headquarters of Pompeius to obtain information, and which was about this very time really imposing, opened up to the king the prospect of fighting not, as in the first Roman war, against both the Roman parties, but in concert with the one against the other.  A more favourable moment could hardly be hoped for, and after all it was always better to declare war than to let it be declared against him.  In 679 Nicomedes iii Philopator king of Bithynia, died, and as the last of his race—­for a son borne by Nysa was, or was said to be, illegitimate—­left his kingdom by testament to the Romans, who delayed not to take possession of this region bordering on the Roman province and long ago filled with Roman officials and merchants.  At the same time Cyrene, which had been already bequeathed to the Romans in 658,(10) was at length constituted a province, and a Roman governor was sent thither (679).  These measures, in connection with the attacks carried out about the same time against the pirates on the south coast of Asia Minor, must have excited apprehensions in the king; the annexation of Bithynia in particular made the Romans immediate neighbours of the Pontic kingdom; and this, it may be presumed, turned the scale.  The king took the decisive step and declared war against the Romans in the winter of 679-680.

Preparations of Mithradates

Gladly would Mithradates have avoided undertaking so arduous a work singlehanded.  His nearest and natural ally was the great-king Tigranes; but that shortsighted man declined the proposal of his father-in-law.  So there remained only the insurgents and the pirates.  Mithradates was careful to place himself in communication with both, by despatching strong squadrons to Spain and to Crete.  A formal treaty was concluded with Sertorius,(11) by which Rome ceded to the king Bithynia, Paphlagonia, Galatia, and Cappadocia—­ all of them, it is true, acquisitions which needed to be ratified on the field of battle.  More important was the support which the Spanish general gave to the king, by sending Roman officers to lead his armies and fleets.  The most active of the emigrants inthe east, Lucius Magius and Lucius Fannius, were appointed by Sertorius as his representatives at the court of Sinope.  From the pirates also came help; they flocked largely to the kingdom of Pontus, and by their means especially the king seems to have succeeded in forming a naval force imposing by the number as well as by the quality of the ships.  His main support still lay in his own forces, with which the king hoped, before the Romans should arrive in Asia, to make himself master of their possessions there; especially as the financial distress produced in the province of Asia by the Sullan war-tribute, the aversion of Bithynia towards the new Roman government, and the elements of combustion left behind by the desolating war recently brought to a close in Cilicia and Pamphylia, opened up favourable prospects to a