The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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Pompeius Puts an End to the Insurrection
Accordingly, at the first encounter with Pompeius, the wretchedly
led and despondent ranks of the insurgents were utterly broken,
and Perpenna, among other officers, was taken prisoner. The wretch
sought to purchase his life by delivering up the correspondence
of Sertorius, which would have compromised numerous men of standing
in Italy; but Pompeius ordered the papers to be burnt unread,
and handed him, as well as the other chiefs of the insurgents,
overto the executioner. The emigrants who had escaped dispersed;
and most of them went into the Mauretanian deserts or joined the pirates.
Soon afterwards the Plotian law, which was zealously supported
by the young Caesar in particular, opened up to a portion of them
the opportunity of returning home; but all those who had taken part
in the murder of Sertorius, with but a single exception, died
a violent death. Osca, and most of the towns which had still adhered
to Sertorius in Hither Spain, now voluntarily opened their gates
to Pompeius; Uxama (Osma), Clunia, and Calagurris alone had to be
reduced by force. The two provinces were regulated anew;
in the Further province, Metellus raised the annual tribute
of the most guilty communities; in the Hither, Pompeius dispensed
reward and punishment: Calagurris, for example, lost its independence
and was placed under Osca. A band of Sertorian soldiers, which had
collected in the Pyrenees, was induced by Pompeius to surrender,
and was settled by him to the north of the Pyrenees near Lugudunum
(St. Bertrand, in the department Haute-Garonne), as the community
of the "congregated" (-convenae-). The Roman emblems of victory
were erected at the summit of the pass of the Pyrenees;
at the close of 683, Metellus and Pompeius marched with their armies
through the streets of the capital, to present the thanks
of the nation to Father Jovis at the Capitol for the conquest
of the Spaniards. The good fortune of Sulla seemed still to be
with his creation after he had been laid in the grave, and to protect it
better than the incapable and negligent watchmen appointed to guard
it. The opposition in Italy had broken down from the incapacity
and precipitation of its leader, and that of the emigrants
from dissension within their own ranks. These defeats,
although far more the result of their own perverseness and discordance
than of the exertions of their opponents, were yet so many victories
for the oligarchy. The curule chairs were rendered once more secure.
Chapter II
Rule of the Sullan Restoration
External Relations
When the suppression of the Cinnan revolution, which threatened
the very existence of the senate, rendered it possible for the restored
senatorial government to devote once more the requisite attention
to the internal and external security of the empire, there emerged
affairs enough, the settlement of which could not be postponed
without injuring the most important interests and allowing
present inconveniences to grow into future dangers. Apart from
the very serious complications in Spain, it was absolutely necessary
effectually to check the barbarians in Thrace and the regions
of the Danube, whom Sulla on his march through Macedonia had only
been able superficially to chastise,(1) and to regulate, by military
intervention, the disorderly state of things along the northern
frontier of the Greek peninsula; thoroughly to suppress
the bands of pirates infesting the seas everywhere, but especially
the eastern waters; and lastly to introduce better order
into the unsettled relations of Asia Minor. The peace which Sulla
had concluded in 670 with Mithradates, king of Pontus,(2)
and of which the treaty with Murena in 673(3) was essentially
a repetition, bore throughout the stamp of a provisional arrangement
to meet the exigencies of the moment; and the relations of the Romans
with Tigranes, king of Armenia, with whom they had de facto waged war,
remained wholly untouched in this peace. Tigranes had with right
regarded this as a tacit permission to bring the Roman possessions
in Asia under his power. If these were not to be abandoned, it
was necessary to come to terms amicably or by force with the new
great-king of Asia.
In the preceding chapter we have described the movements
in Italy and Spain connected with the proceedings of the democracy,
and their subjugation by the senatorial government. In the present
chapter we shall review the external government, as the authorities
installed by Sulla conducted or failed to conduct it.
