Colleen McCullough - 2. The Grass Crown

At the beginning of Gamelion, hugging his secrets, the King of Pontus left Ephesus and journeyed north to Pergamum, where a special treat was in store for him. The two other commissioners and all Manius Aquillius's officers elected to flee to Pergamum, but Manius Aquillius himself went to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, intending there to take ship for Rhodes, where a message had informed him Gaius Cassius was lying low. But no sooner did he land on Lesbos than Manius Aquillius became ill with an enteric fever, and could not travel further. When the Lesbians heard of the fall of Asia Province (of which they were officially a part), they thoughtfully shipped the Roman proconsul to King Mithridates as a special token of their regard. Arrived in the little port of Atarneus, opposite Mytilene, Manius Aquillius was chained to the saddlebow of a huge Bastarnian horseman and dragged all the way to Pergamum, at which city the King was now waiting eagerly for his treat. Constantly stumbling and falling, pelted with filth, jeered at, derided, reviled, Aquillius actually lived to complete the journey, sick though he was. But when Mithridates inspected him in Pergamum he saw at once that if this treatment were to be continued, Aquillius would die. And that would spoil some particularly delicious plans Mithridates had devised for Manius Aquillius! So the Roman proconsul was tied into the saddle of an ass looking backward over its rump and driven mercilessly up and down the entire area around Pergamum to show the citizens of this erstwhile Roman capital how the King of Pontus felt about a Roman proconsul, and how little he feared retribution. Finally, caked in filth and reduced to the merest shadow of a man, Manius Aquillius was led before the author of his torments. Sitting in state upon a golden throne mounted on a costly dais in the middle of the Pergamum agora, the King gazed down upon the man who had refused to send the army of Bithynia away, refused to let Mithridates defend his realm, refused to allow Mithridates to go over his head and complain directly to the Senate and People of Rome. It was in that moment when he looked upon the bent and putrid form of Manius Aquillius that King Mithridates of Pontus lost the last vestige of his fear of Rome. What had he been frightened of? Why had he backed down before this ludicrous manifest weakling? He, Mithridates of Pontus, was far mightier than Rome! Four little armies, less than twenty thousand men! It was Manius Aquillius who personified Rome not Gaius Marius, not Lucius Cornelius Sulla. The King's concept of Rome had been a myth perpetuated by two utterly atypical Roman men! The real Rome stood here at his feet. "Proconsul!" cried the King sharply. Aquillius looked up, but had not the energy to speak. “Proconsul of Rome, I have decided to give you the gold you coveted from me." Up onto the dais his guards drove Manius Aquillius and forced him down onto a low stool placed some distance to the front and left of the King. His arms from shoulders to hands were bound tightly against his body with broad straps, then one guard took hold of the straps on his right side and another took hold of the straps on his left side, giving him no opportunity to move. There came a smith bearing a red-hot crucible in a pair of tongs. It was of a size to contain several cups of molten metal, and smoke rose from it, and an acrid, scorching smell. A third guard went round behind Aquillius, took a fistful of his hair, and pulled his head back; the guard then took his nose between the fingers of the other hand, and pinched his nostrils cruelly shut. The reflex to breathe could not be disobeyed; Manius Aquillius opened his mouth and gasped. Instantly a beautiful turgid glittering river of liquid gold was poured down his air-hungry throat, more and more as he screamed and threshed and tried vainly to rise from his stool, until at last he died, mouth and chin and chest a frozen cascade of solidified gold. "Cut him open and get every last drop of it back," said King Mithridates, and watched intently while all the gold was meticulously scraped from the inside and the outside of Manius Aquillius. "Throw his carcass to the dogs," said King Mithridates, got up from his throne, came down to the level of the dais and stepped unconcernedly across the twisted and mangled remains of Manius Aquillius, proconsul of Rome. Everything was going splendidly! No one knew that better than King Mithridates as he strolled the wind-cooled terraces of Pergamum atop its mountain and waited for the end of the month of Gamelion, which was Roman Quinctilis. Word had come from Aristion in Athens that he too had been successful.

