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Greater success attended the application of Mithradates to the peoples of the east than to the kings.
It is true that the instructions which he had left to the governors whom he appointed in Asia, to equip in the maritime towns a fleet against the pirates, had borne little fruit, for Murena preferred to begin war with Mithradates, and Gnaeus Dolabella, the governor of Cilicia, proved wholly incapable.
Thenceforward the Parthian kingdom was, as you might say, a fact in nature; though until a half-cycle had passed, a small and unimportant one, engaged mostly in reinvogorating the native Turanianism of the Parthians with fresh Parnian importations from the northern steppes. Then, in 170, Mithradates I came to the throne, and seriously founded an empire.
The former was claimed on the part of Pontus as having been bequeathed by the testament of the last of the Pylaemenids to king Mithradates Euergetes: against this, however, legitimate or illegitimate pretenders and the land itself protested.
Caesar, on the other hand, as soon as he obtained news of the arrival of the relieving army, conveyed a part of his troops in ships to the end of the lake of Marea to the west of Alexandria, and marched round this lake and down the Nile to meet Mithradates advancing up the river. Battle at the Nile The junction took place without the enemy attempting to hinder it.
Thus Mithradates acquired here a second kingdom combined with that of Pontus and, like the latter, mainly based on a number of Greek commercial towns.
Meanwhile the confusion on the Asiatic continent had become still worse. Glabrio, who was to take up in the stead of Lucullus the chief command against Mithradates and Tigranes, had remained stationary in the west of Asia Minor and, while instigating the soldiers by various proclamations against Lucullus, had not entered on the supreme command, so that Lucullus was forced to retain it.
But, meanwhile, the whole weight of the enemy's offensive fell on the weak Roman divisions left behind in Pontus and in Armenia. Tigranes compelled the Roman commander of the latter corps, Lucius Fannius the same who had formerly been the medium of communication between Sertorius and Mithradates to throw himself into a fortress, and kept him beleaguered there.
The princes of the Tauric Scythians, whom Mithradates had driven from the Crimea, turned for help to Rome; those of the senators who at all reflected on the traditional maxims of Roman policy could not but recollect that formerly, under circumstances so wholly different, the crossing of king Antiochus to Europe and the occupation of the Thracian Chersonese by his troops had become the signal for the Asiatic war, and could not but see that the occupation of the Tauric Chersonese by the Pontic king ought still less to be tolerated now.
Whether the testament was genuine or spurious, cannot be ascertained, and is of no great moment; there are no special reasons for assuming a forgery. IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates IV. VIII. Cyrene Roman V. I. Collapse of the Power of Sertorius IV. IV. The Provinces IV. VIII. Lucullus and the Fleet on the Asiatic Coast IV. VIII. Flaccus Arrives in Asia
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