Lucullus

  It is clear that the verdict of Mithridates won the day in Tigranes’ camp: there would be no major engagement, at least not until Lucullus was in a position to threaten Artaxata. Dio notes that Lucullus tried to draw the enemy into a major battle by attacking here and there, hoping to coax Tigranes’ forces into an engagement in defence of native soil and resources. But the Armenians did not take the bait. The enemy cavalry was willing to clash now and again with the Roman horse, but whenever the Roman infantry appeared, the Armenian horsemen prudently withdrew – to the increasing frustration of the Romans.73 Roman infantry were picked off and slain by the ‘Parthian’ tactic of archery and missile fire from the retreating cavalry, who often used poison arrows. The kings were clearly not interested in a major, pitched battle – they rightly feared they would be defeated – and so Lucullus may well have considered that his only option was to strike at Artaxata in the hope of provoking the ‘final’ engagement.

  There was a ‘Battle of Artaxata’, but it was not, in the end, a battle for the capital. The details of what happened on the road to the great city are relatively scanty, and there are significant problems of interpretation, in part because it is not clear that either Dio or Appian even describe the engagement.74 Plutarch notes that Tigranes was ready for the approach of the Romans, and that Lucullus – once again an exemplar of religious pietas – made sacrifice to the gods and then prepared to engage the enemy in a pitched battle. The Armenian force consisted of a significant cavalry and infantry array (the latter especially well trained), protected by mounted archers and Iberian lance-men. There was an initial skirmish between these Iberians and the Roman horse, and soon the Iberians were in full retreat. It appears the flight was the result of fright more than deliberate intent, and the Roman cavalry pursued. Tigranes now appeared at the head of his cavalry contingent, and Lucullus is said to have been frightened by the number of the force and their resplendent array. He thus ordered a halt to his own pursuit of the enemy and proceeded to march against the Atropateni who were massed opposite him. These were routed, and soon enough there was a general flight. Plutarch is careful to note that Mithridates was the most cowardly of the three kings who ran for their lives on that day.75

  Our sources agree that considerations of weather played a significant part in the interruption of continuing military operations. Appian says that the onset of winter halted manoeuvres on both sides; Plutarch notes that an unusually early winter struck the region, so that September would already have been inhospitable.76 The two authors are probably describing successive winters and not the same season. We face a difficulty of chronological analysis in the later stages of Lucullus’ Armenian campaign because of the vague nature of Appian’s account in particular, and the generally intractable differences between his narrative and that of Plutarch. Plutarch says that there was already ice and frost, snow and generally damp and unhealthy, difficult conditions at the time of the autumnal equinox. The pursuit of the enemy was a major problem for Lucullus’ force, and once again the escape of the kings must have been a source of tremendous frustration to the Roman commander, who was living, after all, on borrowed time both in terms of the tolerance of his men and the political situation in Rome. Now he faced the problem of every military adventurer in autumn: winter was coming. Artaxata represented all too real challenges of terrain and weather – conditions that only made worse the constant difficulty of keeping an army resupplied in the field, especially so deep in potentially hostile territory.

  What is reasonably clear is that in the aftermath of the Artaxata engagement, the two kings once again separated. Tigranes headed deeper into Armenia and Mithridates returned to what was once the heartland of his Pontic kingdom. The reason for the division is unclear, but it may reflect a strategy of seeking to divide the Roman force and either draw it off in two directions, or at least prolong what the kings must have realized was an increasingly favourable situation for them in terms of calendar and attrition. Appian says that Mithridates had 4,000 of his own soldiers, with an additional 4,000 whom he was supplied with by Tigranes. Lucullus eventually resolved to follow Mithridates, in part because he was already facing his own provisioning and supply problems and needed to return to the richer real estate in Pontus that he had left relatively lightly defended. Mithridates’ strategy was to wear Lucullus down, and in this he was reasonably successful. Artaxata was to be another Tigranocerta; it was to be another major engagement, this one definitive. Lucullus’ hopes in this regard would be dashed. Victory at Nisibis would still await him, but it would prove to be a poor consolation prize.77

