that it was Roman avarice which forced on the war.  Magnesia on the Maeander, Ephesus, and Mitylene welcomed the king joyfully, and Stratoniceia, in Caria, was captured.  He then attacked Magnesia near Mount Sipylus, prepared to invade Rhodes, and issued a hideous order for an exterminating massacre of every Roman and Italian in Asia on an appointed day.  Punishments were proclaimed for anyone who should hide one of the proscribed or bury his body; rewards were promised for all who killed or denounced them.  Slaves who slew their masters were to be freed.  The murder of a creditor was to be taken as payment by a debtor of half his debt. [Massacre of Romans and Italians.] There were dreadful scenes on the fatal day—­the thirtieth after the order was issued—­in the Asiatic cities.  In Pergamus the victims fled to the temple of Aesculapius, and were shot down as they clung to the statues.  At Ephesus they were dragged out from the temple of Artemis and slain.  At Adramyttium they swam out to sea, but were brought back and killed, and their children were drowned.  At Cos alone was any mercy shown.  There those who had taken refuge in the temple of Aesculapius were spared.  The number of the slain was said to be 80,000 or even 120,000, which must have been, however, an incredible exaggeration. [Sidenote:  Objects of the massacre.] By this fiendish crime Mithridates must, though he was mistaken, have felt that he cut himself off for ever from all reconciliation with Rome.  But no doubt he acted on calculation.  For not only did he get rid of men who might have recruited the Roman armies; not only did he gratify the long-hoarded hatred of the farmers and peasants of whom Roman publicans and Roman slave-masters had so long made a prey; not only did he oblige the debtors by wiping out their debts and even the very memory of them in their creditors’ blood, but he might well count on putting his accomplices also beyond the pale of Roman mercy, and so linking them to his own fortunes.  Moreover, vengeance seemed remote.  For Sulla had just marched on Rome instead of to the east, and a civil war in Italy might make Mithridates permanently supreme in Asia. [Sidenote:  Mithridates’ settlement of his new acquisitions.] So he made Pergamus his capital, leaving Sinope to his son as vice-regent, while Cappadocia, Phrygia, and Bithynia were turned into satrapies.  All arrears of taxes were remitted; and so wealthy had his spoils made him that exemption for five years to come was promised to the towns that had obeyed his orders.

[Sidenote:  Reverses of Mithridates.  He retires to Pergamus.] But the tide was already on the turn.  In Paphlagonia there was still resistance.  Archelaus was repulsed and wounded at Magnesia.  Mithridates in person was forced to abandon the siege of Rhodes.  His revenge was sated; he was tired of the hardships of a war which he meant his generals to conduct in future; and with a new wife he went back to Pergamus, to his rings, and his music, and debaucheries, at the very time that a shudder had gone through Italy at the tidings of the massacre, and when Sulla was on his way to avenge it.