Mithridates the Great by Philip Matyszak

defeated, after all) came another financial windfall, as Mithridates helped himself to the booty of another enemy camp and its pay-chest. Aquillius personally escaped to Pergamum, perhaps making a mental note of the defects in Rome’s original deployment. By scattering the Roman and allied forces about the periphery of western Pontus, they had allowed Mithridates, who had the advantage of internal lines of communication, to move swiftly to defeat each of their armies individually. Though in total the Roman and allied armies had outnumbered Mithridates, his army was larger than any one of theirs – and it was certainly larger even than the armies left to Cassius and Oppius combined.
    Quite possibly the army of Oppius did the same arithmetic. When we last heard of him, Oppius was master of an army of 40,000 men. He next appears in the historical record with a small band of cavalry and some mercenaries, and with these he was rather optimistically trying to hold the town of Laodocia on the River Lycus. What happened to his army is unknown. It is possible, but unlikely, that there had been another major battle in which Oppius was defeated, or more probably, those who had signed up for a quick and easy looting expedition into Pontus deserted as soon as they discovered that this war was going to be no such thing. This left the Roman forces looking even thinner, which caused the realists to carefully reconsider their options and depart, until finally the only soldiers remaining were those with personal loyalty to Oppius, or mercenaries determined to take their wages until the last moment that it was safe to do so.
    In recent years, new evidence has come to light of Oppius’ frantic troop-raising activity whilst he was in Laodocia. This is in the form of a letter fromOppius to a Greek city (Aphrodisias), thanking them for raising auxiliary troops, a letter which the Greeks carefully committed to stone in case they needed to prove their good intentions to the Romans later. 10 Sadly, it appears that these and other troops unaccountably failed to turn up.
    To defeat Oppius, Mithridates merely needed to send an envoy. When promised that if they handed over the Roman commander they would receive the same beneficent terms as the numerous Greek cities which had already surrendered, the Laodocians jumped at the offer. Thenceforth, the retinue of Mithridates included one captured Roman magistrate, convincing proof for doubters of the power of Pontus and the vulnerability of Rome.
    And then there was one. Cassius was in Phrygia, but uneasily aware that Pontus was now fully in control of Bithynia, and that Mithridates, once he had reorganized that kingdom, would turn his attention to the last bastion of Roman resistance. Desperately trying to recoup lost numbers, Cassius recruited or press-ganged as much of the local population as he could persuade to carry a spear; but, probably when he received news of the capture of Oppius and the loss of his army, he disbanded his rag-tag force of artisans and yokels in disgust and pulled back to Apameia. Mithridates followed at his leisure, folding Phrygia into his expanding empire, and pointedly staying at the same inn as that in which Alexander the Great had lodged on his journey eastward. Like Phrygia, Apameia surrendered without a fight, and Cassius, who had received substantial help and funding from the wealthy citizens of the town, hurried off to find shelter further west, eventually ending up in Rhodes. 11
    With the loss of Rome’s last effective field army in Asia Minor, the trickle of defections to Pontus became a flood as cities and provinces hastened to ingratiate themselves with the region’s new master. Mithridates had already shown what he could do for his new friends by landing a large sum of cash on Apameia to help them rebuild after earthquake damage. It occurred to one and all that handing over Aquillius would endear whoever did so to Mithridates. The Roman commissioner was trying to