The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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Dissatisfaction with Lucullus in the Capital and in the Army
The year 686 found Lucullus in a position of difficulty,
which daily assumed a more dangerous aspect. In spite of his brilliant
victories, people in Rome were not at all satisfied with him.
The senate felt the arbitrary nature of his conduct: the capitalist
party, sorely offended by him, set all means of intrigue
and corruption at work to effect his recall. Daily the Forum
echoed with just and unjust complaints regarding the foolhardy,
the covetous, the un-Roman, the traitorous general. The senate
so far yielded to the complaints regarding the union of such unlimited
power--two ordinary governorships and an important extraordinary
command--in the hands of such a man, as to assign the province
of Asia to one of the praetors, and the province of Cilicia
along with three newly-raised legions to the consul Quintus
Marcius Rex, and to restrict the general to the command
against Mithradates and Tigranes.
These accusations springing up against the general in Rome
found a dangerous echo in the soldiers' quarters on the Iris
andon the Tigris; and the more so that several officers including
the general's own brother-in-law, Publius Clodius, worked upon
the soldiers with this view. The report beyond doubt designedly
circulated by these, that Lucullus now thought of combining
with the Pontic-Armenian war an expedition against the Parthians,
fed the exasperation of the troops.
Lucullus Advances into Armenia
But while the troublesome temper of the government and of the soldier
thus threatened the victorious general with recall and mutiny,
he himself continued like a desperate gambler to increase
his stake and his risk. He did not indeed march against the Parthians
but when Tigranes showed himself neither ready to make peace
nor disposed, as Lucullus wished, to risk a second pitched
battle, Lucullus resolved to advance from Tigranocerta, through
the difficult mountain-country along the eastern shore of the lake
of Van, into the valley of the eastern Euphrates (or the Arsanias,
now Myrad-Chai), and thence into that of the Araxes, where,
on the northern slope of Ararat, lay Artaxata the capital of Armenia
proper, with the hereditary castle and the harem of the king.
He hoped, by threatening the king's hereditary residence,
to compel him to fight either on the way or at any rate before
Artaxata. It was inevitably necessary to leave behind a division
at Tigranocerta; and, as the marching army could not possibly be
further reduced, no course was left but to weaken the position
in Pontus and to summon troops thence to Tigranocerta. The main
difficulty, however, was the shortness of the Armenian summer,
so inconvenient for military enterprises. On the tableland
of Armenia, which lies 5000 feet and more above the level of the sea,
the corn at Erzeroum only germinates in the beginning of June,
and the winter sets in with the harvest in September; Artaxata
had to be reached and the campaign had to be ended in four
months at the utmost.
At midsummer, 686, Lucullus set out from Tigranocerta,
and, marching doubtless through the pass of Bitlis and farther
to the westward along the lake of Van--arrived on the plateau of Musch
and at the Euphrates. The march went on--amidst constant
and very troublesome skirmishing with the enemy's cavalry,
and especially with the mounted archers--slowly, but without material
hindrance; and the passage of the Euphrates, which was seriously
defended by the Armenian cavalry, was secured by a successful engagement;
the Armenian infantry showed itself, but the attempt to involve it
in the conflict did not succeed. Thus the army reached the tableland,
properly so called, of Armenia, and continued its march
into the unknown country. They had suffered no actual misfortune;
but the mere inevitable delaying of the march by the difficulties
of the ground and the horsemen of the enemy was itself a very serious
disadvantage. Long before they had reached Artaxata, winter set
in; and when the Italian soldiers saw snow and ice around them,
the bow of military discipline that had been far too tightly
stretched gave way.
Lucullus Retreats to Mesopotamia
Capture of Nisibus
A formal mutiny compelled the general to order a retreat,
which he effected with his usual skill. When he had safely reached
Mesopotamia where the season still permitted farther operations,
Lucullus crossed the Tigris, and threw himself with the mass of his
army on Nisibis, the last city that here remained to the Armenians.
The great-king, rendered wiser by the experience acquired before
Tigranocerta, left the city to itself: notwithstanding its brave
defence it was stormed in a dark, rainy night by the besiegers,
and the army of Lucullus found there booty not less rich and winter-
quarters not less comfortable than the year before in Tigranocerta.
Conflicts in Pontus and at Tigranocerta
But, meanwhile, the whole weight of the enemy's offensive fell
on the weak Roman divisions left behind in Pontus and in Armenia.
