The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) · Chapter 116Chapter IV (2)
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Fresh Conflicts with the Albanians
For several days the Roman army had to march in the glowing heat through this almost waterless flat country, without encountering the enemy; it was only on the left bank of the Abas (probably the river elsewhere named Alazonius, now Alasan) that the force of the Albanians under the leadership of Coses, brother of the king Oroizes, was drawn up against the Romans; they are said to have amounted, including the contingent which had arrived from the inhabitants of the Transcaucasian steppes, to 60,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry. Yet they would hardly have risked the battle, unless they had supposed that they had merely to fight with the Roman cavalry; but the cavalry had only been placed in front, and, on its retiring, the masses of Roman infantry showed themselves from their concealment behind. After a short conflict the army of the barbarians was driven into the woods, which Pompeius gave orders to invest and set on fire. The Albanians thereupon consented to make peace; and, following the example of the more powerful peoples, all the tribes settled between the Kur and the Caspian concluded a treaty with the Roman general. The Albanians, Iberians, and generally the peoples settled to the south along, and at the foot of, the Caucasus, thus entered at least for the moment into a relation of dependence on Rome. When, on the other hand, the peoples between the Phasis and the Maeotis—Colchians, Soani, Heniochi, Zygi, Achaeans, even the remote Bastarnae—were inscribed in the long list of the nations subdued by Pompeius, the notion of subjugation was evidently employed in a manner very far from exact. The Caucasus once more verified its significance in the history of the world; the Roman conquest, like the Persian and the Hellenic, found its limit there.
Mithradates Goes to Panticapaeum
Accordingly king Mithradates was left to himself and to destiny. As formerly his ancestor, the founder of the Pontic state had first entered his future kingdom as a fugitive from the executioners of Antigonus and attended only by six horsemen, so had the grandson now been compelled once more to cross the bounds of his kingdom and to turn his back on his own and his fathers' conquests. But for no one had the dice of fate turned up the highest gains and the greatest losses more frequently and more capriciously than for the old sultan of Sinope; and the fortunes of men change rapidly and incalculably in the east. Well might Mithradates now in the evening of his life accept each new vicissitude with the thought that it too was only in its turn paving the way for a fresh revolution, and that the only thing constant was the perpetual change of fortune. Inasmuch as the Roman rule was intolerable for the Orientals at the very core of their nature, and Mithradates himself was in good and in evil a true prince of the east, amidst the laxity of the rule exercised by the Roman senate over the provinces, and amidst the dissensions of the political parties in Rome fermenting and ripening into civil war, Mithradates might, if he was fortunate enough to bide his time, doubtless re-establish his dominion yet a third time. For this very reason—because he hoped and planned while still there was life in him—he remained dangerous to the Romans so long as he lived, as an aged refugee no less than when he had marched forth with his hundred thousands to wrest Hellas and Macedonia from the Romans. The restless old man made his way in the year 689 from Dioscurias amidst unspeakable hardships partly by land partly by sea to the kingdom of Panticapaeum, where by his reputation and his numerous retainers he drove his renegade son Machares from the throne and compelled him to put himself to death. From this point he attempted once more to negotiate with the Romans; he besought that his paternal kingdom might be restored to him, and declared himself ready to recognize the supremacy of Rome and to pay tribute as a vassal. But Pompeius refused to grant the king a position in which he would have begun the old game afresh, and insisted on his personal submission.
His Last Preparations against Rome
Mithradates, however, had no thought of delivering himself into the hands of the enemy, but was projecting new and still more extravagant plans. Straining all the resources with which the treasures that he had saved and the remnant of his states supplied him, he equipped a new army of 36,000 men consisting partly of slaves which he armed and exercised after the Roman fashion, and a war-fleet; according to rumour he designed to march westward through Thrace, Macedonia, and Pannonia, to carry along with him the Scythians in the Sarmatian steppes and the Celts on the Danube as allies, and with this avalanche of peoples to throw himself on Italy. This has been deemed a grand idea, and the plan of war of the Pontic king has been compared with the military march of Hannibal; but the same project, which in a gifted man is a stroke of genius, becomes folly in one who is wrong-headed. This intended invasion of Italy by the Orientals was simply ridiculous, and nothing but a product of the impotent imagination of despair. Through the prudent coolness of their leader the Romans were prevented from Quixotically pursuing their Quixotic antagonist and warding off in the distant Crimea an attack, which, if it were not nipped of itself in the bud, would still have been soon enough met at the foot of the Alps.
