetes, almost an entire army was pent up behind the walls of Piraeus. This led Archelaus to test the Roman strength. He waited until Sulla had found fault with a particular legion and sent it off on wood-gathering duties, then led his army out of the gates. He did not go too far, having reinforcements positioned at sally ports within the walls and ensuring that his entire force benefited from covering fire from the archers and slingers on the ramparts. Archelaus himself led the sally and, by force of personality, pulled his troops together when they started to buckle. A ferocious fight ensued with the advantage going first to one side and then the other, with Sulla’s lieutenant, Murena, forced at one point to plunge into the fray to steady a legion as it began to break.

Finally the wood-cutting detail returned and, perceiving the situation, exchanged firewood for swords to make a concerted charge. By now the Pontics were tiring and the arrival of fresh enemies forced them back within the walls, having suffered some 2,000 casualties. Archelaus himself stood his ground for so long that the gates had to be closed in his face to stop the Romans following him into the fort, and the furious general had to be hauled over the ramparts on a rope.

Winter set in but there was no slackening the pace of the siege. As fast as the Romans constructed entrenchments and earthworks, Pontic sallies knocked them down and filled them in. Winter storms came laced with additional showers of arrows, javelins and lead shot, ferried in by regular supply convoys from Euboea. Unfortunately for the Athenians, the plenty in Piraeus was mirrored by desperate want in Athens. Cut off by Sulla’s armies, the Athenians were starting to boil leather boots and belts, and to gather edible weeds from about the temples. Negotiators sent to Sulla got a few paragraphs into their prepared speeches when the Roman general curtly informed them that he was there to teach the rebels obedience, not to learn rhetoric from them.

The contrast between the situation in Athens and Piraeus finally convinced Sulla, who was, like many Romans, a landlubber to the core, of the importance of sea power. He sent to Rhodes, Rome’s traditional naval ally, demanding ships with which to choke off the Pontic naval supply line. The Rhodians replied that they had too few ships to break the Mithridatic blockade on their island, let alone give Sulla naval superiority in Athens. Unstated but implicit in this reply was the observation that the Romans might like to think a little more deeply next time before they decided their allies were too unreliable to be trusted with a navy.
^*

It was a sign of the importance that he now attributed to sea-power that Sulla chose his second-in-command, Lucullus, for a mission to gather ships. Basically, Lucullus’ task was to assemble a scratch navy from whatever he could find floating in the eastern Mediterranean, and to extort, bribe or demand ships from allied and neutral states, starting with Egypt. Sulla hoped that the Ptolemies were suitably nettled by the loss of their treasure to Mithridates at Cos, and were in any case sufficiently worried about the extent of Mithridates’ new empire and further ambitions to help the Romans. Accordingly, Lucullus was ordered to make for Alexandria, notwithstanding that the sea between him and his destination was swarming with pro-Pontic pirates and Mithridates’ own ships.

There was no slackening of the pace of the siege. Both sides showed considerable energy and initiative, as was shown by the incident in which a
Roman patrol observed that the guards on a particular section of wall had dozed off. They promptly alerted the rest of their cohort, who furtively returned with siege ladders. The sleep of the sentries was converted to a more permanent repose, but, before the promising opportunity could be exploited, the Romans were spotted and thrown off the walls in a fierce and chaotic fight. Some of the Pontics, observing that the Romans were distracted, charged out and took the opportunity to ignite a few siege engines. With honours even after this spirited exchange, everyone settled down for the rest of the night.

Soon afterwards came the long-awaited battle of the two towers, as Sulla moved his machine to take on the Pontic tower within the Piraeus fortifications. An epic battle of men and siege engines followed, which was eventually won by the Romans, who used a sort of spring-powered blunderbuss to fire huge lead balls at the enemy in volleys of twenty at a time. With the Pontic tower becoming distinctly wobbly, Archelaus was forced to pull it out of the fight.

Then it was the turn of the siege mound. This had been going up faster than the wall opposite, and now had reached the point where Sulla could mount a formidable array of catapults on his new firing point. Infuriatingly, just as all was ready, the mound subsided into the earth. The Pontics had been digging under the mound as fast as the Romans had been piling the earth on top, so it all had to be done again. First, however, there came the grim business of counter-mining, in which groups of soldiers fought vicious battles underground, swapping shovels for swords as they dug into the enemy’s tunnels. Finally, when the mounds were able to support battering rams securely, the Romans launched another major assault and managed to break part of the wall and set a tower on fire. Another hellish fight followed for possession of the building whilst it was still ablaze.

Meanwhile, Sulla had been doing some undermining of his own. A number of tunnels had reached the foundations of Piraeus’ walls, and these walls were now supported by solid Roman props of timber. The props were soaked in oil and ignited at random intervals, so that the defenders could never be sure whether the section of wall they were fighting on might not suddenly cave in and take them down in the collapse. Archelaus rallied his men magnificently, even as Sulla threw wave after wave of attackers at the breaches. Between the irresistible Roman army and the immovable Pontic defence, something had to give. In the end it was the exhausted Romans who called it a day.

As soon as the Romans pulled back, Pontic stone workers swarmed over the
breaches, knowing that the Romans would be back to try again before the damp masonry could properly set. Sure enough, the next day the Romans threw themselves at the walls once again and smashed their way through the Pontic repairs – just as Archelaus had expected. Behind the breaches were new fortifications, curved like dam walls to hold back the Roman flood. But these curves were concave, so the attacking Romans faced a hail of missiles not only from the front, but from the sides as well. Realizing that these defences (known in the siegemaster’s trade as ‘lunettes’) were literal death traps, Sulla pulled his army back, and turned his malevolent attention on Athens.