Tigranes compelled the Roman commander of the latter corps, Lucius
Fannius--the same who had formerly been the medium of communication
between Sertorius and Mithradates (18)--to throw himself
into a fortress, and kept him beleaguered there. Mithradates
advanced into Pontus with 4000 Armenian horsemen and 4000 of his own,
and as liberator and avenger summoned the nation to rise against
the common foe. All joined him; the scattered Roman soldiers
were everywhere seized and put to death: when Hadrianus, the Roman
commandant in Pontus,(19) led his troops against him, the former
mercenaries of the king and the numerous natives of Pontus
following the army as slaves made common cause with the enemy.
For two successive days the unequal conflict lasted; it was only
the circumstance that the king after receiving two wounds had
to be carried off from the field of battle, which gave the Roman
commander the opportunity of breaking off the virtually lost
battle, and throwing himself with the small remnant of his troops
into Cabira. Another of Lucullus' lieutenants who accidentally
came into this region, the resolute Triarius, again gathered round
him a body of troops and fought a successful engagement
with the king; but he was much too weak to expel him afresh
from Pontic soil, and had to acquiesce while the king took up
winter-quarters in Comana.
Farther Retreat to Pontus
So the spring of 687 came on. The reunion of the army in Nisibis,
the idleness of winter-quarters, the frequent absence of the general,
had meanwhile increased the insubordination of the troops;
not only did they vehemently demand to be led back, but it was already
tolerably evident that, if the general refused to lead them home,
they would break up of themselves. The supplies were scanty;
Fannius and Triarius, in their distress, sent the most urgent
entreaties to the general to furnish aid. With a heavy heart
Lucullus resolved to yield to necessity, to give up Nisibis
and Tigranocerta, and, renouncing all the brilliant hopes of his
Armenian expedition, to return to the right bank of the Euphrates.
Fannius was relieved; but in Pontus the help was too late.
Triarius, not strong enough to fight with Mithradates, had taken
up a strong position at Gaziura (Turksal on the Iris, to the west
of Tokat), while the baggage was left behind at Dadasa.
But when Mithradates laid siege to the latter place, the Roman soldiers,
apprehensive for their property, compelled their leader to leave
his secure position, and to give battle to the king between Gaziura
and Ziela (Zilleh) on the Scotian heights.
Defeat of the Romans in Pontus at Ziela
What Triarius had foreseen, occurred. In spite of the stoutest
resistance the wing which the king commanded in person broke
the Roman line and huddled the infantry together into a clayey ravine,
where it could make neither a forward nor a lateral movement
and was cut to pieces without pity. The king indeed was dangerously
wounded by a Roman centurion, who sacrificed his life for it;
but the defeat was not the less complete. The Roman camp was taken;
the flower of the infantry, and almost all the staff and subaltern
officers, strewed the ground; the dead were left lying unburied
on the field of battle, and, when Lucullus arrived on the right bank
of the Euphrates, he learned the defeat not from his own soldiers,
but through the reports of the natives.
Mutiny of the Soldiers
Along with this defeat came the outbreak of the military conspiracy.
At this very time news arrived from Rome that the people had resolved
to grant a discharge to the soldiers whose legal term of service had
expired, to wit, to the Fimbrians, and to entrust the chief command
in Pontus and Bithynia to one of the consuls of the current year:
the successor of Lucullus, the consul Manius Acilius Glabrio,
had already landed in Asia Minor. The disbanding of the bravest
and most turbulent legions and the recall of the commander-in-chief,
in connection with the impression produced by the defeat of Ziela,
dissolved all the bonds of authority in the army just when the general
had most urgent need of their aid. Near Talaura in Lesser Armenia
he confronted the Pontic troops, at whose head Tigranes' son-in-law,
Mithradates of Media, had already engaged the Romans successfully
in a cavalry conflict; the main force of the great-king was advancing
to the same point from Armenia. Lucullus sent to Quintus Marcius
the new governor of Cilicia, who had just arrived on the way
to his province with three legions in Lycaonia, to obtain help from him;
Marcius declared that his soldiers refused to march to Armenia.
He sent to Glabrio with the request that he would take up the supreme
command committed to him by the people; Glabrio showed still less
inclination to undertake this task, which had now become so difficult
and hazardous. Lucullus, compelled to retain the command,
with the view of not being obliged to fight at Talaura against
the Armenian and the Pontic armies conjoined, ordered a movement
against the advancing Armenians.
