With only a single legion of true Roman soldiers at his disposal, Aquillius had to rely on local conscripts to guard the border with Pontus. But what these conscripts lacked in skill, they made up in abundance. Within a few months, Aquillius could call on four armies of 40,000 soldiers each. One army was led by Nicomedes IV, and the other three by subordinate Roman praetors. But though Aquillius soon had 150,000–200,000 men guarding every pass in and out of Bithynia, that did not mean he was a match for Mithridates. With his legitimacy based on military strength from the beginning, Mithridates’s core Pontic army was trained, disciplined, and experienced. Around this core, Mithridates could call in new conscripts of his own from across the known world. In this first campaign, Mithridates marched against Aquillius with 150,000 men. At their height, the Pontic armies would bulge to 250,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry.12
When Mithridates advanced on Bithynia, he crushed Aquillius’s conscripts “guarding” the passes. All four armies disintegrated and the Roman officers evacuated the mainland to the island city of Rhodes. Aquillius himself retreated to Pergamum and evacuated to the island of Lesbos. As if this land invasion was not enough, Mithridates also sent a war fleet through the Bosporus. The Romans had hired a Greek navy to block the straights, but they too disintegrated upon contact with the enemy. Now Pontic forces controlled both the land and the sea. If Aquillius had really come to provoke Mithridates into a war, he had done a fine job.13
Mithridates proceeded to envelope the entire province of Asia. Being an enlightened model of an ideal king, Mithridates knew exactly how to introduce himself. He announced that he was here to liberate the people of Asia from the yoke of the Roman oppression. A generation of publicani abuse in Asia gave Mithridates the perfect propaganda tool: he declared a five-year tax holiday and canceled all outstanding debts owed to Italians. Then, when Mithridates promised leniency to the people of Lesbos in exchange for handing over Aquillius, the people complied. Now a prisoner, Aquillius became a frequent target of humiliating jokes in Mithridates’s court.14
WHILE AQUILLIUS LOST control of Asia, his patron Marius stewed back in Rome. After being shunted aside during the Social War, Marius had gone home and watched with increasing bitterness as the next generation of rising stars took over. Pompey Strabo was building a powerful base in Picenum and Cisalpine Gaul. Down in the south, Metellus Pius—son of Marius’s late rival Numidicus—would soon be consul. And then there was Sulla, whose success ate at Marius most of all. Sulla’s exploits in Campania and Samnium were added to the list of heroic deeds on Sulla’s resume that went all the way back to his capture of Jugurtha in 105. As the Social War wound down, Sulla’s star burned hotter than any man’s in Italy.15
Casting a dejected eye on the situation in Italy, Marius looked further afield for a chance to quench the thirst for glory, and spied the deteriorating situation in Asia. But if Marius really thought he could secure an eastern command, he was deluding himself. He was almost seventy years old. The Romans did not send seventy-year-olds to run their wars. To prove he could handle the job, Marius came down to the Campus Martius daily to exercise and display his physical prowess. He cut a comic, and somewhat pathetic, figure going through his regimen. Crowds gathered to watch, some cheering him on but most “moved to pity at the sight of his greed and ambition, because, though he had risen from poverty to the greatest wealth and from obscurity to the highest place he knew not how to set bounds to his good fortune.” On top of his age, Marius had already been maneuvered out of commands during the Social War, so why on earth he thought anyone would let him take five legions to Asia is a mystery. Marius was never in serious consideration for the job. The men who
The consular elections in 89 were delayed until the end of the year due to the ongoing war. By then Rome probably knew about Mithridates’s capture of Cappadocia and provocative letter to Aquillius. A consulship now meant a chance to run a great war in the east, and candidates came hard for the job, “every one striving to be general in the war against Mithridates, lured on by the greatness of the rewards and riches to be reaped in that war.” When the elections finally came at the end of December, there was intense jockeying for the command. Sulla and his close friend Quintus Pompeius Rufus (whose son had recently married Sulla’s daughter) ran as a team, with Gaius Julius Caesar Strabo Vopiscus trying to push his way in between them.17
