The Grass Crown (92 page)

Athens is now completely mine, including the Piraeus. Unfortunately the Roman elements and my avowed enemies fled before I could lay hands on them, but those who were foolish enough to stay—mostly rich Athenians who could not be brought to believe they stood in danger—have perished. I have confiscated all property belonging to the exiled and the dead, and put it into a fund to finance our war against the Romans.

What I promised my voters I would do, I have to do, but it will not inconvenience your own campaign, O Great King. I promised to take the island of Delos back from the Romans who now run it. Wonderfully profitable emporium that it is, the income from it was what kept Athens so affluent at the height of her power. At the beginning of Gamelion, my friend Apellicon (an excellent admiral and a skilled general) will mount an expedition against Delos. A rotten apple, the island will have no chance against us.

And that is all for the present, my Lord and Master. The city of Athens is yours and the port of the Piraeus is open for your ships when and if you need them.

The King did need them, the Piraeus and the city of Athens behind it, connected by the Long Walls. For at the end of Quinctilis—Gamelion to the Greeks—the fleets of Archelaus issued out of the Hellespont and spilled down the western side of the Aegean Sea. They numbered three hundred decked war galleys of three or more banks, over one hundred undecked two-banker biremes, and fifteen hundred transports stuffed with troops and marines. Archelaus wasted no thought for the Asia Province littoral, as it was already in the hands of his King. He was intent upon establishing the Pontic presence in Greece so that the body of Macedonia would be crushed between two Pontic armies—his own in Greece and that of Young Ariarathes in the eastern part of Macedonia.

Young Ariarathes had also kept to the timetable given to him by his father, the King. At the end of Quinctilis he transported his hundred thousand men across the Hellespont and began to march along the narrow coastal strip of Thracian Macedonia, using the Roman engineered and built Via Egnatia. He found himself completely unopposed, set up permanent bases at Abdera on the sea and Philippi slightly inland, and continued westward toward the first formidable Roman settlement, the governor’s city of Thessalonica.

And at the end of Quinctilis the Roman, Latin and Italian citizens resident in Bithynia, Asia Province, Phrygia and Pisidia were murdered down to the last man, woman, child, slave. In this most secret of his three orders Mithridates had displayed great cunning. For instead of using his own men to implement it, the King had directed that each local community of Aeolian or Ionian or Dorian Greeks should do the killing. Many areas hailed the decree with joy and experienced no difficulty assembling a force of volunteers eager to kill their Roman oppressors. But other areas were aghast and found it impossible to persuade anyone to kill Romans. In Tralles, the ethnarch was obliged to hire a band of Phrygian mercenaries to do murder on behalf of Tralles; other reluctant districts followed suit, hoping thus to transfer the guilt to the shoulders of strangers.

Eighty thousand Roman, Latin and Italian citizens and their families died in one single day, and seventy thousand slaves. The slaughter went on from Nicomedia in Bithynia all the way to Cnidus in Caria and as far inland as Apameia. No one was spared; nor was anyone hidden and assisted to flee; terror of King Mithridates far outweighed human compassion. Had Mithridates used his own soldiers to carry out the massacre, the blame for it would have rested with Mithridates entirely; but by forcing the Greek communities to do his dirty work for him, he ensured that they too would bear the blame. And the Greeks understood the King’s reasoning perfectly. Life with King Mithridates of Pontus suddenly didn’t seem any better than life with Rome, despite the remission of taxes.

Many of the persecuted sought asylum in temples, only to find no asylum was offered; they were carried out and dispatched still crying to this god or that god for refuge. Refusing to leave go of altars or statues and continuing to cling with fingers made superhuman by terror, some had their hands chopped off before being dragged away from holy ground and put to death.

Worst of all was the concluding clause of the general order of execution personally sealed by King Mithridates: no Roman or Latin or Italian or slave of Roman or Latin or Italian was to be burned or buried. The corpses were taken as far from human habitation as possible and left to rot in ravines, closed valleys, on the tops of mountains, and at the bottom of the sea. Eighty thousand Romans and Latins and Italians and seventy thousand slaves. One hundred and fifty thousand people. The birds of the air and the scavengers of earth and water dined well that Sextilis, for not one community dared to disobey and bury its victims; King Mithridates took great pleasure in journeying from place to place to view the enormous heaps of dead.