Farther Retreat to Asia Minor
The soldiers obeyed the order to march; but, when they reached
the point where the routes to Armenia and Cappadocia diverged,
the bulk of the army took the latter, and proceeded to the province
of Asia. There the Fimbrians demanded their immediate discharge;
and although they desisted from this at the urgent entreaty
of the commander-in-chief and the other corps, they yet persevered
in their purpose of disbanding if the winter should come on without
an enemy confronting them; which accordingly was the case.
Mithradates not only occupied once more almost his whole kingdom,
but his cavalry ranged over all Cappadocia and as far as Bithynia;
king Ariobarzanes sought help equally in vain from Quintus Marcius,
from Lucullus, and from Glabrio. It was a strange, almost
incredible issue for a war conducted in a manner so glorious.
If we look merely to military achievements, hardly any other Roman
general accomplished so much with so trifling means as Lucullus;
the talent and the fortune of Sulla seemed to have devolved on this
his disciple. That under the circumstances the Roman army should
have returned from Armenia to Asia Minor uninjured, is a military
miracle which, so far as we can judge, far excels the retreat
of Xenophon; and, although mainly doubtless to be explained
by the solidity of the Roman, and the inefficiency of the Oriental,
system of war, it at all events secures to the leader of this expedition
an honourable name in the foremost rank of men of military
capacity. If the name of Lucullus is not usually included among these,
it is to all appearance simply owing to the fact that no narrative
of his campaigns which is in a military point of view even tolerable
has come down to us, and to the circumstance that in everything
and particularly in war, nothing is taken into account
but the final result; and this, in reality, was equivalent
to a complete defeat. Through the last unfortunate turn of things,
and principally through the mutiny of the soldiers, all the results
of an eight years' war had been lost; in the winter of 687-688
the Romans again stood exactly at the same spot
as in the winter of 679-680.
War with the Pirates
The maritime war against the pirates, which began at the same time
with the continental war and was all along most closely connected
with it, yielded no better results. It has been already mentioned
(20) that the senate in 680 adopted the judicious resolution
to entrust the task of clearing the seas from the corsairs
to a single admiral in supreme command, the praetor Marcus Antonius.
But at the very outset they had made an utter mistake in the choice
of the leader; or rather those, who had carried this measure
so appropriate in itself, had not taken into account that in the senate
all personal questions were decided by the influence of Cethegus(21)
and similar coterie-considerations. They had moreover
neglected to furnish the admiral of their choice with money
and ships in a manner befitting his comprehensive task,
so that with his enormous requisitions he was almost as burdensome
to the provincials whom he befriended as were the corsairs.
Defeat of Antonius off Cydonia
The results were corresponding. In the Campanian waters the fleet
of Antonius captured a number of piratical vessels. But an engagement
took place with the Cretans, who had entered into friendship
and alliance with the pirates and abruptly rejected his demand
that they should desist from such fellowship; and the chains,
with which the foresight of Antonius had provided his vessels
for the purpose of placing the captive buccaneers in irons,
served to fasten the quaestor and the other Roman prisoners
to the masts of the captured Roman ships, when the Cretan generals
Lasthenes and Panares steered back in triumph to Cydonia
from the naval combat in which they had engaged the Romans
off their island. Antonius, after having squandered immense sums
and accomplished not the slightest result by his inconsiderate mode
of warfare, died in 683 at Crete. The ill success of his expedition,
the costliness of building a fleet, and the repugnance of the oligarchy
to confer any powers of a more comprehensive kind on the magistrates,
led them, after the practical termination of this enterprise
by Antonius' death, to make no farther nomination of an admiral-in-chief,
and to revert to the old system of leaving each governor to look
after the suppression of piracy in his own province: the fleet equipped
by Lucullus for instance(22) was actively employed for this purpose
in the Aegean sea.
Cretan War
So far however as the Cretans were concerned, a disgrace
like that endured off Cydonia seemed even to the degenerate Romans
of this age as if it could be answered only by a declaration of war.
Yet the Cretan envoys, who in the year 684 appeared in Rome
with the request that the prisoners might be taken back and the old
alliance reestablished, had almost obtained a favourable decree
of the senate; what the whole corporation termed a disgrace,
the individual senator was ready to sell for a substantial price.