Dalmato-Macedonian Expeditions
We still recognize the vigorous hand of Sulla in the energetic measures
which, in the last period of his regency, the senate adopted almost
simultaneously against the Sertorians, the Dalmatians and Thracians,
and the Cilician pirates.
The expedition to the Graeco-Illyrian peninsula was designed partly
to reduce to subjection or at least to tame the barbarous tribes
who ranged over the whole interior from the Black Sea to the Adriatic,
and of whom the Bessi (in the great Balkan) especially were,
as it was then said, notorious as robbers even among a race
of robbers; partly to destroy the corsairs in their haunts,
especially along the Dalmatian coast. As usual, the attack took
place simultaneously from Dalmatia and from Macedonia, in which
province an army of five legions was assembled for the purpose.
In Dalmatia the former praetor Gaius Cosconius held the command,
marched through the country in all directions, and took by storm
the fortress of Salona after a two years' siege. In Macedonia
the proconsul Appius Claudius (676-678) first attempted along
the Macedono-Thracian frontier to make himself master of the mountain
districts on the left bank of the Karasu. On both sides the war
was conducted with savage ferocity; the Thracians destroyed
the townships which they took and massacred their captives,
and the Romans returned like for like. But no results of importance
were attained; the toilsome marches and the constant conflicts
with the numerous and brave inhabitants of the mountains decimated
the army to no purpose; the general himself sickened and died.
His successor, Gaius Scribonius Curio (679-681), was induced
by various obstacles, and particularly by a not inconsiderable
military revolt, to desist from the difficult expedition
against the Thracians, and to turn himself instead to the northern
frontier of Macedonia, where he subdued the weaker Dardani (in Servia)
and reached as far as the Danube. The brave and able Marcus Lucullus
(682, 683) was the first who again advanced eastward, defeated the Bessi
in their mountains, took their capital Uscudama (Adrianople),
and compelled them to submit to the Roman supremacy. Sadalas king
of the Odrysians, and the Greek towns on the east coast to the north
and south of the Balkan chain--Istropolis, Tomi, Callatis,
Odessus (near Varna), Mesembria, and others--became dependent
on the Romans. Thrace, of which the Romans had hitherto held little
more than the Attalic possessions on the Chersonese, now became
a portion--though far from obedient--of the province of Macedonia.
Piracy
But the predatory raids of the Thracians and Dardani, confined
as they were to a small part of the empire, were far less injurious
to the state and to individuals than the evil of piracy,
which was continually spreading farther and acquiring
more solid organization. The commerce of the whole Mediterranean
was in its power. Italy could neither export its products nor import
grain from the provinces; in the former the people were starving,
in the latter the cultivation of the corn-fields ceased for want
of a vent for the produce. No consignment of money, no traveller
was longer safe: the public treasury suffered most serious losses;
a great many Romans of standing were captured by the corsairs,
and compelled to pay heavy sums for their ransom, if it was not even
the pleasure of the pirates to execute on individuals the sentence
of death, which in that case was seasoned with a savage humour.
The merchants, and even the divisions of Roman troops destined
for the east, began to postpone their voyages chiefly to the unfavourable
season of the year, and to be less afraid of the winter storms
than of the piratical vessels, which indeed even at this season
did not wholly disappear from the sea. But severely as the closing
of the sea was felt, it was more tolerable than the raids
made on the islands and coasts of Greece and Asia Minor.
Just as afterwards in the time of the Normans, piratical squadrons
ran up to the maritime towns, and either compelled them to buy
themselves off with large sums, or besieged and took them by storm.
