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Mithridates, driven step by step into Colchis, and no longer able to keep the sea, conceived the project of turning the Black Sea by the Caucasus, in order to pass through Thrace to assume the offensive, a policy which it is difficult to understand, in view of the fact that he was unable to defend his kingdom against fifty thousand Romans.
However, expeditions had ascended the rivers of the Scythians, had made their way into Colchis, and into the countries of the Jugrians and of the Estians, had carried off fifteen hundred maidens in the Archipelago, and sunk all the strange vessels sailing beyond Cape Oestrymon, so that the secret of the routes should not be known.
This was in short for the Roman dominion to be placed at the disposal of one man. For the provinces which alone he could not touch under the former law, Phrygia, Lycaonia, Galatia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, the upper Colchis, Armenia, these he now had together with the armies and resources with which Lucullus defeated Mithridates and Tigranes.
There is another story of Medea almost too revolting for record even of a sorceress, a class of persons to whom both ancient and modern poets have been accustomed to attribute every degree of atrocity. In her flight from Colchis she had taken her young brother Absyrtus with her.
The bulls of Colchis are recorded to have brazen feet; but whether it happened by ill pasture and running, by an alloy from intervention of other parents from stolen intrigues; whether a weakness in their progenitors had impaired the seminal virtue, or by a decline necessary through a long course of time, the originals of nature being depraved in these latter sinful ages of the world whatever was the cause, it is certain that Lord Peter's bulls were extremely vitiated by the rust of time in the metal of their feet, which was now sunk into common lead.
He came thus, and called to them often; but when they woke they looked at each other, and said, 'Who dare sail to Colchis, or bring home the golden fleece? And in all the country none was brave enough to try it; for the man and the time were not come. Phrixus had a cousin called AEson, who was king in Iolcos by the sea.
And at last, they say, he stopped at Colchis, on the steep Circassian coast; and there Phrixus married Chalciope, the daughter of Aietes the king; and offered the ram in sacrifice; and Aietes nailed the ram's fleece to a beech, in the grove of Ares the war- God.
When he was about to return homeward from the land of Colchis, he wrote to this chanaranges that he had decided to invade the land of the Romans with his whole army, not, however, by a single inroad into the country, but making two divisions of the Persian army, in order that the attack might be made upon the enemy on both sides of the River Euphrates.
That Cæsar should have been Cæsar, or Pompey Pompey, does not seem to me a matter so difficult as that Cicero should have been Cicero. Then comes that letter of which I spoke in my first chapter, in which he recapitulates the Getæ, the Armenians, and the men of Colchis. "Shall I, the savior of the city, assist to bring down upon that city those hordes of foreign men?
Why, if you will believe me, they were the sons of that very Phrixus, who in his childhood had been carried to Colchis on the back of the golden-fleeced ram.
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