  Nisibis

  We have observed that Lucullus’ men had been eager for a return home almost immediately after the engagement – such as it was – at Artaxata. The situation was critical. Plutarch notes that not long after Artaxata, the tribunes had come to Lucullus to beg him to give up the pursuit of Tigranes and Mithridates. There was shouting in the soldiers’ tents at night, which the biographer says is a mark of mutiny and incipient rebellion.78 Lucullus sought to counsel patience and renewed tolerance for the hardships of the campaign, but his words must have been ringing increasingly hollow. He tried to argue that Artaxata was the ‘Armenian Carthage’, the city of Hannibal, but his men were in no mood for history lessons about the Second Punic War. In the end, Lucullus had to agree not to pursue Tigranes at least – the Roman army had moved as far east as it seemed willing to proceed.

  Nisibis was under the control of Tigranes’ brother Gouras, and it also benefited from the technology expertise of Callimachus, the Greek who had been such a threat to Roman safety at Amisus. Nisibis was apparently not to be one of the more difficult or challenging tests of Lucullus’ ingenuity; the city fell without much of a siege process. Plutarch gives no details of the campaign, and focuses instead on how Lucullus was willing to treat Gouras with kindness, while Callimachus was brought to him in chains because, by his actions at Amisus in particular, he had robbed Lucullus of the chance to treat Greeks with respect and clemency.79 His death would follow shortly.

  Appian adds the detail that Nisibis was a treasure city of Tigranes, a city he had seized from the Parthians. It was a strongly fortified city, with two walls of brick with an intervenient moat. Appian provides more details of the actual siege than Plutarch. He notes that Lucullus prosecuted the siege with vigour, but that between the walls and the moat there was little that he could do – the city was so secure that even Tigranes did not see any need to come to assist in its defence, treasures notwithstanding. But then winter came, and on a moonless night there was another terrible storm – and the defenders of the city relaxed their guard. At just the most unexpected and infelicitous time given the weather, Lucullus struck. The few guards who had been left to man the walls were killed; archery and fire were utterly useless, given the torrential rain. Nisibis was captured because of the ability of Lucullus to judge exactly the right moment to launch an assault that could not be countered. If Tigranes really did conclude that Nisibis could defend itself, he had woefully miscalculated. Yet once again, the loss of a city would not mean the end of the war, and would arguably add another charge to the indictment of avarice composed by Lucullus’ enemies. Nisibis could easily (if rather unfairly) be claimed to be more treasure-laden than strategically significant.

  Dio makes clear that Tigranes thought that Nisibis could withstand a siege, and that the king headed for Armenia and the regions around the border with Pontus. We are told that Lucius Fannius opposed him, and that the king launched his own siege – an operation that was foiled when Lucullus sent aid to Fannius.80 Fannius had served in Fimbria’s army; his career between desertion and rescue by Lucullus is not entirely clear.81 Tigranes and Mithridates had clearly mastered the strategy of dividing their forces and compelling Lucullus to chase first one, then the other. Artaxata had not been taken; Nisibis was a very real prize, though less significant than Tigranocerta, and equally pointless in terms of the critical question of the capture of the kings. And Pontus
was weakly defended by understaffed Roman legions, with a population that was more than willing to welcome back Mithridates.

  Eutropius has a brief comment here on the Nisibis operation: Inde Nisibin profectus eam quoque civitatem cum regis fratre cepit82 (Lucullus advanced to Nisibis, and captured the city and the brother of the king). Another victory for the roster of conquests – and a royal captive, but not the king who mattered, and not the end of the war. Success at Nisibis would soon enough be followed by serious disaster elsewhere for the Romans.

  Nisibis is the modern Nusaybin in south-east Turkey, not far from the Syrian border. It would be captured by the Emperor Trajan in AD 115, and later by Septimius Severus. It would be the general locale of the final engagement between Rome and Parthia in AD 217, but hardly the last time the Romans would fight near its walls.

  If someone wanted to be cleverly critical of Lucullus, they could say that he had abandoned the road of difficulty and taken the path to luxury and decadence. Nisibis represented the latter, while Artaxata may well have symbolized the former. But in a fair appraisal of the situation, and given the army he was blessed or cursed to have, Lucullus arguably did the best he could – yet the best was to prove simply not good enough in the current constraints.

