or perished in the Copaic marshes; a few only, Archelaus among the rest, reached Euboea.  The Boeotian communities had severely to pay for their renewed revolt from Rome, some of them even to annihilation.  Nothing opposed the advance into Macedonia and Thrace; Philippi was occupied, Abdera was voluntarily evacuated by the Pontic garrison, the European continent in general was cleared of the enemy.  At the end of the third year of the war (669) Sulla was able to take up winter-quarters in Thessaly, with a view to begin the Asiatic campaign in the spring of 670,(15) for which purpose he gave orders to build ships in the Thessalian ports.

Reaction in Asia Minor against Mithradates

Meanwhile the circumstances of Asia Minor also had undergone a material change.  If king Mithradates had once come forward as the liberator of the Hellenes, if he had introduced his rule with the recognition of civic independence and with remission of taxes, they had after this brief ecstasy been but too rapidly and too bitterly undeceived.  He had very soon emerged in his true character, and had begun to exercise a despotism far surpassing the tyranny of the Roman governors—­a despotism which drove even the patient inhabitants of Asia Minor to open revolt.  The sultan again resorted to the most violent expedients.  His decrees granted independence to the townships which turned to him, citizenship to the -metoeci-, full remission of debts to the debtors, lands to those that had none, freedom to the slaves; nearly 15,000 such manumitted slaves fought in the army of Archelaus.  The most fearful scenes were the result of this high-handed subversion of all existing order.  The most considerable mercantile cities, Smyrna, Colophon, Ephesus, Tralles, Sardes, closed their gates against the king’s governors or put them to death, and declared for Rome.(16) On the other hand the king’s lieutenant Diodorus, a philosopher of note like Aristion, of another school, but equally available for the worst subservience, under the instructions of his master caused the whole town-council of Adramyttium to be put to death.  The Chians, who were suspected of an inclination to Rome, were fined in the first instance in 2000 talents (480,000 pounds) and, when the payment was found not correct, they were en masse put on board ship and deported in chains under the charge of their own slaves to the coast of Colchis, while their island was occupied with Pontic colonists.  The king gave orders that the chiefs of the Celts in Asia Minor should all be put to death along with their wives and children in one day, and that Galatia should be converted into a Pontic satrapy.  Most of these bloody edicts were carried into effect either at Mithradates’ own headquarters or in Galatia, but the few who escaped placed themselves at the head of their powerful tribes and expelled Eumachus, the governor of the king, out of their bounds.  It may readily be conceived that such a king would be pursued by the daggers of assassins; sixteen hundred men were condemned to death by the royal courts of inquisition as having been implicated in such conspiracies.