Revolt against Mithradates
In fact, while Pompeius, without troubling himself further as to the threats of the impotent giant, was employed in organizing the territory which he had gained, the destinies of the aged king drew on to their fulfilment without Roman aid in the remote north. His extravagant preparations had produced the most violent excitement among the Bosporans, whose houses were torn down, and whose oxen were taken from the plough and put to death, in order to procure beams and sinews for constructing engines of war. The soldiers too were disinclined to enter on the hopeless Italian expedition. Mithradates had constantly been surrounded by suspicion and treason; he had not the gift of calling forth affection and fidelity among those around him. As in earlier years he had compelled his distinguished general Archelaus to seek protection in the Roman camp; as during the campaigns of Lucullus his most trusted officers Diodes, Phoenix, and even the most notable of the Roman emigrants had passed over to the enemy; so now, when his star grew pale and the old, infirm, embittered sultan was accessible to no one else save his eunuchs, desertion followed still more rapidly on desertion. Castor, the commandant of the fortress Phanagoria (on the Asiatic coast opposite Kertch), first raised the standard of revolt; he proclaimed the freedom of the town and delivered the sons of Mithradates that were in the fortress into the hands of the Romans. While the insurrection spread among the Bosporan towns, and Chersonesus (not far from Sebastopol), Theudosia (Kaffa), and others joined the Phanagorites, the king allowed his suspicion and his cruelty to have free course. On the information of despicable eunuchs his most confidential adherents were nailed to the cross; the king's own sons were the least sure of their lives. The son who was his father's favourite and was probably destined by him as his successor, Pharnaces, took his resolution and headed the insurgents. The servants whom Mithradates sent to arrest him, and the troops despatched against him, passed over to his side; the corps of Italian deserters, perhaps the most efficient among the divisions of Mithradates' army, and for that very reason the least inclined to share in the romantic—and for the deserters peculiarly hazardous—expedition against Italy, declared itself en masse for the prince; the other divisions of the army and the fleet followed the example thus set.
Death of Mithadates
After the country and the army had abandoned the king, the capital Panticapaeum at length opened its gates to the insurgents and delivered over to them the old king enclosed in his palace. From the high wall of his castle the latter besought his son at least to grant him life and not imbrue his hands in his father's blood; but the request came ill from the lips of a man whose own hands were stained with the blood of his mother and with the recently-shed blood of his innocent son Xiphares; and in heartless severity and inhumanity Pharnaces even outstripped his father. Seeing therefore he had now to die, the sultan resolved at least to die as he had lived; his wives, his concubines and his daughters, including the youthful brides of the kings of Egypt and Cyprus, had all to suffer the bitterness of death and drain the poisoned cup, before he too took it, and then, when the draught did not take effect quickly enough, presented his neck for the fatal stroke to a Celtic mercenary Betuitus. So died in 691 Mithradates Eupator, in the sixty-eighth year of his life and the fifty-seventh of his reign, twenty-six years after he had for the first time taken the field against the Romans. The dead body, which king Pharnaces sent as a voucher of his merits and of his loyalty to Pompeius, was by order of the latter laid in the royal sepulchre of Sinope.