Just a very few Romans did escape death. These were the exiles, stripped of their citizenships and sentenced not to return to Rome. And among them they included one Publius Rutilius Rufus, friend of the Roman great, currently citizen of Smyrna held in honor and respect, producer of scurrilous pen portraits of men like Catulus Caesar and Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle.

All in all, thought King Mithridates at the beginning of the month of Anthesterion, which was Sextilis to the Romans, things could not have looked better. His satraps were ensconced in the seats of government from Miletus to Andramyttium in Asia Province, and across the border in Bithynia. No more kings would be forthcoming for Bithynia. The only candidate Mithridates might have permitted to ascend the throne was dead. After Socrates returned to Pontus he irritated the King by whining incessantly, and was put to death to shut him up. The whole of Anatolia north of Lycia, Pamphylia and Cilicia now belonged to Pontus, and the rest would be his very soon.

Nothing, however, pleased the King quite as much as did the massacre of the Romans and Latins and Italians. Every time he came across another place where thousands of bodies had been dumped to rot, he beamed, he laughed, he rejoiced. He had made no distinction between Roman and Italian, despite the fact that he knew Rome and Italy were at war. A phenomenon no one was better able to understand than Mithridates—it was brother against brother, with power the prize.

Yes, everything was going splendidly. His son Young Mithridates was regent in Pontus (though the prudent King had taken his son’s wife and children along on his march to Asia Province just to make sure Young Mithridates behaved himself); his son Ariarathes was King of Cappadocia; Phrygia, Bithynia, Galatia, and Paphlagonia were all royal satrapies under the personal rule of some of his elder sons; and his son-in-law Tigranes of Armenia was at liberty to do as he pleased east of Cappadocia as long as he didn’t tread on the Pontic toes. Let Tigranes conquer Syria and Egypt; it would keep him busy. Mithridates frowned. In Egypt the populace would tolerate no foreign king. Which meant a puppet Ptolemy. If such a personage could be found. But certainly the queens of Egypt would be descendants of Mithridates; no daughter of Tigranes could be allowed to usurp a position destined for a daughter of Mithridates.

Most impressive of all was the success of the King’s fleets—if, that is, he ignored the miserable failure of Aristion and his “excellent admiral and skilled general” Apellicon; the Athenian invasion of Delos had turned into a fiasco. But having taken the islands of the Cyclades, Archelaus’s admiral Metrophanes went on to take Delos and put another twenty thousand Romans, Latins, and Italians to death there. The Pontic general then bestowed Delos upon Athens to make sure that Aristion stayed in power; the Pontic fleets needed the Piraeus as their western base.

All Euboea was now in Pontic hands, as was the island of Sciathos and a great deal of Thessaly around the Bay of Pagasae, including the vital ports of Demetrias and Methone. Because of their northern Greek conquests, Pontic forces were able to block the roads from Thessaly into central Greece, a discomfort which decided most of the rest of Greece to declare for Mithridates. The Peloponnese, Boeotia, Laconia, and all of Attica now hailed the King of Pontus fervently as their deliverer from the Romans—and sat back, pure spectators, to watch the armies and fleets of Mithridates crush Macedonia like a boot on a beetle.

But the crushing of Macedonia proved—for the time being, anyway—an impossibility. Caught between a suddenly antagonistic Greece and the advancing Pontic land forces on the Via Egnatia, Gaius Sentius and Quintus Bruttius Sura didn’t panic, didn’t concede defeat. They hustled to call up as many auxiliaries as they could, and put them into camp alongside the two Roman legions which were all Macedonia had to counter Mithridates. Pontus would not take Macedonia without paying a bitter price.