When Samothrace, Clazomenae, Samos, Iassus were pillaged
by the pirates (670) under the eyes of Sulla after peace was concluded
with Mithradates, we may conceive how matters went where neither
a Roman army nor a Roman fleet was at hand. All the old rich temples
along the coasts of Greece and Asia Minor were plundered
one after another; from Samothrace alone a treasure of 1000 talents
(240,000 pounds) is said to have been carried off. Apollo, according
to a Roman poet of this period, was so impoverished by the pirates that,
when the swallow paid him a visit, he could no longer produce
to it out of all his treasures even a drachm of gold. More than four
hundred townships were enumerated as having been taken or laid
under contribution by the pirates, including cities like Cnidus,
Samos, Colophon; from not a few places on islands or the coast,
which were previously flourishing, the whole population migrated,
that they might not be carried off by the pirates. Even inland
districts were no longer safe from their attacks; there were instances
of their assailing townships distant one or two days' march
from the coast. The fearful debt, under which subsequently
all the communities of the Greek east succumbed, proceeded
in great part from these fatal times.
Organization of Piracy
Piracy had totally changed its character. The pirates
were no longer bold freebooters, who levied their tribute
from the large Italo-Oriental traffic in slaves and luxuries,
as it passed through the Cretan waters between Cyrene
and the Peloponnesus--in the language of the pirates the "golden sea";
no longer even armed slave-catchers, who prosecuted "war, trade,
and piracy" equally side by side; they formed now a piratical state,
with a peculiar esprit de corps, with a solid and very respectable
organization, with a home of their own and the germs of a symmachy,
and doubtless also with definite political designs. The pirates
called themselves Cilicians; in fact their vessels were the rendezvous
of desperadoes and adventurers from all countries--discharged
mercenaries from the recruiting-grounds of Crete, burgesses
from the destroyed townships of Italy, Spain, and Asia, soldiers
and officers from the armies of Fimbria and Sertorius, in a word
the ruined men of all nations, the hunted refugees of all vanquished
parties, every one that was wretched and daring--and where was there not
misery and outrage in this unhappy age? It was no longer
a gang of robbers who had flocked together, but a compact soldier-
state, in which the freemasonry of exile and crime took the place
of nationality, and within which crime redeemed itself, as it so often
does in its own eyes, by displaying the most generous public spirit.
In an abandoned age, when cowardice and insubordination
had relaxed all the bonds of social order, the legitimate commonwealths
might have taken a pattern from this state--the mongrel offspring
of distress and violence--within which alone the inviolable
determination to stand side by side, the sense of comradeship,
respect for the pledged word and the self-chosen chiefs, valour
and adroitness seemed to have taken refuge. If the banner of this state
was inscribed with vengeance against the civil society which,
rightly or wrongly, had ejected its members, it might be a question
whether this device was much worse than those of the Italian oligarchy
and the Oriental sultanship which seemed in the fair way of dividing
the world between them. The corsairs at least felt themselves
on a level with any legitimate state; their robber-pride,
their robber-pomp, and their robber-humour are attested by many
a genuine pirate's tale of mad merriment and chivalrous bandittism:
they professed, and made it their boast, to live at righteous war
with all the world: what they gained in that warfare was designated
not as plunder, but as military spoil; and, while the captured corsair
was sure of the cross in every Roman seaport, they too claimed
the right of executing any of their captives.
Its Military-Political Power
Their military-political organization, especially since
the Mithradatic war, was compact. Their ships, for the most part
-myopiarones-, that is, small open swift-sailing barks,
with a smaller proportion of biremes and triremes, now regularly sailed
associated in squadrons and under admirals, whose barges were wont
to glitter in gold and purple. To a comrade in peril,
though he might be totally unknown, no pirate captain refused
the requested aid; an agreement concluded with any one of them
was absolutely recognized by the whole society, and any injury inflicted
on one was avenged by all. Their true home was the sea from the pillars
of Hercules to the Syrian and Egyptian waters; the refuges
which they needed for themselves and their floating houses
on the mainland were readily furnished to them by the Mauretanian
and Dalmatian coasts, by the island of Crete, and, above all,
by the southern coast of Asia Minor, which abounded in headlands
and lurking-places, commanded the chief thoroughfare of the maritime
commerce of that age, and was virtually without a master.