The death of Mithradates was looked on by the Romans as equivalent to a victory: the messengers who reported to the general the catastrophe appeared crowned with laurel, as if they had a victory to announce, in the Roman camp before Jericho. In him a great enemy was borne to the tomb, a greater than had ever yet withstood the Romans in the indolent east. Instinctively the multitude felt this: as formerly Scipio had triumphed even more over Hannibal than over Carthage, so the conquest of the numerous tribes of the east and of the great-king himself was almost forgotten in the death of Mithradates; and at the solemn entry of Pompeius nothing attracted more the eyes of the multitude than the pictures, in which they saw king Mithradates as a fugitive leading his horse by the rein and thereafter sinking down in death between the dead bodies of his daughters. Whatever judgment may be formed as to the idiosyncrasy of the king, he is a figure of great significance—in the full sense of the expression—for the history of the world. He was not a personage of genius, probably not even of rich endowments; but he possessed the very respectable gift of hating, and out of this hatred he sustained an unequal conflict against superior foes throughout half a century, without success doubtless, but with honour. He became still more significant through the position in which history had placed him thanthrough his individual character. As the forerunner of the national reaction of the Orientals against the Occidentals, he opened the new conflict of the east against the west; and the feeling remained with the vanquished as with the victors, that his death was not so much the end as the beginning.
Pompeius Proceeds to Syria
Meanwhile Pompeius, after his warfare in 689 with the peoples of the Caucasus, had returned to the kingdom of Pontus, and there reduced the last castles still offering resistance; these were razed in order to check the evils of brigandage, and the castle wells were rendered unserviceable by rolling blocks of rock into them. Thence he set out in the summer of 690 for Syria, to regulate its affairs.
State of Syria
It is difficult to present a clear view of the state of disorganization which then prevailed in the Syrian provinces. It is true that in consequence of the attacks of Lucullus the Armenian governor Magadates had evacuated these provinces in 685,(7) and that the Ptolemies, gladly as they would have renewed the attempts of their predecessors to attach the Syrian coast to their kingdom, were yet afraid to provoke the Roman government by the occupation of Syria; the more so, as that government had not yet regulated their more than doubtful legal title even in the case of Egypt, and had been several times solicited by the Syrian princes to recognize them as the legitimate heirs of the extinct house of the Lagids. But, though the greater powers all at the moment refrained from interference in the affairs of Syria, the land suffered far more than it would have suffered amidst a great war, through the endless and aimless feuds of the princes, knights, and cities.
Arabian Princes
The actual masters in the Seleucid kingdom were at this time the Bedouins, the Jews, and the Nabataeans. The inhospitable sandy steppe destitute of springs and trees, which, stretching from the Arabianpeninsula up to and beyond the Euphrates, reaches towards the west as far as the Syrian mountain-chain and its narrow belt of coast, toward the east as far as the rich lowlands of the Tigris and lower Euphrates—this Asiatic Sahara—was the primitive home of the sons of Ishmael; from the commencement of tradition we find the "Bedawi," the "son of the desert," pitching his tents there and pasturing his camels, or mounting his swift horse in pursuit now of the foe of his tribe, now of the travelling merchant. Favoured formerly by king Tigranes, who made use of them for his plans half commercial half political,(8) and subsequently by the total absence of any master in the Syrian land, these children of the desert spread themselves over northern Syria. Wellnigh the leading part in a political point of view was enacted by those tribes, which had appropriated the first rudiments of a settled existence from the vicinity of the civilized Syrians. The most noted of these emirs were Abgarus, chief of the Arab tribe of the Mardani, whom Tigranes had settled about Edessa and Carrhae in upper Mesopotamia;(9) then to the west of the Euphrates Sampsiceramus, emir of the Arabs of Hemesa (Homs) between Damascus and Antioch, and master of the strong fortress Arethusa; Azizus the head of another horde roaming in the same region; Alchaudonius, the prince of the Rhambaeans, who had already put himself into communication with Lucullus; and several others.
Robber-Chiefs
Alongside of these Bedouin princes there had everywhere appeared bold cavaliers, who equalled or excelled the children of the desert in the noble trade of waylaying. Such was Ptolemaeus son of Mennaeus, perhaps the most powerful among these Syrian robber- chiefs and one of the richest men of this period, who ruled over the territory of the Ityraeans—the modern Druses—in the valleys of the Libanus as well as on the coast and over the plain of Massyas to the northward with the cities of Heliopolis (Baalbec) and Chalcis, and maintained 8000 horsemen at his own expense; such were Dionysius and Cinyras, the masters of the maritime cities Tripolis (Tarablus) and Byblus (between Tarablus and Beyrout); such was the Jew Silas in Lysias, a fortress not far from Apamea on the Orontes.