Late summer began to be a little boring for King Mithridates, now well ensconced in Pergamum and undisputed master of Asia Minor. The only interesting thing left to do was to visit the various human hills of dead, and the most imposing of those monuments he had already seen. Except, he realized, the district further up the river Caicus above which Pergamum sat. There were two towns in Asia Province named Stratoniceia. The greater of them, situated in Caria, was still stubbornly holding out against a Pontic besieging force. The lesser Stratoniceia lay further inland than Pergamum upon the Caicus, and vowed itself completely loyal to Mithridates. So when the King rode into the town, its people turned out en masse to cheer him and throw flower petals before his triumphant progress.

In the crowd he set eyes upon a Greek girl called Monima, and had her brought to him immediately. So pale was her coloring that her hair seemed white and her brows and lashes invisible, which endowed her with an oddly bald kind of beauty; one close look, and the King added her to his wives, so rare and strange was she, with her lustrous dark pink eyes. He encountered no opposition from her father, Philopoemon, especially after he took Philopoemon south with him (and Monima) to Ephesus, where the King installed his father-in-law as satrap of the region.

Enjoying the diversions Ephesus was famous for—and enjoying his albino bride too—the King devoted enough time to business to send a laconic message to Rhodes demanding that it surrender itself and the refugee governor, Gaius Cassius Longinus. The answer, swiftly delivered, was a firm no to both requests; Rhodes was a Friend and Ally of the Roman People, and would honor its commitment to the death if necessary.

For the first time since he had set his campaign in motion, Mithridates had a temper tantrum. While his Pontic court and the more enterprising of the Ephesian sycophants cowered, the King ranted up and down his audience chamber until his rage blew out and he subsided to a glowering mass upon his throne, chin in hand, lips pouting, the marks of tears upon his fleshy cheeks.

From that moment he lost interest in every other enterprise he had started; he bent his energies exclusively upon securing the submission of Rhodes. How dared it say no to him! Did such a little place as Rhodes think it could hold out against the might of Pontus? Well, soon it would find out it didn’t stand a chance.

His own fleets were too heavily involved in maneuvers on the western side of the Aegean to tap into their numbers for such an insignificant campaign as the one against little island Rhodes; so instead the King demanded that Smyrna, Ephesus, Priene, Miletus, Halicarnassus and the islands of Chios and Samos donate him all the ships he needed. Of land troops he had plenty, as he had kept two armies in Asia Province; but thanks to the dogged resistance of Lycian Patara and Termessus, he could not get those troops to the logical place from which to launch a land invasion of Rhodes—namely the beaches and coves of Lycia. The Rhodian navy was deservedly formidable of reputation, and was concentrated upon the western side of Rhodes overlooking that sea which washed down from Halicarnassus and Cnidus. But, unable to use Lycia, down these sea-lanes must the invasion forces of Mithridates pass.

He demanded transports by the hundreds and as many war galleys as Asia Province could find, ordering that they congregate in Halicarnassus—to which city, so beloved of Gaius Marius, he brought one of his armies for embarkation. And at the end of September he sailed, his own gigantic completely enclosed “sixteener” in the midst of the crowd, easily distinguished by the gold and purple throne erected under a canopy on the poop. Here he sat, master of all he surveyed, and reveling in it.

Cumbersome and slow though the biggest of the warships were, still any armed galley moved faster than the transports, a motley collection of all kinds of coastal cargo boats never designed to do more than hug the contours of bays and headlands. Thus by the time the forerunners of the fleet rounded the tip of the Cnidan peninsula and faced the open water of the Carpathian Sea, the enormous number of vessels was strung out all the way back to Halicarnassus, where the last of the transports were even then just leaving harbor, packed with terrified Pontic soldiers.

Manning light and very fast trireme galleys which were only partially decked, the Rhodian navy appeared on the horizon and headed straight for the makeshift Pontic fleet. It was no part of Rhodian sea tactics to employ the kind of heavy “sixteener” in which King Mithridates himself sat. These capital ships carried vast numbers of marines and many pieces of artillery; but the Rhodians despised the efficacy of artillery in sea battles and didn’t keep still for long enough to allow their ships to be boarded by marines. The Rhodian navy’s reputation had been won because of the speed and the extreme maneuverability of its vessels, able to dart at will between lumbering capital ships; the crews could stroke so strongly on a ramming charge that sheer speed more than compensated for lack of weight, and the bronze-reinforced oaken beak of a Rhodian trireme could drive deeply into the side of the heftiest “sixteener.” Holing the enemy’s ships was the only way to win decisively at sea, said the Rhodians.

