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 Pontic invasion.  There was no lack of stores; 2,000,000 -medimni- of grain lay in the royal granaries.  The fleet and the men were numerous and well exercised, particularly the Bastarnian mercenaries, a select corps which was a match even for Italian legionaries.  On this occasion also it was the king who took the offensive.  A corps under Diophantus advanced into Cappadocia, to occupy the fortresses there and to close the way to the kingdom of Pontus against the Romans; the leader sent by Sertorius, the propraetor Marcus Marius, went in company with the Pontic officer Eumachus to Phrygia, with a view to rouse the Roman province and the Taurus mountains to revolt; the main army, above 100,000 men with 16,000 cavalry and 100 scythe-chariots, led by Taxiles and Hermocrates under the personal superintendence of the king, and the war-fleet of 400 sail commanded by Aristonicus, moved along the north coast of Asia Minor to occupy Paphlagonia and Bithynia.

Roman Preparations