Jews
In the south of Syria, on the other hand, the race of the Jews seemed as though it would about this time consolidate itself into a political power. Through the devout and bold defence of the primitive Jewish national worship, which was imperilled by the levelling Hellenism of the Syrian kings, the family of the Hasmonaeans or the Makkabi had not only attained to their hereditary principality and gradually to kingly honours;(10) but these princely high-priests had also spread their conquests to the north, east, and south. When the brave Jannaeus Alexander died (675), the Jewish kingdom stretched towards the south over the whole Philistian territory as far as the frontier of Egypt, towards the south-east as far as that of the Nabataean kingdom of Petra, from which Jannaeus had wrested considerable tracts on the right bank of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, towards the north over Samaria and Decapolis up to the lake of Gennesareth; here he was already making arrangements to occupy Ptolemais (Acco) and victoriously to repel the aggressions of the Ityraeans. The coast obeyed the Jews from Mount Carmel as far as Rhinocorura, including the important Gaza—Ascalon alone was still free; so that the territory of the Jews, once almost cut off from the sea, could now be enumerated among the asylums of piracy. Now that the Armenian invasion, just as it approached the borders of Judaea, was averted from that land by the intervention of Lucullus,(11) the gifted rulers of the Hasmonaean house would probably have carried their arms still farther, had not the development of the power of that remarkable conquering priestly state been nipped in the bud by internal divisions.
Pharisees Sadducees
The spirit of religious independence, and the spirit of national independence—the energetic union of which had called the Maccabee state into life—speedily became once more dissociated and even antagonistic. The Jewish orthodoxy or Pharisaism, as it was called, was content with the free exercise of religion, as it had been asserted in defiance of the Syrian rulers; its practical aim was a community of Jews, composed of the orthodox in the lands of all rulers, essentially irrespective of the secular government— a community which found its visible points of union in the tribute for the temple at Jerusalem, which was obligatory on every conscientious Jew, and in the schools of religion and spiritual courts. Overagainst this orthodoxy, which turned away from political life and became more and more stiffened into theological formalism and painful ceremonial service, were arrayed the defenders of the national independence, invigorated amidst successful struggles against foreign rule, and advancing towards the ideal of a restoration of the Jewish state, the representatives of the old great families—the so-called Sadducees—partly on dogmatic grounds, in so far as they acknowledged only the sacred books themselves and conceded authority merely, not canonicity, to the "bequests of the scribes," that is, to canonical tradition;(12) partly and especially on political grounds, in so far as, instead of a fatalistic waiting for the strong arm of the Lord of Zebaoth, they taught that the salvation of the nation was to be expected from the weapons of this world, and from the inward and outward strengthening of the kingdom of David as re-established in the glorious times of the Maccabees. Those partisans of orthodoxy found their support in the priesthood and the multitude; they contested with the Hasmonaeans the legitimacy of their high- priesthood, and fought against the noxious heretics with all the reckless implacability, with which the pious are often found to contend for the possession of earthly goods. The state-party on the other hand relied for support on intelligence brought into contact with the influences of Hellenism, on the army, in which numerous Pisidian and Cilician mercenaries served, and on the abler kings, who here strove with the ecclesiastical power much as a thousand years later the Hohenstaufen strove with the Papacy. Jannaeus had kept down the priesthood with a strong hand; under his two sons there arose (685 et seq.) a civil and fraternal war, since the Pharisees opposed the vigorous Aristobulus and attempted to obtain their objects under the nominal rule of his brother, the good-natured and indolent Hyrcanus. This dissension not merely put a stop to the Jewish conquests, but gave also foreign nations opportunity to interfere and thereby obtain a commanding position in southern Syria.