When the Pontic fleet sighted the Rhodian navy, all was readied for a mighty battle. But it appeared Rhodes was only attempting a sally, for after making the Pontic galleys dizzy at the speed of their gyrations, the Rhodians turned and made off without doing more than stoving in the sides of two particularly inept five-bankers. However, before the Rhodians did depart the scene, they succeeded in giving King Mithridates the fright of his life. This was actually his first engagement at sea; he had done all his sailing within the Euxine, where not even the sauciest pirate would have dared to attack a ship of the Pontic navy.

Excited and fascinated, the King sat upon his gold and purple throne with his eyes trying to go everywhere at once; it did not occur to him that he himself stood in any danger. He had swiveled to his extreme left to watch the antics of a superbly sailed Rhodian galley some distance off his stern when his own huge ship lurched, groaned, shuddered convulsively, and the sounds of many oars snapping off like twigs became intermingled with cries of dismay and alarm.

His sudden and utterly overwhelming panic was over almost before it began; but not quickly enough. In the midst of his brief yet total terror, the King of Pontus shat himself. It went everywhere, solid faeces mixed with what seemed an incredible amount of more liquid bowel contents, a stinking brown mess all over the gold-encrusted purple cloth of his cushion, trickling down the legs of his throne, running down his own legs into the manes of the golden lions upon the flaps of his boots, pooling and plopping on the deck around his feet when he jumped up. And there was nowhere to go! He could not conceal it from the amazed eyes of his attendants and officers, he could not conceal it from the sailors below amidships who had looked up instinctively to make sure their King was safe.

Then he discovered that his ship had not been rammed at all. One of his own vessels, a big and clumsy “sixteener” from the isle of Chios, had blundered broadside into his own ship’s beam and shorn off every oar down one side of each galley.

Was that amazement in their eyes? Or was it amusement? The King’s bulging orbs glared with frightful fury from one face to the next and watched every face flush red, then pale like a transparent goblet suddenly emptied of wine.

“I’m ill!” he shouted. “There’s something wrong, I’m ill! Help me, you fools!”

The stillness broke. People rushed at him from every side, cloths seemed to pop into existence from nowhere; two really quick thinkers found buckets and doused the King with seawater. It was when the cold contents of those pails slapped against his legs that the King bethought him of a better way to deal with this ghastly situation; he threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“Come on, you fools, get me clean!”

The King lifted up his skirts of golden pteryges, the kilt of golden mail beneath and the purple tunic under that again, displaying powerful thighs, firm buttocks—and, in front, a mighty engine which had sired half a hundred lusty sons. When the worst was washed from his nether regions to the deck, he doffed every item of clothing he wore and stood naked upon the high stern of his ship, showing his dazzled crew what a magnificent specimen was their King. He still laughed, still joked, and occasionally clutched at his belly and groaned for extra effect.

But later, when the Rhodian fleet had gone and the two Pontic “sixteeners” had been disentangled—and a clean cushion sat on his thoroughly scrubbed throne—the freshly garbed King beckoned his ship’s captain to his side.

“The lookout and pilot of this ship, captain. I want their tongues torn out, their testicles cut off, their eyes put out, and their hands cut off. Then set them loose with begging bowls,” said Mithridates. “On the Chian ship, I want the same punishment meted out to the lookout, the pilot, and the captain. Every other man on board the Chian ship is to be killed. And never, never, never let me go again within spitting distance of a Chian, or that vile island called Chios! Do you begin to understand, captain?”

The captain swallowed, closed his eyes. “Yes, O Great One. I understand.” He cleared his spasmed throat, launched heroically into the question he had no choice but to ask, “Mighty King, I must put in somewhere to pick up more oars. I do not have enough spares on board. We cannot go on as we are.”

