Colleen McCullough - 3. Fortune's Favorites

All the eastern kings were being troublesome one of the penalties Rome was forced to endure because her internecine strife had made it impossible for Sulla to remain in the east long enough to render both Mithridates and Tigranes permanently impotent. As it was, no sooner had Sulla sailed home than Mithridates was back intriguing to annex Cappadocia, and Lucius Licinius Murena (then governor of Asia Province and Cilicia) had promptly gone to war against him without Sulla's knowledge or permission, and in contravention of the Treaty of Dardanus. For a while Murena had done amazingly well, until self confidence had led him into a series of disastrous encounters with Mithridates on his own soil of Pontus. Sulla had been obliged to send the elder Aulus Gabinius to order Murena back to his own provinces. It had been Sulla's intention to punish Murena for his cavalier behavior, but then had come the confrontation with Pompey; so Murena had had to be allowed to return and celebrate a triumph in order to put Pompey in his place. In the meantime, Tigranes had used the six years just gone by to expand his kingdom of Armenia southward and westward into lands belonging to the King of the Parthians and the rapidly disintegrating Kingdom of Syria. He had begun to see his chance when he learned that old King Mithradates of the Parthians was too ill to proceed with a projected invasion of Syria and too ill to prevent the barbarians called Massagetae from taking over all his lands to the north and east of Parthia itself, as well as to prevent one of his sons, Gotarzes, from usurping Babylonia. As Tigranes himself had once predicted, the death of King Mithradates of the Parthians had provoked a war of succession complicated by the fact that the old man had had three official queens two his paternal half sisters, and the third none other than a daughter of Tigranes called Automa. While various sons of various mothers fought over what remained, yet another vital satrapy seceded fabulously rich Elymais, watered by the eastern tributaries of the Tigris, the rivers Choaspes and Pasitigris; the silt free harbors to the east of the Tigris Euphrates delta were lost, as was the city of Susa, one of the Parthian royal seats. Uncaring, the sons of old King Mithradates warred on. So did Tigranes. His first move (in the year Gaius Marius died) was to invade in succession the petty kingdoms of Sophene, Gordyene, Adiabene, and finally Osrhoene. These four little states conquered, Tigranes now owned all the lands bordering the eastern bank of the Euphrates from above Tomisa all the way down to Europus; the big cities of Amida, Edessa and Nisibis were now also his, as were the tolls levied along the great river. But rather than entrust such commercial enterprises as toll collecting to his own Armenians, Tigranes wooed and won over the Skenite Arabs who controlled the arid regions between the Euphrates and the Tigris south of Osrhoene, and exacted tolls on every caravan which passed across their territory. Nomad Bedouins though they were, Tigranes moved the Skenite Arabs into Edessa and Carrhae and appointed them the collectors of Euphrates tolls at Samosata and Zeugma. Their king whose royal title was Abgar was now the client of Tigranes, and the Greek speaking populations of all the towns the King of Armenia had overcome were forced to emigrate to those parts of Armenia where the Greek language was hitherto unknown. Tigranes desperately wanted to be the civilized ruler of a Hellenized kingdom and what better way to Hellenize it than to implant colonies of Greek speakers within its borders? As a child Tigranes had been held hostage by the King of the Parthians and had lived in Seleuceia upon Tigris, far away from Armenia. At the time of his father's death he was the only living son, but the King of the Parthians had demanded a huge price for releasing the youth Tigranes seventy valleys in the richest part of Armenia, which was Media Atropatene. Now Tigranes marched into Media Atropatene and took back the seventy valleys, stuffed with gold, lapis lazuli, turquoise and fertile pastures. He now found, however, that he lacked sufficient Nesaean horses to mount his growing numbers of cataphracts. These strange cavalrymen were clad from head to foot in steel mesh armor as were their horses, which needed to be large to carry the weight. So in the following year Tigranes invaded Media itself, the home of the Nesaean horse, and annexed it to Armenia. Ecbatana, summer royal seat of the Kings of the Parthians and before them, the summer royal seat of the Kings of Media and Persia, including Alexander the Great was burned to the ground, and its magnificent palace sacked. Three years had gone by. While Sulla marched slowly up the Italian peninsula, Tigranes had turned his attention to the west and crossed the Euphrates into Commagene. Unopposed, he occupied all the lands of northern Syria between the Amanus Mountains and the Libanus Mountains, including mighty Antioch and the lower half of the valley of the Orontes River. Even a part of Cilicia Pedia fell to him, around the eastern shore of the Sinus Issicus. Syria was genuine Hellenized territory, its populace a fully Greek speaking one powerfully under the influence of Greek customs. No sooner had he established his authority in Syria than Tigranes uplifted whole communities of these hapless Greek speakers and sent them and their families to live in his newly built capital of Tigranocerta. Most favored were the artisans, not one of whom was allowed to remain in Syria. However, the King understood the need to protect his Greek imports from his Median speaking native peoples, who were directed under pain of death to treat the new citizens with care and kindness. And while Sulla was legislating to have himself appointed Dictator of Rome, Tigranes formally adopted the title he had hungered for all his life King of Kings. Queen Cleopatra Selene of Syria youngest sister and at one time wife of Ptolemy Soter Chickpea who had managed to rule Syria through several Seleucid husbands, was taken from Antioch and made to live in the humblest circumstances in a tiny village on the Euphrates; her place in the palace at Antioch was taken by the satrap Magadates, who was to rule Syria in the name of Tigranes, King of Kings. King of Kings, thought Sulla cynically; all those eastern potentates thought themselves King of Kings. Even, it seemed, the two bastard sons of Ptolemy Soter Chickpea, who now ruled in Egypt and Cyprus with their Mithridatid wives. But the will of the dead Ptolemy Alexander the Second was genuine; no one knew that better than Sulla did, for he was its witness. Sooner or later Egypt would belong to Rome. For the moment Ptolemy Auletes must be allowed to reign in Alexandria; but, vowed Sulla, that puppet of Mithridates and Tigranes would never know an easy moment! The Senate of Rome would send regularly to Alexandria demanding that Ptolemy Auletes step down in favor of Rome, the true owner of Egypt. As for King Mithridates of Pontus interesting, that he had lost two hundred thousand men in the freezing cold of the Caucasus he would have to be discouraged yet again from trying to annex Cappadocia. Complaining by letter to Sulla that Murena had plundered and burned four hundred villages along the Halys River, Mithridates had proceeded to take the Cappadocian bank of the Halys off poor Cappadocia; to make this ploy look legitimate, he had given King Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia a new bride, one of his own daughters. When Sulla discovered that the girl was a four year old child, he sent yet another messenger to see King Mithridates and order him in Rome's name to quit Cappadocia absolutely, bride or no bride. The messenger had returned very recently, bearing a letter from Mithridates promising to do as he was told and informing Sulla that the King of Pontus was going to send an embassage to Rome to ratify the Treaty of Dardanus into watertight legality. "He'd better make sure his embassage doesn't dawdle," said Sulla to himself as he terminated all these thoughts of eastern kings by going to find his wife. It was in her presence for she wasn't very far away that he ended his audible reflections by saying, "If they do dawdle, they won't find me here to dicker with them and good luck dickering with the Senate!" "I beg your pardon, my love?" asked Valeria, startled. "Nothing. Give me a kiss."