  Roman Disasters and Recovery; Zela

  Mithridates, for his part, of course knew where he was heading, while Lucullus needed to wait for reconnaissance and intelligence reports in the aftermath of the Nisibis siege – not to mention tend to the rescue of Fannius’ forces. Before Lucullus could hope to catch the fugitive monarch, Mithridates was able to launch a surprise attack on the defensive forces in Pontus under the command of Fabius Hadrianus. Both fugitive kings were fully occupied with surgical strikes behind enemy lines, as it were, hitting hard at Roman forces which might be considered easy prey – and diversionary bait for Lucullus. The Romans now suffered a serious blow, with some 500 slain. Hadrianus was in such desperate straits that he even resorted to freeing the slaves in his custody so that they could supplement his embattled force. A total disaster may well have been averted by the timely wounding of the king himself, who was struck by a stone in the knee and a missile weapon under the eye. The wounds were serious enough that Mithridates’ army was concerned that the king might die then and there. The Romans, for their part, were unable to do much in the immediate aftermath of the king’s injuries because of how badly they had been mauled in the engagement.83 Dio tells us that the local population in Lesser Armenia and Pontus was willing to welcome back Mithridates, given that he was, after all, their king of long standing and that they had been mistreated by the Romans.84 These Romans, who had been left behind by Lucullus to secure the captured territory of the king, clearly lacked Lucullus’ gentle touch in dealing with local populations. Hadrianus was now essentially trapped in Cabeira, and Mithridates – wounded or not – had won back some of his lost glory. His victorious mood would not last for long, though for now things were not going badly for the kings, relatively speaking. There had been victories over smaller Roman forces not under the command of Lucullus in 68 BC, and 67 BC would see an even greater Roman defeat. And this was the worst possible time for the Romans to incur significant losses.

  The king’s battle wounds were perhaps cured by the Agari, a Scythian tribe noted for the use of snake venom (they may have been involved in the curing of his wounds after the Battle of Zela; we cannot be sure). Plutarch does not engage in such memorable accounts, simply noting that word reached Lucullus that Hadrianus had been defeated by the king, such that the Romans in his camp felt shame at the loss.85 Hadrianus had suffered the defection of Thracian mercenaries and slaves in his camp who decided to join Mithridates. The whole affair might have been catastrophic for the Roman position, had fortune not intervened. The wounding of Mithridates bought the Romans sufficient time to send help to Hadrianus, who was in danger of a critical siege. The general Gaius Valerius Triarius was sent with a relief force. Once again, nature and the forces of storm or tempest played a part in the unfolding of military history. Triarius relieved Hadrianus and took command of the Roman soldiery, moving to engage with Mithridates’ force, but a terrific storm rose up and destroyed tents and animals on both sides of the battlefield. For a while, waiting out the weather was the order of the day.

  Once again, the quest for glory and the desire for an ambitious undertaking were to be the undoing of a would-be hero – at least in the view of Plutarch and Appian.86 Triarius learned that Lucullus was indeed on his way, and that before long his superior would be on the scene and ready to settle affairs with Mithridates. He decided, then, that this was his hour to strike; he wanted desperately to have a victory to his credit before Lucullus could snatch the glory. Triarius ordered an attack on the Pontic camp. The fight is reported to have been long and brutal, but Mithridates was finally able to decide the day, and the Roman infantry were driven back to a muddy ditch and slaughtered in frightful numbers. It was another chaotic defeat for Rome, until fortune intervened to favour the children of Romulus. Mithridates had destroyed the Roman infantry, and was now in pursuit of the cavalry. A Roman centurion then managed to come close to the monarch in the chaos of battle, apparently in the guise of one of his attendants. He moved to strike the king in the thigh with a sword – he was aiming for an exposed part of the body, and hoping to assassinate Mithridates and thus save the day for his comrades.