Nothing will stop us now, O Mighty Mithridates, for Athens will show Greece the way. I started my campaign by speaking about the old pre-eminence and wealth of Athens, for it is my opinion that a people past its prime looks back to the days of glory with exquisitely keen nostalgia, and is therefore easy to seduce with promises of a return to those days of glory. Thus did I speak in the Agora for six months, slowly grinding down my opposition and gathering adherents. I even persuaded my audience that Carthage had allied itself with you against Rome, and my audience believed me! So much for the old saw that Athenians are the best educated men in the world. Not one of them knew that Carthage was obliterated by Rome nearly fifty years ago. Amazing. I write because I have the pleasure to tell you that I have just been elected military leader of Athens the time as I write is halfway through normal Poseideon. I was also given the power to choose my own colleagues. Naturally I have chosen men who firmly believe that the salvation of our Greek world is in your hands, Great King, and who cannot wait for the day when you crush Rome beneath your lion-booted heel. Athens is now completely mine, including the Piraeus. Unfortunately the Roman elements and my avowed enemies fled before I could lay hands on them, but those who were foolish enough to stay mostly rich Athenians who could not be brought to believe they stood in danger have perished. I have confiscated all property belonging to the exiled and the dead, and put it into a fund to finance our war against the Romans. What I promised my voters I would do, I have to do, but it will not inconvenience your own campaign, O Great King. I promised to take the island of Delos back from the Romans who now run it. Wonderfully profitable emporium that it is, the income from it was what kept Athens so affluent at the height of her power. At the beginning of Gamelion, my friend Apellicon (an excellent admiral and a skilled general) will mount an expedition against Delos. A rotten apple, the island will have no chance against us. And that is all for the present, my Lord and Master. The city of Athens is yours and the port of the Piraeus is open for your ships when and if you need them.

The King did need them, the Piraeus and the city of Athens behind it, connected by the Long Walls. For at the end of Quinctilis Gamelion to the Greeks the fleets of Archelaus issued out of the Hellespont and spilled down the western side of the Aegean Sea. They numbered three hundred decked war galleys of three or more banks, over one hundred undecked two-banker biremes, and fifteen hundred transports stuffed with troops and marines. Archelaus wasted no thought for the Asia Province littoral, as it was already in the hands of his King. He was intent upon establishing the Pontic presence in Greece so that the body of Macedonia would be crushed between two Pontic armies his own in Greece and that of Young Ariarathes in the eastern part of Macedonia. Young Ariarathes had also kept to the timetable given to him by his father, the King. At the end of Quinctilis he transported his hundred thousand men across the Hellespont and began to march along the narrow coastal strip of Thracian Macedonia, using the Roman engineered and built Via Egnatia. He found himself completely unopposed, set up permanent bases at Abdera on the sea and Philippi slightly inland, and continued westward toward the first formidable Roman settlement, the governor's city of Thessalonica. And at the end of Quinctilis the Roman, Latin and Italian citizens resident in Bithynia, Asia Province, Phrygia and Pisidia were murdered down to the last man, woman, child, slave. In this most secret of his three orders Mithridates had displayed great cunning. For instead of using his own men to implement it, the King had directed that each local community of Aeolian or Ionian or Dorian Greeks should do the killing. Many areas hailed the decree with joy and experienced no difficulty assembling a force of volunteers eager to kill their Roman oppressors. But other areas were aghast and found it impossible to persuade anyone to kill Romans. In Tralles, the ethnarch was obliged to hire a band of Phrygian mercenaries to do murder on behalf of Tralles; other reluctant districts followed suit, hoping thus to transfer the guilt to the shoulders of strangers. Eighty thousand Roman, Latin and Italian citizens and their families died in one single day, and seventy thousand slaves. The slaughter went on from Nicomedia in Bithynia all the way to Cnidus in Caria and as far inland as Apameia. No one was spared; nor was anyone hidden and assisted to flee; terror of King Mithridates far outweighed human compassion. Had Mithridates used his own soldiers to carry out the massacre, the blame for it would have rested with Mithridates entirely; but by forcing the Greek communities to do his dirty work for him, he ensured that they too would bear the blame. And the Greeks understood the King's reasoning perfectly. Life with King Mithridates of Pontus suddenly didn't seem any better than life with Rome, despite the remission of taxes. Many of the persecuted sought