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Updated: June 11, 2025
Alexander with his Macedonian army, in which the staff especially was excellent, could fully make head against the great-king; but the king of Epirus, which stood by the side of Macedonia somewhat as Hesse by the side of Prussia, could only raise an army worthy of the name by means of mercenaries and of alliances based on accidental political combinations.
Liberated after twenty months' captivity about the middle of 684 in consequence of the variance that had occurred between the great-king and the Romans, he had been despatched with 10,000 Armenian cavalry to his former kingdom, to threaten the communications of the enemy.
Of all the Phoenician settlements none attained a more rapid and secure prosperity than those which were established by the Tyrians and Sidonians on the south coast of Spain and the north coast of Africa regions that lay beyond the reach of the arm of the great-king and the dangerous rivalry of the mariners of Greece, and in which the natives held the same relation to the strangers as the Indians in America held to the Europeans.
The expeditions of Servilius and Marcius to Cilicia, and of Metellus to Crete, were undertaken on this system; and in accordance with it Triarius had the island of Delos surrounded by a wall for protection against the pirates. Such attempts to secure the dominion of the seas remind us of that Persian great-king, who ordered the sea to be scourged with rods to make it subject to him.
Notwithstanding the close relations of Rome with the court of Alexandria and her royal ward, the senate by no means intended to be in reality, what it was in name, his "protector;" firmly resolved to give itself no concern about Asiatic affairs except in case of extreme necessity, and to limit the sphere of the Roman power by the Pillars of Hercules and the Hellespont, it allowed the great-king to take his course.
On the only occasion in earlier times when they took the field on the offensive in the great Sicilian expedition of the African Phoenicians which ended in their defeat at Himera by Gelo of Syracuse it was simply as dutiful subjects of the great-king and in order to avoid taking part in the campaign against the Hellenes of the east, that they entered the lists against the Hellenes of the west; just as their Syrian kinsmen were in fact obliged in that same year to share the defeat of the Persians at Salamis .
Even the prince of Corduene, the province situated to the east of Tigranocerta, submitted; while, on the other hand, Guras the brother of the great-king maintained himself in Nisibis, and thereby in Mesopotamia.
Near Talaura in Lesser Armenia he confronted the Pontic troops, at whose head Tigranes' son-in-law, Mithradates of Media, had already engaged the Romans successfully in a cavalry conflict; the main force of the great-king was advancing to the same point from Armenia.
Mithradates kept back and contented himself with inducing Tigranes the great-king of Armenia, who held a more free position with reference to the Romans than he did, to send troops to Cappadocia. Sulla quickly collected his forces and the contingents of the Asiatic allies, crossed the Taurus, and drove the governor Gordius along with his Armenian auxiliaries out of Cappadocia.
The great-king cherished in secret the suspicion that Mithradates might have had a hand in the insurrection of his grandson Cleopatra the mother of the younger Tigranes was the daughter of Mithradates and, though no open rupture took place, the good understanding between the two monarchs was disturbed at the very moment when it was most urgently needed.
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