Mithridates the Great (8 page)

Either the bribes worked, the Romans were sufficiently embarrassed by their treatment of the Pontic embassy, or they were just too preoccupied with the problems of their failing Republic to worry much about Cappadocia at that point. In any case, Mithridates was temporarily left with a free hand. Which he needed. The new, young Cappadocian king was not prepared to return to the status quo and adamantly refused to let his kingdom be ruled by Gordias, the man who had assassinated his father.

Possibly with the help of Armenia, and almost certainly with covert assistance from Nicomedes and Laodice, the young king managed to assemble an army in remarkably short time. With this at his back, he boldly asserted his independence and that of his kingdom. Mithridates accepted the challenge. Nevertheless, he professed his admiration for the skill and energy of his relative, and asked for a chance for the two to meet in person, and see if the diplomatic crisis could not be sorted out by uncle and nephew talking face-to-face.

Ariarathes agreed, but knowing his family well, added the provisos that neither was to be accompanied by a bodyguard, and his uncle should undergo a thorough body search before the meeting. So comprehensive was this body search that it verged upon the intimate, and only ended when Mithridates irritably asked exactly what kind of ‘weapon’ his searcher was hoping to discover in the king’s trousers. In fact, as the unfortunate Ariarathes was to discover, the correct answer should have been ‘the short, but quite adequately effective knife which his majesty has strapped to his private parts’. Given that Mithridates was a physically powerful individual even when unarmed, it can be assumed that the family meeting was brief, brutal and bloody. Afterwards Mithridates informed the opposing army that they no longer had a king to lead them, and the enemy melted away without a fight.
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All this left a vacancy for the throne of Cappadocia. Mithridates chose to fill the post with his eight-year-old son, perhaps hoping that his own child might be inspired by the family loyalty so lacking in his mother, sister/wife, brother and nephew. Taking a leaf from Nicomedes’ book, he gave the child the name Ariarathes IX. Undeterred, Nicomedes produced another Ariarathes of his own, the brother of the murdered king who had been hoping to live out his life peacefully in Asia. For a while the two kings each ‘ruled’ Cappadocia, issuing coins as though sole monarch – a situation which lasted as long as it took the generals of Mithridates to find and defeat the Bithynian claimant. With this man’s death the line of genuine Ariarathid kings came to an end, though this did not stop the enterprising Nicomedes from producing another ‘Ariarathes’, albeit one of patently synthetic pedigree and setting him up in opposition to the (equally false) Pontic Ariarathes.

It was inevitable that once the German menace had been seen off, the Romans would return their attention to the shenanigans in Cappadocia. The general principally responsible for defeating the Germans was Marius, and some time in 99 or 98 BC Marius travelled to Asia Minor, allegedly to fulfil a vow made during the German war. More probably, Marius either correctly divined that Asia Minor would be the scene of Rome’s next major war, or he was assessing the chances of discreetly provoking that war himself and so earning greater wealth and glory as the commander who won it. Plutarch says that when Marius met with Mithridates, though Mithridates treated him with all deference and respect, the king was bluntly warned by the Roman that Pontus would come to grief ‘unless it became greater than Rome, or did as it was commanded in silence’.
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Shortly thereafter came news that the Romans were thoroughly unimpressed by the fake genealogies with which both Mithridates and Nicomedes had equipped the embassies sent to Rome to argue the case for their different versions of Ariarathes. Mithridates was to get out of Cappadocia at once, and take his puppet king with him. Bithynia was to stop interfering with the succession, leaving the Cappadocians free to be ruled as they pleased. And while they were about it, Nicomedes and Mithridates could get out of Paphlagonia and allow self-rule to that region as well.

With their customary tactlessness, the Romans made it plain that this was not a matter for discussion or prevarication. They had a large veteran army available, and nothing pressing for it to do at that moment. Mithridates considered his options, and the advice of Marius, and did as he was commanded in silence. The Cappadocian nobility, unaccustomed to any other form of government, chose to remain a monarchy. They selected a king from their own number: Ariobarzanes, the first of his line. It is unknown how Ariobarzanes felt about his elevation, but he would have been very unwise to assume that he would be left to rule his new kingdom in peace. In fact Mithridates was already working to depose him, and had elected to do so by invoking a force heretofore quiescent in the affairs of the region –Armenia.