Nabataeans
This was the case first of all with the Nabataeans. This remarkable nation has often been confounded with its eastern neighbours, the wandering Arabs, but it is more closely related to the Aramaean branch than to the proper children of Ishmael. This Aramaean or, according to the designation of the Occidentals, Syrian stock must have in very early times sent forth from its most ancient settlements about Babylon a colony, probably for the sake of trade, to the northern end of the Arabian gulf; these were the Nabataeans on the Sinaitic peninsula, between the gulf of Suez and Aila, and in the region of Petra (Wadi Mousa). In their ports the wares of the Mediterranean were exchanged for those of India; the great southern caravan-route, which ran from Gaza to the mouth of the Euphrates and the Persian gulf, passed through the capital of the Nabataeans—Petra—whose still magnificent rock-palaces and rock-tombs furnish clearer evidence of the Nabataean civilization than does an almost extinct tradition. The leaders of the Pharisees, to whom after the manner of priests the victory of their faction seemed not too dearly bought at the price of the independence and integrity of their country, solicited Aretas the king of the Nabataeans for aid against Aristobulus, in return for which they promised to give back to him all the conquests wrested from him by Jannaeus. Thereupon Aretas had advanced with, it was said, 50,000 men into Judaea and, reinforced by the adherents of the Pharisees, he kept king Aristobulus besieged in his capital.
Syrian Cities
Amidst the system of violence and feud which thus prevailed from one end of Syria to another, the larger cities were of course the principal sufferers, such as Antioch, Seleucia, Damascus, whose citizens found themselves paralysed in their husbandry as well as in their maritime and caravan trade. The citizens of Byblus and Berytus (Beyrout) were unable to protect their fields and their ships from the Ityraeans, who issuing from their mountain and maritime strongholds rendered land and sea equally insecure. Those of Damascus sought to ward off the attacks of the Ityraeans and Ptolemaeus by handing themselves over to the more remote kings of the Nabataeans or of the Jews. In Antioch Sampsiceramus and Azizus mingled in the internal feuds of the citizens, and the Hellenic great city had wellnigh become even now the seat of an Arab emir. The state of things reminds us of the kingless times of the German middle ages, when Nuremberg and Augsburg found their protection not in the king's law and the king's courts, but in their own walls alone; impatiently the merchant-citizens of Syria awaited the strong arm, which should restore to them peace and security of intercourse.
The Last Seleucids
There was no want, however, of a legitimate king in Syria; there were even two or three of them. A prince Antiochus from the house of the Seleucids had been appointed by Lucullus as ruler of the most northerly province in Syria, Commagene.(13) Antiochus Asiaticus, whose claims on the Syrian throne had met with recognition both from the senate and from Lucullus,(14) had been received in Antioch after the retreat of the Armenians and there acknowledged as king. A third Seleucid prince Philippus had immediately confronted him there as a rival; and the great population of Antioch, excitable and delighting in opposition almost like that of Alexandria, as well as one or two of the neighbouring Arab emirs had interfered in the family strife which now seemed inseparable from the rule of the Seleucids. Was there any wonder that legitimacy became ridiculous and loathsome to its subjects, and that the so-called rightful kings were of even somewhat less importance in the land than the petty princes and robber-chiefs?
Annexation of Syria
To create order amidst this chaos did not require either brilliance of conception or a mighty display of force, but it required a clear insight into the interests of Rome and of her subjects, and vigour and consistency in establishing and maintaining the institutions recognized as necessary. The policy of the senate in support of legitimacy had sufficiently degraded itself; the general, whom the opposition had brought into power, was not to be guided by dynastic considerations, but had only to see that the Syrian kingdom should not be withdrawn from the clientship of Rome in future either by the quarrels of pretenders or by the Covetousness of neighbours. But to secure this end there was only one course; that the Roman community should send a satrap to grasp with a vigorous hand the reins of government, which had long since practically slipped from the hands of the kings of the ruling house more even through their own fault than through outward misfortunes. This course Pompeius took. Antiochus the Asiatic, on requesting to be acknowledged as the hereditary ruler of Syria, received the answer that Pompeius would not give back the sovereignty to a king who knew neither how to maintain nor how to govern his kingdom, even at the request of his subjects, much less against their distinctly expressed wishes. With this letter of the Roman proconsul the house of Seleucus was ejected from the throne which it had occupied for two hundred and fifty years. Antiochus soon after lost his life through the artifice of the emir Sampsiceramus, as whose client he played the ruler in Antioch; thenceforth there is no further mention of these mock-kings and their pretensions.