It was not till a formal resolution of the senate rendered the loans
of the Cretan envoys among the Roman bankers non-actionable--
that is, not until the senate had incapacitated itself for undergoing
bribery--that a decree passed to the effect that the Cretan
communities, if they wished to avoid war, should hand over not only
the Roman deserters but the authors of the outrage perpetrated off
Cydonia--the leaders Lasthenes and Panares--to the Romans
for befitting punishment, should deliver up all ships and boats of four
or more oars, should furnish 400 hostages, and should pay a fine
of 4000 talents (975,000 pounds). When the envoys declared that they
were not empowered to enter into such terms, one of the consuls
of the next year was appointed to depart on the expiry of his official
term for Crete, in order either to receive there what was demanded
or to begin the war.
Metellus Subdues Crete
Accordingly in 685 the proconsul Quintus Metellus appeared
in the Cretan waters. The communities of the island, with the larger
towns Gortyna, Cnossus, Cydonia at their head, were resolved rather
to defend themselves in arms than to submit to those excessive
demands. The Cretans were a nefarious and degenerate people,(23)
with whose public and private existence piracy was as intimately
associated as robbery with the commonwealth of the Aetolians;
but they resembled the Aetolians in valour as in many other respects,
and accordingly these two were the only Greek communities
that waged a courageous and honourable struggle for independence.
At Cydonia, where Metellus landed his three legions, a Cretan army
of 24,000 men under Lasthenes and Panares was ready to receive him;
a battle took place in the open field, in which the victory
after a hard struggle remained with the Romans. Nevertheless
the towns bade defiance from behind their walls to the Roman general;
Metellus had to make up his mind to besiege them in succession.
First Cydonia, in which the remains of the beaten army had taken
refuge, was after a long siege surrendered by Panares in return
for the promise of a free departure for himself. Lasthenes, who had
escaped from the town, had to be besieged a second time in Cnossus;
and, when this fortress also was on the point of falling,
he destroyed its treasures and escaped once more to places which still
continued their defence, such as Lyctus, Eleuthera, and others.
Two years (686, 687) elapsed, before Metellus became master
of the whole island and the last spot of free Greek soil thereby
passed under the control of the dominant Romans; the Cretan communities,
as they were the first of all Greek commonwealths to develop
the free urban constitution and the dominion of the sea, were also
to be the last of all those Greek maritime states that formerly filled
the Mediterranean to succumb to the Roman continental power.
The Pirates in the Mediterranean
All the legal conditions were fulfilled for celebrating another
of the usual pompous triumphs; the gens of the Metelli could add
to its Macedonian, Numidian, Dalmatian, Balearic titles with equal
right the new title of Creticus, and Rome possessed another name
of pride. Nevertheless the power of the Romans in the Mediterranean
was never lower, that of the corsairs never higher, than in those
years. Well might the Cilicians and Cretans of the seas, who are
said to have numbered at this time 1000 ships, mock the Isauricus
and the Creticus, and their empty victories. With what effect
the pirates interfered in the Mithradatic war, and how the obstinate
resistance of the Pontic maritime towns derived its best resources
from the corsair-state, has been already related. But that state
transacted business on a hardly less grand scale on its own behoof.
Almost under the eyes of the fleet of Lucullus, the pirate Athenodorus
surprised in 685 the island of Delos, destroyed its far-famed
shrines and temples, and carried off the whole population
into slavery. The island Lipara near Sicily paid to the pirates
a fixed tribute annually, to remain exempt from like attacks.
Another pirate chief Heracleon destroyed in 682 the squadron
equipped in Sicily against him, and ventured with no more than four
open boats to sail into the harbour of Syracuse. Two years later
his colleague Pyrganion even landed at the same port, established
himself there and sent forth flying parties into the island,
till the Roman governor at last compelled him to re-embark.
People grew at length quite accustomed to the fact that all
the provinces equipped squadrons and raised coastguards,
or were at any rate taxed for both; and yet the pirates appeared
to plunder the provinces with as much regularity as the Roman governors.