Armenia

Armenia had been quiet because it had been thoroughly under the thumb of the Parthians, and the Parthians had enough problems with digesting their new conquests without looking for trouble with the well-organized, militarily competent and relatively inaccessible kingdoms of Asia Minor.

Though virtually a client kingdom, Armenia still required a king, and so,
about 100 BC, the Parthians released the heir to the Armenian kingdom, who had grown up in Parthia as a hostage to his future realm’s good behaviour. This was Tigranes II, son of the previous ruler, the first Tigranes. In return for coming into his kingdom, Tigranes II had to yield to Parthia the rule of ‘seventy valleys’, though it is uncertain where these valleys were and how much of a loss they represented to Armenia.

By now aged about forty, Tigranes almost immediately started to make up for lost time. His first task was to take his kingdom in hand and wrest control from the powerful barons who were virtually kings in their own fiefdoms. Demonstrating the ability and ambition which was to earn him the suffix of ‘the Great’, Tigranes quickly rallied the kingdom behind him. He boosted his military credibility and compensated for the loss of the seventy valleys by conquering the principality of Sophene on the southeastern border of Cappadocia. It was probably this which brought him to the attention of Mithridates, whose kingdom abutted Armenia in Armenia minor, east Pontus and Colchis. The two kings recognized one another as kindred spirits and, soon after, Tigranes married Mithridates’ daughter. This lass was called Cleopatra, a name to be made famous by a later queen of Egypt, but at the time recalling a sister of Alexander the Great – an interesting pointer to how Mithridates portrayed himself in his early propaganda.

Tigranes was deeply interested in affairs to the south of his borders, where the collapse of the Seleucid empire seemed to offer considerable potential for expansion. At the same time, Tigranes’ contacts in the Parthian court would have brought him word of Parthian distraction on their eastern borders due to invading tribes of horsemen (the ancestors of Atilla the Hun). Yet for all this wealth of opportunity, one was conspicuous in its temptation. That was for Tigranes to accept the invitation of his new father-in-law to invade and conquer Cappadocia. There can be little doubt that this invasion was paid for with Pontic silver. Three years after Ariobarzanes accepted the Cappadocian throne, he was on the run and Gordias, henchman of Mithridates, was back in charge.
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Mithridates had scrupulously obeyed Roman orders. He had kept out of Cappadocia while Armenia invaded it and placed a Pontic puppet in power, and he could disingenuously claim total innocence for the actions of his son-in-law. In short, Mithridates had contrived to simultaneously obey Roman orders and make Rome look foolish to its allies and subjects in the region. This was a dangerous game to play, and Mithridates must have been aware that Roman patience was wearing very thin.

* Nicomedes was later to reply tartly to a Roman request for military help by saying that he had no population left to help with - Roman debt collectors had hauled the lot off into slavery

Chapter 3

The First Clash with Rome

Early Skirmishes

As it happened, the right man was on hand to deal with the Cappadocian situation. This was Lucius Cornelius Sulla, propraetor of Rome, who was already on his way to Asia Minor to have a go at sorting out the perennial pirate problem in Cilicia. Sulla was from an ancient family of Roman aristocrats which had fallen on hard times. At first Sulla had shown little sign of wanting to change the family fortune, having spent his youth as a hard-drinking wastrel with a taste for the uninhibited life of the theatre folk with whom he often caroused. Yet, once he received a large inheritance from a wealthy mistress, Sulla suddenly reconsidered his place in the world and embarked on a political career. Serving with the army (as did almost every Roman with political aspirations), Sulla played a key role in ending the war with Jugurtha in Africa. He was charged with extracting the renegade king from the court of Bocchus of Mauritania, where Jugurtha had taken refuge. For a while it was touch and go whether Sulla would be handed over to Jugurtha or the other way around, but Sulla’s diplomacy and the implicit backing of the Roman legions carried the day.

Sulla’s success was not received with total enthusiasm by his envious commander, the glory-hungry Marius. When Rome turned to cope with the threat of the German invasion, Sulla found himself so firmly sidelined by Marius that he abandoned his former commander, and served with considerable distinction under another general. The Asian command on which Sulla was now embarked was partly his reward for his earlier conduct.