asylum in temples, only to find no asylum was offered; they were carried out and dispatched still crying to this god or that god for refuge. Refusing to leave go of altars or statues and continuing to cling with fingers made superhuman by terror, some had their hands chopped off before being dragged away from holy ground and put to death. Worst of all was the concluding clause of the general order of execution personally sealed by King Mithridates: no Roman or Latin or Italian or slave of Roman or Latin or Italian was to be burned or buried. The corpses were taken as far from human habitation as possible and left to rot in ravines, closed valleys, on the tops of mountains, and at the bottom of the sea. Eighty thousand Romans and Latins and Italians and seventy thousand slaves. One hundred and fifty thousand people. The birds of the air and the scavengers of earth and water dined well that Sextilis, for not one community dared to disobey and bury its victims; King Mithridates took great pleasure in journeying from place to place to view the enormous heaps of dead. Just a very few Romans did escape death. These were the exiles, stripped of their citizenships and sentenced not to return to Rome. And among them they included one Publius Rutilius Rufus, friend of the Roman great, currently citizen of Smyrna held in honor and respect, producer of scurrilous pen portraits of men like Catulus Caesar and Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle. All in all, thought King Mithridates at the beginning of the month of Anthesterion, which was Sextilis to the Romans, things could not have looked better. His satraps were ensconced in the seats of government from Miletus to Andramyttium in Asia Province, and across the border in Bithynia. No more kings would be forthcoming for Bithynia. The only candidate Mithridates might have permitted to ascend the throne was dead. After Socrates returned to Pontus he irritated the King by whining incessantly, and was put to death to shut him up. The whole of Anatolia north of Lycia, Pamphylia and Cilicia now belonged to Pontus, and the rest would be his very soon. Nothing, however, pleased the King quite as much as did the massacre of the Romans and Latins and Italians. Every time he came across another place where thousands of bodies had been dumped to rot, he beamed, he laughed, he rejoiced. He had made no distinction between Roman and Italian, despite the fact that he knew Rome and Italy were at war. A phenomenon no one was better able to understand than Mithridates it was brother against brother, with power the prize. Yes, everything was going splendidly. His son Young Mithridates was regent in Pontus (though the prudent King had taken his son's wife and children along on his march to Asia Province just to make sure Young Mithridates behaved himself); his son Ariarathes was King of Cappadocia; Phrygia, Bithynia, Galatia, and Paphlagonia were all royal satrapies under the personal rule of some of his elder sons; and his son-in-law Tigranes of Armenia was at liberty to do as he pleased east of Cappadocia as long as he didn't tread on the Pontic toes. Let Tigranes conquer Syria and Egypt; it would keep him busy. Mithridates frowned. In Egypt the populace would tolerate no foreign king. Which meant a puppet Ptolemy. If such a personage could be found. But certainly the queens of Egypt would be descendants of Mithridates; no daughter of Tigranes could be allowed to usurp a position destined for a daughter of Mithridates. Most impressive of all was the success of the King's fleets if, that is, he ignored the miserable failure of Aristion and his "excellent admiral and skilled general" Apellicon; the Athenian invasion of Delos had turned into a fiasco. But having taken the islands of the Cyclades, Archelaus's admiral Metrophanes went on to take Delos and put another twenty thousand Romans, Latins, and Italians to death there. The Pontic general then bestowed Delos upon Athens to make sure that Aristion stayed in power; the Pontic fleets needed the Piraeus as their western base. All Euboea was now in Pontic hands, as was the island of Sciathos and a great deal of Thessaly around the Bay of Pagasae, including the vital ports of Demetrias and Methone. Because of their northern Greek conquests, Pontic forces were able to block the roads from Thessaly into central Greece, a discomfort which decided most of the rest of Greece to declare for Mithridates. The Peloponnese, Boeotia, Laconia, and all of Attica now hailed the King of Pontus fervently as their deliverer from the Romans and sat back, pure spectators, to watch the armies and fleets of Mithridates crush Macedonia like a boot on a beetle. But the crushing of Macedonia proved for the time being, anyway an impossibility. Caught between a suddenly antagonistic Greece and the advancing Pontic land forces on the Via Egnatia, Gaius Sentius and Quintus Bruttius Sura didn't panic, didn't concede defeat. They hustled to call up as many auxiliaries as they could, and put them into camp alongside the two Roman legions which were all Macedonia had to counter Mithridates. Pontus would not take Macedonia without paying a bitter price.