The league of Lycian cities there, and the Pamphylian communities,
were of little importance; the Roman station, which had existed
in Cilicia since 652, was far from adequate to command the extensive
coast; the Syrian dominion over Cilicia had always been
but nominal, and had recently been superseded by the Armenian,
the holder of which, as a true great-king, gave himself no concern
at all about the sea and readily abandoned it to the pillage
of the Cilicians. It was nothing wonderful, therefore,
that the corsairs flourished there as they had never done anywhere else.
Not only did they possess everywhere along the coast signal-places
and stations, but further inland--in the most remote recesses
of the impassable and mountainous interior of Lycia, Pamphylia,
and Cilicia--they had built their rock-castles, in which they concealed
their wives, children, and treasures during their own absence
at sea, and, doubtless, in times of danger found an asylum themselves.
Great numbers of such corsair-castles existed especially
in the Rough Cilicia, the forests of which at the same time furnished
the pirates with the most excellent timber for shipbuilding; and there,
accordingly, their principal dockyards and arsenals were situated.
It was not to be wondered at that this organized military state
gained a firm body of clients among the Greek maritime cities,
which were more or less left to themselves and managed their own
affairs: these cities entered into traffic with the pirates
as with a friendly power on the basis of definite treaties,
and did not comply with the summons of the Roman governors to furnish
vessels against them. The not inconsiderable town of Side
in Pamphylia, for instance, allowed the pirates to build ships
on its quays, and to sell the free men whom they had captured
in its market.
Such a society of pirates was a political power; and as a political
power it gave itself out and was accepted from the time
when the Syrian king Tryphon first employed it as such and rested
his throne on its support.(4) We find the pirates as allies of king
Mithradates of Pontus as well as of the Roman democratic emigrants;
we find them giving battle to the fleets of Sulla in the eastern
and in the western waters; we find individual pirate princes ruling
over a series of considerable coast towns. We cannot tell how far
the internal political development of this floating state had
already advanced; but its arrangements undeniably contained
the germ of a sea-kingdom, which was already beginning to establish
itself, and out of which, under favourable circumstances,
a permanent state might have been developed.
Nullity of the Roman Marine Police
This state of matters clearly shows, as we have partly indicated
already,(5) how the Romans kept--or rather did not keep--order
on "their sea." The protectorate of Rome over the provinces
consisted essentially in military guardianship; the provincials
paid tax or tribute to the Romans for their defence by sea and land,
which was concentrated in Roman hands. But never, perhaps,
did a guardian more shamelessly defraud his ward than the Roman
oligarchy defrauded the subject communities. Instead of Rome equipping
a general fleet for the empire and centralizing her marine police,
the senate permitted the unity of her maritime superintendence--
without which in this matter nothing could at all be done--to fall
into abeyance, and left it to each governor and each client state
to defend themselves against the pirates as each chose and was able.
Instead of Rome providing for the fleet, as she had bound herself
to do, exclusively with her own blood and treasure and with those
of the client states which had remained formally sovereign,
the senate allowed the Italian war-marine to fall into decay,
and learned to make shift with the vessels which the several
mercantile towns were required to furnish, or still more frequently
with the coast-guards everywhere organized--all the cost
and burden falling, in either case, on the subjects. The provincials
might deem themselves fortunate, if their Roman governor applied
the requisitions which he raised for the defence of the coast
in reality solely to that object, and did not intercept them
for himself; or if they were not, as very frequently happened, called
on to pay ransom for some Roman of rank captured by the buccaneers.
Measures undertaken perhaps with judgment, such as the occupation
of Cilicia in 652, were sure to be spoilt in the execution.
Any Roman of this period, who was not wholly carried away
by the current intoxicating idea of the national greatness, must have
wished that the ships' beaks might be torn down from the orator's
platform in the Forum, that at least he might not be constantly
reminded by them of the naval victories achieved in better times.