The senate’s changed orders instructed Sulla to restore Ariobarzanes to his throne, but gave him no additional resources with which to do this. In fact, apart from a legion fruitlessly toiling away against the pirates in Cilicia, Rome had only a minimal military presence in Asia Minor at this time. Roman diplomacy was based on the principle, universally understood after a century of hard lessons taught to a variety of Mediterranean states, that if Rome did have to get to the point of sending a major military force, diplomatic relations would
only be resumed once the legions were encamped in the capital of the offending kingdom – and normally after installing the successor of the ruler who had caused the problem in the first place.

As a means of projecting military power at minimal cost this was highly effective, but it meant that in low-intensity warfare, Roman commanders were often left to make bricks without straw; having to enforce the will of Rome without troops to do the job. This was the situation in which Sulla found himself. Most of the troops he eventually assembled into a small army were supporters of Ariobarzanes, Bithynian levies and auxiliaries from Pergamum. Meanwhile, Mithridates had seconded Archelaus, one of his most competent generals, to the assistance of Gordias.

At least once, this got Sulla into considerable difficulty. Struggling to get to grips with unfamiliar terrain, the ‘Roman’ force suddenly found itself in a weak position, facing a large number of enemies who knew the land intimately. Sulla resorted to a trick he was to use again in later years. He asked for a truce and negotiations. With the enemy relaxed, he quietly pulled his troops back to safer ground. Thereafter Sulla’s biographer, Plutarch, assures us that Sulla hit his stride and with ‘considerable slaughter of Cappadocians, and even more of their Armenian allies’ restored Ariobarzanes and expelled Gordias. Interestingly, Plutarch explicitly tells us that although the operation was ostensibly against the Armenian occupation of Cappadocia, the real objective of the senate was to check the growing power of Mithridates.
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His immediate objective achieved, Sulla – with Ariobarzanes in tow - proceeded to the banks of the Euphrates, where he established Rome’s first formal diplomatic ties with the Parthian empire.

Meanwhile, back in Bithynia, Nicomedes III had died. It was too much to expect his successor, Nicomedes IV, to lose interest in Cappadocia as he had married a niece of Mithridates (a daughter whom Mithridates’ older sister had managed to conceive by Ariarathes VI before Mithridates had him assassinated). In fact, it is highly probable that Nicomedes IV contributed to the Pontic disappointment in Cappadocia by lending troops to support Sulla, and if we are to believe the later charges laid against Mithridates by Nicomedes, the Pontic king reciprocated by sending an assassin to deal with Nicomedes in the same way as his father-in-law had been disposed of. The assassin failed.

Yet every change of monarch in a Hellenistic kingdom created disappointed supporters of failed candidates, and adherents of the old regime displaced by those of the new. The same situation was true of Bithynia,
where the biggest loser after the death of Nicomedes III was Socrates, bastard brother of the king, who had become so indispensable during the last years of Nicomedes’ rule as to have been virtually a co-monarch. Displaced by Nicomedes IV, Socrates appealed to Rome for support, but was turned down by the senate. Instead he found a ready backer in Mithridates. In purely nominal deference to Rome, the Pontic king stood ostentatiously clear of the action as Socrates mysteriously acquired money and a Pontic army, thinly disguised as ‘mercenaries’, which swept him to power. Unable to resist the overwhelming force which Socrates had at his disposal, Nicomedes fled to the Romans. The Romans offered political support, loans of money (at interest), but at that point still had nothing like the military muscle in the region to match Pontus.

The Road to War

In the years approaching 90 BC, Mithridates appears to have become steadily more assertive and aggressive. His confrontations with Rome now took place behind ever more threadbare proxies, and he made almost no attempt to disguise his motivation. Given that Rome was considerably less than popular in the Greek East, this attitude of near-outright defiance gained Mithridates ever-increasing support from the cities and peoples of the region, as numerous pro-Pontic inscriptions and dedications attest.
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The Romans noted with concern that Pontus was levying large numbers of troops and also actively recruiting allies from among the Sarmatian and Thracian tribes. Meanwhile, a large-scale ship-building programme had given Pontus naval supremacy in the Black Sea, and potentially much further afield. It was unlikely that Armenia, a steadfast Pontic ally, was targeted for conquest. Further east was also unlikely and Pontus had expanded as far as was sensible to the north and northeast.