soldiers too were disinclined to enter on the hopeless Italian expedition.  Mithradates had constantly been surrounded by suspicion and treason; he had not the gift of calling forth affection and fidelity among those around him.  As in earlier years he had compelled his distinguished general Archelaus to seek protection in the Roman camp; as during the campaigns of Lucullus his most trusted officers Diodes, Phoenix, and even the most notable of the Roman emigrants had passed over to the enemy; so now, when his star grew pale and the old, infirm, embittered sultan was accessible to no one else save his eunuchs, desertion followed still more rapidly on desertion.  Castor, the commandant of the fortress Phanagoria (on the Asiatic coast opposite Kertch), first raised the standard of revolt; he proclaimed the freedom of the town and delivered the sons of Mithradates that were in the fortress into the hands of the Romans.  While the insurrection spread among the Bosporan towns, and Chersonesus (not far from Sebastopol), Theudosia (Kaffa), and others joined the Phanagorites, the king allowed his suspicion and his cruelty to have free course.  On the information of despicable eunuchs his most confidential adherents were nailed to the cross; the king’s own sons were the least sure of their lives.  The son who was his father’s favourite and was probably destined by him as his successor, Pharnaces, took his resolution and headed the insurgents.  The servants whom Mithradates sent to arrest him, and the troops despatched against him, passed over to his side; the corps of Italian deserters, perhaps the most efficient among the divisions of Mithradates’ army, and for that very reason the least inclined to share in the romantic—­and for the deserters peculiarly hazardous—­expedition against Italy, declared itself en masse for the prince; the other divisions of the army and the fleet followed the example thus set.

Death of Mithadates

After the country and the army had abandoned the king, the capital Panticapaeum at length opened its gates to the insurgents and delivered over to them the old king enclosed in his palace.  From the high wall of his castle the latter besought his son at least to grant him life and not imbrue his hands in his father’s blood; but the request came ill from the lips of a man whose own hands were stained with the blood of his mother and with the recently-shed blood of his innocent son Xiphares; and in heartless severity and inhumanity Pharnaces even outstripped his father.  Seeing therefore he had now to die, the sultan resolved at least to die as he had lived; his wives, his concubines and his daughters, including the youthful brides of the kings of Egypt and Cyprus, had all to suffer the bitterness of death and drain the poisoned cup, before he too took it, and then, when the draught did not take effect quickly enough, presented his neck for the fatal stroke to a Celtic mercenary Betuitus.  So died in 691 Mithradates Eupator, in the sixty-eighth year of his life and the fifty-seventh of his reign, twenty-six years after he had for the first time taken the field against the Romans.  The dead body, which king Pharnaces sent as a voucher of his merits and of his loyalty to Pompeius, was by order of the latter laid in the royal sepulchre of Sinope.