Military Pacification of Syria
But, to establish the new Roman government and introduce any tolerable order into the confusion of affairs, it was further necessary to advance into Syria with a military force and to terrify or subdue all the disturbers of the peace, who had sprung up during the many years of anarchy, by means of the Roman legions. Already during the campaigns in the kingdom of Pontus and on the Caucasus Pompeius had turned his attention to the affairs of Syria and directed detached commissioners and corps to interfere, where there was need. Aulus Gabinius—the same who as tribune of the people had sent Pompeius to the east—had in 689 marched along the Tigris and then across Mesopotamia to Syria, to adjust the complicated affairs of Judaea. In like manner the severely pressed Damascus had already been occupied by Lollius and Metellus. Soon afterwards another adjutant of Pompeius, Marcus Scaurus, arrived in Judaea, to allay the feuds ever breaking out afresh there. Lucius Afranius also, who during the expedition of Pompeius to the Caucasus held the command of the Roman troops in Armenia, had proceeded from Corduene (the northern Kurdistan) to upper Mesopotamia, and, after he had successfully accomplished the perilous march through the desert with the sympathizing help of the Hellenes settled in Carrhae, brought the Arabs in Osrhoene to submission. Towards the end of 690 Pompeius in person arrived in Syria,(15) and remained there till the summer of the following year, resolutely interfering and regulating matters for the present and the future. He sought to restore the kingdom to its state in the better times of the Seleucid rule; all usurped powers were set aside, the robber-chiefs were summoned to give up their castles, the Arab sheiks were again restricted to their desert domains, the affairs of the several communities were definitely regulated.
The Robber-Chiefs Chastised
The legions stood ready to procure obedience to these stern orders, and their interference proved especially necessary against the audacious robber-chiefs. Silas the ruler of Lysias, Dionysius the ruler of Tripolis, Cinyras the ruler of Byblus were taken prisoners in their fortresses and executed, the mountain and maritime strongholds of the Ityraeans were broken up, Ptolemaeus son of Mennaeus in Chalcis was forced to purchase his freedom and his lordship with a ransom of 1000 talents (240,000 pounds). Elsewhere the commands of the new master met for the most part with unresisting obedience.
Negotiations and Conflicts with the Jews
The Jews alone hesitated. The mediators formerly sent by Pompeius, Gabinius and Scaurus, had—both, as it was said, bribed with considerable sums—in the dispute between the brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus decided in favour of the latter, and had also induced king Aretas to raise the siege of Jerusalem and to proceed homeward, in doing which he sustained a defeat at the hands of Aristobulus. But, when Pompeius arrived in Syria, he cancelled the orders of his subordinates and directed the Jews to resume their old constitution under high-priests, as the senate had recognized it about 593,(16) and to renounce along with the hereditary principality itself all the conquests made by the Hasmonaean princes. It was the Pharisees, who had sent an embassy of two hundred of their most respected men to the Roman general and procured from him the overthrow of the kingdom; not to the advantage of their own nation, but doubtless to that of the Romans, who from the nature of the case could not but here revert to the old rights of the Seleucids, and could not tolerate a conquering power like that of Jannaeus within the limits of their empire. Aristobulus was uncertain whether it was better patiently to acquiesce in his inevitable doom or to meet his fate with arms in hand; at one time he seemed on the point of submitting to Pompeius, at another he seemed as though he would summon the national party among the Jews to a struggle with the Romans. When at length, with the legions already at the gates, he yielded to the enemy, the more resolute or more fanatical portion of his army refused to comply with the orders of a king who was not free. The capital submitted; the steep temple-rock was defended by that fanatical band for three months with an obstinacy ready to brave death, till at last the besiegers effected an entrance while the besieged were resting on the Sabbath, possessed themselves of the sanctuary, and handed over the authors of that desperate resistance, so far as they had not fallen under the sword of the Romans, to the axes of the lictors. Thus ended the last resistance of the territories newly annexed to the Roman state.