Expedition to the South Coast of Asia Minor
Publius Servilius Isauricus
Zenicetes Vanquished
The Isaurians Subdued
Nevertheless Sulla, who in the war against Mithradates had
the opportunity of acquiring an adequate conviction of the dangers
which the neglect of the fleet involved, took various steps
seriously to check the evil. It is true that the instructions
which he had left to the governors whom he appointed in Asia,
to equip in the maritime towns a fleet against the pirates, had borne
little fruit, for Murena preferred to begin war with Mithradates,
and Gnaeus Dolabella, the governor of Cilicia, proved wholly
incapable. Accordingly the senate resolved in 675 to send one
of the consuls to Cilicia; the lot fell on the capable Publius
Servilius. He defeated the piratical fleet in a bloody engagement,
and then applied himself to destroy those towns on the south coast
of Asia Minor which served them as anchorages and trading stations.
The fortresses of the powerful maritime prince Zenicetes--Olympus,
Corycus, Phaselis in eastern Lycia, Attalia in Pamphylia--
were reduced, and the prince himself met his death in the flames
of his stronghold Olympus. A movement was next made against
the Isaurians, who in the north-west corner of the Rough Cilicia,
on the northern slope of Mount Taurus, inhabited a labyrinth
of steep mountain ridges, jagged rocks, and deeply-cut valleys,
covered with magnificent oak forests--a region which is even
at the present day filled with reminiscences of the old robber times.
To reduce these Isaurian fastnesses, the last and most secure retreats
ofthe freebooters, Servilius led the first Roman army over the Taurus,
and broke up the strongholds of the enemy, Oroanda, and above all
Isaura itself--the ideal of a robber-town, situated on the summit
of a scarcely accessible mountain-ridge, and completely overlooking
and commanding the wide plain of Iconium. The war, not ended
till 679, from which Publius Servilius acquired for himself
and his descendants the surname of Isauricus, was not without fruit;
a great number of pirates and piratical vessels fell in consequence
of it into the power of the Romans; Lycia, Pamphylia, West Cilicia
were severely devastated, the territories of the destroyed towns
were confiscated, and the province of Cilicia was enlarged by their
addition to it. But, in the nature of the case, piracy was far
from being suppressed by these measures; on the contrary, it simply
betook itself for the time to other regions, and particularly
to Crete, the oldest harbour for the corsairs of the Mediterranean.(6)
Nothing but repressive measures carried out on a large scale
and with unity of purpose--nothing, in fact, but the establishment
of a standing maritime police--could in such a case
afford thorough relief.
Asiatic Relations
Tigranes and the New Great-Kingdom of Armenia
The affairs of the mainland of Asia Minor were connected by various
relations with this maritime war. The variance which existed
between Rome and the kings of Pontus and Armenia did not abate,
but increased more and more. On the one hand Tigranes,
kingof Armenia, pursued his aggressive conquests in the most reckless
manner. The Parthians, whose state was at this period torn
by internal dissensions and enfeebled, were by constant hostilities
driven farther and farther back into the interior of Asia.
Of the countries between Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Iran, the kingdoms
of Corduene (northern Kurdistan), and Media Atropatene (Azerbijan),
were converted from Parthian into Armenian fiefs, and the kingdom
of Nineveh (Mosul), or Adiabene, was likewise compelled, at least
temporarily, to become a dependency of Armenia. In Mesopotamia,
too, particularly in and around Nisibis, the Armenian rule
was established; but the southern half, which was in great part desert,
seems not to have passed into the firm possession of the new great-
king, and Seleucia, on the Tigris, in particular, appears not to have
become subject to him. The kingdom of Edessa or Osrhoene
he handed over to a tribe of wandering Arabs, which he transplanted
from southern Mesopotamia and settled in this region, with the view
of commanding by its means the passage of the Euphrates
and the great route of traffic.(7)
Cappadocia Armenian
But Tigranes by no means confined his conquests to the eastern
bank of the Euphrates. Cappadocia especially was the object
of his attacks, and, defenceless as it was, suffered destructive
blows from its too potent neighbour. Tigranes wrested the eastern
province Melitene from Cappadocia, and united it with the opposite
Armenian province Sophene, by which means he obtained command
of the passage of the Euphrates with the great thoroughfare
of traffic between Asia Minor and Armenia. After the death of Sulla
the Armenians even advanced into Cappadocia proper, and carried off
to Armenia the inhabitants of the capital Mazaca (afterwards Caesarea)
and eleven other towns of Greek organization.
