MITHRIDATES MAY HAVE gotten away but he could see the walls closing in. Calculating that he would get better terms from Sulla than Fimbria, Mithridates opened a channel through General Archelaus. Archelaus approached Sulla with an enticing offer: Sulla would get the full backing of Mithridates for his domestic wars if Sulla agreed to leave Asia in Pontic hands. But Sulla laughed this off and delivered his own terms: Asia would return to Roman provincial status; Cappadocia and Bithynia would be ruled by Roman client kings; and Mithridates would return to Pontus. But beyond simply restoring
In early 85, Sulla and Mithridates finally met in person on an island in the northern Aegean. The meeting began with a battle of wills over who would speak first. Sulla finally broke the silence to say, “It is the part of suppliants to speak first, while victors need only to be silent.” Mithridates then went into a long and not entirely incorrect account of how he had been provoked into war by the machinations of Aquillius and the other Romans. Sulla interrupted this story to tick off the list of Mithridates’s own crimes, up to and including the murder of eighty thousand Italians. Unable to deny these crimes, and without an army to hide behind, Mithridates agreed to all of Sulla’s terms. With the treaty complete, Sulla allowed the king to return to Pontus where Mithridates rebuilt his power and planned his next move, “just as fire not wholly extinguished bursts forth again into greater flames.”53
Sulla’s own forces could not believe the terms of the peace when they found out. Jugurtha had bribed a few old senators, and as punishment was paraded through the streets of Rome in chains and deposited naked in a dank cell to starve to death. Mithridates had been guilty of unconscionable aggression and mass murder. How was Mithridates
The explanation for Sulla’s lenient terms are simple. They left him free to turn his attention to his domestic enemies. As soon as he left the meeting with Mithridates, Sulla moved against Fimbria’s legion in Asia. Leading his own army across the Hellespont, Sulla located Fimbria’s army and set up a camp nearby. Outnumbered by superior forces, Fimbria’s two legions had no intention of putting up a fight. Sulla was a great conquering warlord; Fimbria was a murderous renegade legate. When his officers told him they would not fight, Fimbria agreed to vacate his command and leave the country. Fimbria departed for Pergamum, where he killed himself.55
The war now over, Sulla reorganized Asia. The former arrangement of the province still traced its roots back to the original will of King Attalus III, which stipulated that many cities would be free of taxation. Sulla swept all that aside. As punishment for collaborating with Mithridates, there were no free cities anymore—they were now
BACK IN ROME, the city lay quiet under an uneasy calm. Just a few years earlier it had been a war zone; the Forum had been consumed by violent street clashes. Now everything was calm and quiet. After completing his service in the legions under the command of Pompey Strabo, young Marcus Tullius Cicero settled in Rome to study rhetoric and oratory during the years of Cinna’s government. He later reported that in “the three following years, the city was free from the tumult of arms.”57