It seemed as if the King took this news very well. He asked in a fairly mild voice, “Whereabouts do you suggest we put in?”

“Either Cnidus or Cos. Not anywhere to the south.”

An expression of interest in something other than his public humiliation came into the King’s eyes. “Cos!” he exclaimed. “Make it Cos! I have a bone to pick with the priests of the Asklepeion. They granted asylum to Romans.

And I would like to see how much treasure they have. And gold. Yes, go to Cos, captain.”

“Prince Pelopidas wishes to see you, O Great One.”

“If he wants to see me, what is he waiting for?”

He was still dangerous, never more dangerous than when he laughed but was not amused. Anything might set him off—a wrong word, a wrong look, a wrong guess. When Pelopidas appeared before the throne in the time it would have taken the King to snap his fingers, he was terrified; but took enormous care not to show it. “Well, what is it?”

’”Great One, I heard you order this ship to Cos for repairs. May I transfer myself to another vessel and go on to Rhodes? I presume that you will want me there when our troops land—unless you plan to transfer yourself to another ship, in which case if you wish it I will remain here to see to things. Please instruct me, Mighty King.”

“You go to Rhodes. I leave the choice of a landing place up to you. Not so far from Rhodus City as to tire the army on the march. Put the men into a camp, and wait for me to arrive.”

When the “sixteener” hove to in the harbor of the city of Cos on the island of Cos, King Mithridates left the captain to deal with his oar troubles, and himself went ashore in a sleek and well-rowed lighter. He proceeded immediately with his guard to the precinct of the god of healing, Asklepios, which lay on the outskirts of the city; so rapidly had he moved that his identity was unknown when he strode into the forecourt of the sanctuary and bellowed to see whoever was in charge—a typical Mithridatic insult, as the King knew perfectly well the man in charge would be the high priest.

“Who is this arrogant upstart?” demanded one priest of another within the King’s hearing.

“I am Mithridates of Pontus, and you are dead men.”

Thus it was that by the time the high priest arrived, two of his servitors lay headless between him and his visitor. A very subtle and intelligent man, the high priest had guessed who his unknown visitor was the moment he had been informed a big gold and purple ape was shouting for him.

“Welcome to the precinct of Asklepios on Cos, King Mithridates,” said the high priest calmly, displaying no fear.

“I hear that’s what you say to Romans.”

“I say it to everyone.”

“Not to Romans I had ordered killed.”

“Were you to come here yourself crying for asylum, it would be granted to you in like measure, King Mithridates. The God Asklepios plays no favorites, and all men need him at one time or another. A fact it is wise to remember. He is a god of life, not of death.”

“All right, consider them your punishment,” said the King, pointing to the two dead priests.

“A punishment two times greater than it ought to be.”

“Don’t try my temper too far, high priest! Now show me your books—and not the set you keep for the Roman governor.”

The Asklepeion of Cos was the greatest banking institution in the world apart from Egypt’s state bank, and had grown to be so because of the careful acumen of a long succession of priestly administrators who had come into being under the aegis of the Ptolemies of Egypt—Cos had once been an Egyptian possession. Therefore its development as an institute devoted to the care of money was a logical offshoot of the Egyptian banking system. At first the temple had been a more typical sanctuary, akin to those in other places. Consecrated to healing and to hygiene, the Asklepeion of Cos was the brainchild of some disciples of Hippocrates, and had originally practised the art of incubation—the sleep-cure of dreams and their interpretation as still practised in the precincts at Epidaurus and Pergamum. But with the passing of the generations on Cos and its occupation by the Ptolemies of Egypt, money had replaced cures as the staple income of the temple, and the priests had become more soaked in things Egyptian than in things Greek.

It was a huge precinct, its buildings scattered among parklands beautifully gardened—gymnasium, agora, shops, baths, library, a priestly training college, facilities for scholars in residence, houses and slave quarters, a palace for the high priest, a necropolis on special ground, circles of subterranean sleep cubicles, a hospital, the great complex devoted to banking, and the temple to the god himself contained within a sacred grove of plane trees.