by whom Lucullus was beloved as a benefactor and a founder.  Everything else also went on successfully and conformably to the merits of the general, who sought for the praise that is due to justice and humanity, and not the praise that follows success in war:  for the success in war was due in no small degree, to the army and to fortune, but his justice and humanity proved that he had a mild and well-regulated temper; and it was by these means that Lucullus now subdued the barbarians without resorting to arms; for the kings of the Arabs came to him to surrender all that they had, and the Sopheni also came over to him.  He also gained the affection of the Gordyeni so completely that they were ready to leave their cities, and to follow him, as volunteers, with their children and wives, the reason of which was as follows:  Zarbienus, the King of the Gordyeni, as it has been already told, secretly communicated, through Appius, with Lucullus about an alliance, being oppressed by the tyranny of Tigranes; but his design was reported to Tigranes, and he was put to death, and his children and wife perished with him, before the Romans invaded Armenia.  Lucullus did not forget all this; and, on entering Gordyene, he made a funeral for Zarbienus, and, ornamenting the pile with vests, and the king’s gold, and the spoils got from Tigranes, he set fire to it himself, and poured libations on the pile, with the friends and kinsmen of the king, and gave him the name of friend and ally of the Roman people.  He also ordered a monument to be erected to him at great cost; for a large quantity of gold and silver was found in the palace of Zarbienus, and there were stored up three million medimni of wheat, so that the soldiers were well supplied, and Lucullus was admired, that without receiving a drachma from the treasury, he made the war support itself.

XXX.  While Lucullus was here, there came an embassy from the King of the Parthians[407] also, who invited him to friendship and an alliance.  This proposal was agreeable to Lucullus, and in return he sent ambassadors to the Parthian, who discovered that he was playing double and secretly asking Mesopotamia from Tigranes as the price of his alliance.  On hearing this Lucullus determined to pass by Tigranes and Mithridates as exhausted antagonists, and to try the strength of the Parthians, and to march against them, thinking it a glorious thing, in one uninterrupted campaign, like an athlete, to give three kings in succession the throw, and to have made his way through three empires, the most powerful under the sun, unvanquished and victorious.  Accordingly he sent orders to Sornatius and the other commanders in Pontus to conduct the army there to him, as he was intending to advance from Gordyene farther into Asia.  These generals had already found that the soldiers were difficult to manage and mutinous; but now they made the ungovernable temper of the soldiers quite apparent, being unable by any means of persuasion or compulsion to move the