But even the sacred soil of Italy was now no longer respected
by the shameless transgressors: from Croton they carried off with them
the temple-treasures of the Lacinian Hera; they landed in Brundisium,
Misenum, Caieta, in the Etruscan ports, even in Ostia itself; they
seized the most eminent Roman officers as captives, among others
the admiral of the Cilician army and two praetors with their whole
retinue, with the dreaded -fasces- themselves and all the insignia
of their dignity; they carried away from a villa at Misenum
the very sister of the Roman admiral-in-chief Antonius, who was sent
forth to annihilate the pirates; they destroyed in the port
of Ostia the Roman war fleet equipped against them and commanded
by a consul. The Latin husbandman, the traveller on the Appian highway,
the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae
were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single
moment; all traffic and all intercourse were suspended;
the most dreadful scarcity prevailed in Italy, and especially
in the capital, which subsisted on transmarine corn. The contemporary
world and history indulge freely in complaints of insupportable
distress; in this case the epithet may have been appropriate.
Servile Disturbances
We have already described how the senate restored by Sulla carried
out its guardianship of the frontier in Macedonia, its discipline
over the client kings of Asia Minor, and lastly its marine police;
the results were nowhere satisfactory. Nor did better success
attend the government in another and perhaps even more urgent
matter, the supervision of the provincial, and above all
of the Italian, proletariate. The gangrene of a slave-proletariate
Gnawed at the vitals of all the states of antiquity, and the more so,
the more vigorously they had risen and prospered; for the power
and riches of the state regularly led, under the existing
circumstances, to a disproportionate increase of the body
of slaves. Rome naturally suffered more severely from this cause
than any other state of antiquity. Even the government of the sixth
century had been under the necessity of sending troops against
the gangs of runaway herdsmen and rural slaves. The plantation-system,
spreading more and more among the Italian speculators
had infinitely increased the dangerous evil: in the time of
the Gracchan and Marian crises and in close connection with them
servile revolts had taken place at numerous points of the Roman
empire, and in Sicily had even grown into two bloody wars (619-622
and 652-654;(24)). But the ten years of the rule of the restoration
after Sulla's death formed the golden age both for the buccaneers
at sea and for bands of a similar character on land, above all
in the Italian peninsula, which had hitherto been comparatively
well regulated. The land could hardly be said any longer to enjoy
peace. In the capital and the less populous districts of Italy
robberies were of everyday occurrence, murders were frequent.
A special decree of the people was issued--perhaps at this epoch--
against kidnapping of foreign slaves and of free men; a special
summary action was about this time introduced against violent
deprivation of landed property. These crimes could not
but appear specially dangerous, because, while they were usually
perpetrated by the proletariate, the upper class were to a great
extent also concerned in them as moral originators and partakers
in the gain. The abduction of men and of estates was very frequently
suggested by the overseers of the large estates and carried out
by the gangs of slaves, frequently armed, that were collected there:
and many a man even of high respectability did not disdain what
one of his officious slave-overseers thus acquired for him
as Mephistopheles acquired for Faust the lime trees of Philemon.
The state of things is shown by the aggravated punishment for outrages
on property committed by armed bands, which was introduced
by one of the better Optimates, Marcus Lucullus, as presiding over
the administration of justice in the capital about the year 676,(25)
with the express object of inducing the proprietors of large bands
of slaves to exercise a more strict superintendence over them
and thereby avoid the penalty of seeing them judicially condemned.
Where pillage and murder were thus carried on by order
of the world of quality, it was natural for these masses of slaves
and proletarians to prosecute the same business on their own account;
a spark was sufficient to set fire to so inflammable materials,
and to convert the proletariate into an insurrectionary army.
An occasion was soon found.
Outbreak of the Gladiatorial War in Italy
Spartacus
The gladiatorial games, which now held the first rank
among the popular amusements in Italy, had led to the institution
of numerous establishments, more especially in and around Capua,
designed partly for the custody, partly for the training
of those slaves who were destined to kill or be killed for the amusement
of the sovereign multitude. These were naturally in great part
brave men captured in war, who had not forgotten that they had once
faced the Romans in the field. A number of these desperadoes broke out
of one of the Capuan gladiatorial schools (681), and sought refuge
on Mount Vesuvius. At their head were two Celts, who were designated
by their slave-names Crixus and Oenomaus, and the Thracian Spartacus.
The latter, perhaps a scion of the noble family of the Spartocids
which attained even to royal honours in its Thracian home
and in Panticapaeum, had served among the Thracian auxiliaries
in the Roman army, had deserted and gone as a brigand to the mountains,
and had been there recaptured and destined for the gladiatorial games.