Syria under Tigranes
Nor could the kingdom of the Seleucids, already in full course
of dissolution, oppose greater resistance to the new great-king.
Here the south from the Egyptian frontier to Straton's Tower
(Caesarea) was under the rule of the Jewish prince Alexander Jannaeus,
who extended and strengthened his dominion step by step
in conflict with his Syrian, Egyptian, and Arabic neighbours
and with the imperial cities. The larger towns of Syria--Gaza,
Straton's Tower, Ptolemais, Beroea--attempted to maintain themselves
on their own footing, sometimes as free communities, sometimes
under so-called tyrants; the capital, Antioch, in particular,
was virtually independent. Damascus and the valleys of Lebanon
had submitted to the Nabataean prince, Aretas of Petra. Lastly,
in Cilicia the pirates or the Romans bore sway. And for this crown
breaking into a thousand fragments the Seleucid princes continued
perseveringly to quarrel with each other, as though it were their object
to make royalty a jest and an offence to all; nay more,
while this family, doomed like the house of Laius to perpetual discord,
had its own subjects all in revolt, it even raised claims to the throne
of Egypt vacant by the decease of king Alexander II without heirs.
Accordingly king Tigranes set to work there without ceremony.
Eastern Cilicia was easily subdued by him, and the citizens of Soli
and other towns were carried off, just like the Cappadocians,
to Armenia. In like manner the province of Upper Syria,
withthe exception of the bravely-defended town of Seleucia at the mouth
of the Orontes, and the greater part of Phoenicia were reduced
by force; Ptolemais was occupied by the Armenians about 680,
and the Jewish state was already seriously threatened by them. Antioch,
the old capital of the Seleucids, became one of the residences
of the great-king. Already from 671, the year following the peace
between Sulla and Mithradates, Tigranes is designated
in the Syrian annals as the sovereign of the country, and Cilicia
and Syria appear as an Armenian satrapy under Magadates,
the lieutenant of the great-king. The age of the kings of Nineveh,
ofthe Salmanezers and Sennacheribs, seemed to be renewed; again oriental
despotism pressed heavily on the trading population of the Syrian
coast, as it did formerly on Tyre and Sidon; again great states
of the interior threw themselves on the provinces along
the Mediterranean; again Asiatic hosts, said to number
half a million combatants, appeared on the Cilician and Syrian coasts.
As Salmanezer and Nebuchadnezzar had formerly carried the Jews
to Babylon, so now from all the frontier provinces of the new
kingdom--from Corduene, Adiabene, Assyria, Cilicia, Cappadocia--
the inhabitants, especially the Greek or half-Greek citizens
of the towns, were compelled to settle with their whole goods
and chattels (under penalty of the confiscation of everything
that they left behind) in the new capital, one of those gigantic cities
proclaiming rather the nothingness of the people than the greatness
of the rulers, which sprang up in the countries of the Euphrates
on every change in the supreme sovereignty at the fiat of the new
grand sultan. The new "city of Tigranes," Tigrano-certa, founded
on the borders of Armenia and Mesopotamia, and destined
as the capital of the territories newly acquired for Armenia, became
a city like Nineveh and Babylon, with walls fifty yards high,
and the appendages of palace, garden, and park that were appropriate
to sultanism. In other respects, too, the new great-king proved
faithful to his part. As amidst the perpetual childhood
of the east the childlike conceptions of kings with real crowns
on their heads have never disappeared, Tigranes, when he showed
himselfin public, appeared in the state and the costume of a successor
of Darius and Xerxes, with the purple caftan, the half-white
half-purple tunic, the long plaited trousers, the high turban,
and the royal diadem--attended moreover and served in slavish fashion,
wherever he went or stood, by four "kings."