  A Failed Assassination

  It was an incredibly brave and foolhardy action; the Roman soldier was immediately slain by Mithridates’ men. But the king was in dire straits once again, or at least so went the story in swift rumour among his men. Appian says that the king’s doctor, Timotheus, immediately moved to staunch the bleeding, and, perhaps more importantly, to show the king to his army – to literally lift up the monarch and encourage his men that all was well. Mithridates’ main concern at this point was to chastise his men for having abandoned the pursuit of the Roman cavalry because of their fear for his life. Once treated, the king moved to lead an attack on what was left of the Roman camp.

  The Romans had abandoned the site of their fortified base. Appian says that after the clash, twenty-four tribunes and 150 centurions were found while the king’s men were stripping the dead – one of the heaviest death tolls in the officer corps for one’s day action in the annals of Roman military history, indeed, possibly the worst ever.87 Dio notes that Triarius had feared Mithridates’ overwhelming numbers; he was waiting for Lucullus, but the king’s attack on the Roman baggage at Dadasa had frightened them into action.

  Plutarch offers additional details of the disastrous encounter between Triarius and Mithridates. He says that some 7,000 Romans were killed (he reports the same officer casualty figures as Appian), and notes that when Lucullus finally arrived on the scene, he prudently hid Triarius to save his life from the angry action of his infuriated soldiers.88 Not surprisingly, we learn that Mithridates was in no mood to engage with Lucullus in battle – his attrition strategy was working wonders for his cause, and delay was the order of the day for the Pontic monarch. The so-called Battle of Zela of 67 BC was fought somewhere near the modern central Turkish city of Sivas. Triarius suffered what may well have been his first defeat; it was certainly his worst. Some twenty years later, Zela would be the scene of another battle, with a very different outcome, when Julius Caesar defeated Pharnaces II of Pontus, the occasion for the celebrated veni, vidi, vici report.

  Taking Stock of the Disaster at Zela: 67 BC

  The Zela engagement of 67 BC was a Roman military disaster, details for which are frustratingly elusive. Triarius was clearly the responsible party for the loss – and Lucullus the ultimate winner in that he successfully relieved the Roman position and drove off Mithridates. The Pontic king was not willing to stay and face a man who had defeated him before; the story of Lucullus’ military career in Asia would not change – the king was perfectly happy to run away yet again. Especially in light of Caesar’s later victory in the same vicinity over a Pontic k
ing, we may conclude that the First Battle of Zela had an eerie outcome. This would be Lucullus’ last real chance to destroy Mithridates, and the king would once again refuse to take any unnecessary risk. Before long, Mithridates would be seeing to the restoration of his rule over huge swaths of Pontic land. He was soon busying himself with the rebuilding and rehabilitation of his kingdom in what was increasingly clearly the waning period of Lucullus’ military life.

  One might well wonder if Lucullus had given premature hopes to his Roman audience that the business with the two kings was finished. In any case, the disaster at Zela would have been a godsend for his enemies in the capital. In 67 BC, the Romans could celebrate Quintus Metellus’ subjugation of Crete and the island’s reduction into a province. But Mithridates had defeated a Roman force at Zela and Tigranes had moved to recover Armenia. Much had changed in five long years. In 72, Lucullus had defeated Mithridates at Cabeira (the year the pirates had done well against Marcus Antonius off Crete). Mithridates had fled to Tigranes, and Lucullus had spent 71–70 BC engaged in pursuit and further (albeit relatively minor) victories. In 70, Metellus began his pirate campaign in Cretan waters. In 69, Lucullus reached the apex of his power with the astonishing victory at Tigranocerta. But already in 68, the decline was in full vigour, and 67 was a year of bad news for the opponents of both Mithridates and Tigranes. Zela would prove to be Mithridates’ one truly impressive achievement over a Roman army, though he would not profit much from the victory in the long-term. If Appian is a reliable source, the king’s victory was in part achieved because he was able to pin down the Romans in a muddy trench that impeded their movement; the Romans were caught by Mithridates and slaughtered in the ditch.89 Mithridates was about 67 years old in 67 BC – and he now had a present to celebrate the year. Zela was the high point of his career of animosity against Rome. All Mithridates and Tigranes had to do for the moment was to run amok through Pontus and Cappadocia.90