The ancient history of Amaseia is usually pieced together not from a chronicle written by the city itself but from the margins of the great authors who narrated the forty-year war between the Kingdom of Pontus and Rome. Four names stand out: Appian of Alexandria, Memnon of Heraclea, Plutarch of Chaeronea and Cassius Dio of Nicaea. Each wrote in a different century and with a different purpose, and none made Amaseia his subject. Yet the valleys, fortresses and royal residences where the war was fought lie within the basin of the Yeşilırmak, and there is no way to understand the world of the city in those years without consulting these narratives.

The State of the Sources

A plain statement is needed before going further. In Appian's Mithridatic Wars, in Plutarch's Lives of Lucullus and Pompey, in the fragments of Memnon preserved in Photius's summary, and in the sections of Cassius Dio devoted to the Pontic campaigns, Amaseia does not appear as a visible actor in the story. The places named again and again are Amisus (modern Samsun), Sinope, Cabeira, Eupatoria, Themiscyra, Talaura, Comana and Gaziura. The author who names Amaseia, who describes its walls, its water channels and the plains around it, is Strabo, who writes of his own native city, and Strabo's geography is the subject of a separate article. The task here is therefore not to force the city's name into the texts of these four writers. It is to show where the war they describe took place, to link that geography to Amaseia through the distances Strabo gives, and to read the city's passage from royal seat to Roman province against this background.

The war itself can be summarized briefly. Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus, fought three separate wars against Rome in Anatolia, Greece and the Aegean. After the first war, against Sulla, the kingdom withdrew to its old borders. In the third war, in late 73 BC, Lucullus entered Pontus; when Mithridates was defeated he fled to his son-in-law Tigranes, King of Armenia, but a few years later he returned to his country and routed the Roman commanders. Pompey finished the war. According to the traditional dating, Mithridates died in 63 BC at Panticapaeum in the Crimea. The Anatolian stage of this long story extends from the coast at Amisus to Cabeira, and from there to Zela and Comana. Amaseia lies just west of this line, in the old heartland of the kings.

Appian and the Mithridatic Wars

Appian, born in Alexandria, lived from about AD 95 to 165. He divided Roman history not chronologically but by the countries Rome conquered, and the Mithridatic Wars is one of the most completely preserved parts of that scheme. The text follows Mithridates' struggle from the age of Sulla to Pompey's victory and closes the account with a tally: the Romans had defeated the king at the end of forty-two years, although elsewhere in the same pages the war is said to have lasted forty. This small discrepancy shows that ancient historians did not keep chronology with modern strictness.

The value of Appian's Pontic narrative lies in the detail he gives of the kingdom's interior. He writes that in the winter of 73/72 BC Lucullus entered a rich district untouched by war, where a slave sold for four drachmas and an ox for one. Lucullus besieged Amisus and Eupatoria, which Mithridates had founded, named after himself and made his royal residence, and with a separate army he besieged Themiscyra, named after one of the Amazons. The mines dug during that siege were so wide that battles could be fought underground, and the besieged threw bears, other wild animals and swarms of bees into the tunnels from above. Mithridates meanwhile wintered at Cabeira, gathering a new army there and sending supplies and soldiers from it to Amisus. According to Appian this army numbered about forty thousand foot and four thousand horse.

In the spring of 72 BC Lucullus crossed the mountains toward Cabeira. Mithridates had ordered his forward posts to light signal fires whenever anything important happened; the commander of the advance guard, Phoenix, lit the fire and then went over to Lucullus with his men. In the cavalry engagement the Romans fell back, and Lucullus's master of horse, Pomponius, was brought wounded before the king. When the king asked what favor Pomponius could do him in return for his life, Pomponius answered that it would be a great one if the king made peace with Lucullus, and that if he remained an enemy he would not even consider the question; Appian and Plutarch tell this anecdote in almost the same words. The story of the Scythians Olcaba and Sobdacus, on the other hand, appears only in Appian. Olcaba had first taken refuge with Lucullus, then, believing he was not sufficiently honored or was under suspicion, returned to the king and betrayed Sobdacus, who was about to desert to Lucullus. Lucullus hesitated to descend to the plain because the enemy was stronger in cavalry; a hunter who knew the mountain paths guided him through a cave, and by a roundabout descent he brought his army down above Mithridates.

The second phase of the narrative begins with the decay of Lucullus's army. After the winter of 68/67 BC Mithridates returned to Pontus with the four thousand soldiers Tigranes had given him and four thousand of his own. He routed Fabius, whom Lucullus had left behind, and in that fight was wounded in the knee by a stone and under the eye by a dart. Appian says the king was treated by the Agari, a Scythian tribe that used snake venom as medicine; some of their physicians always accompanied him. Triarius then made a night attack near Zela. The struggle long remained balanced, until the king charged the Roman line so hard that the infantry was driven into a muddy trench. Among the dead were twenty-four tribunes and one hundred and fifty centurions, and Appian notes that so many officers had seldom fallen in a single Roman defeat. Mithridates was wounded in the thigh by a sword that day, and his soldiers were thrown into panic until his physician Timotheus stanched the blood and showed him to the army.

Appian's sections on Pompey also define the place of Pontus in the Roman order. Pompey founded or refounded eight cities in Cappadocia and twenty in Cilicia and Coele Syria; in Pontus he rebuilt Eupatoria, which Mithridates had founded and named after himself but then destroyed because it had admitted the Romans, and called it Magnopolis. At Talaura Mithridates' storehouse was found: two thousand drinking cups of onyx fused with gold, horse trappings, couches and chairs set with precious stones. The inventory took thirty days. Appian sums the king up in these terms: eighth in descent from the first Mithridates who founded the Kingdom of Pontus, sixteenth from Darius, king of the Persians; he lived sixty-eight or sixty-nine years and reigned fifty-seven; he killed his mother, his brother, three sons and three daughters; he could ride a hundred and eighty kilometers in a day, drove a chariot with sixteen horses, loved Greek learning and was fond of music. The portrait is one of the fullest descriptions of the king drawn from the Roman side.

Memnon and the Local Memory of Heraclea

Memnon's identity and the age in which he lived are uncertain. He is known to have written the history of Heraclea Pontica on the southwestern coast of the Black Sea, but the work as a whole is lost. What survives are books nine to sixteen, as read and summarized by Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century. Photius says he had not read the first eight books and that the work continued beyond the sixteenth. The date of composition is debated between the first and second centuries AD; the last event in the summary is the death of Brithagoras, who had been sent as an envoy to Caesar. Memnon is the most complete surviving example of this genre, a compressed local account of much of the Hellenistic period.

Memnon's account of Mithridates starts from a different place than Appian's war chronicle. At the outset of the war, Heraclea is a port city caught between Mithridates and the Romans. Memnon writes that Lucullus, Cotta and Triarius met at Nicomedia and resolved to march into Pontus: Lucullus would pass through the inland districts into Cappadocia with the army to attack the king and his whole kingdom, Cotta would take on Heraclea, and Triarius the naval forces around the Hellespont and the Propontis. Mithridates sent envoys to the kings of the Scythians, to the king of Parthia and to Tigranes. According to Memnon the others gave no help; Tigranes, ignoring many entreaties from the king's daughter, finally agreed to an alliance. The battles fought by Diophantus and Taxiles with forty thousand foot and eight thousand horse are described, and most often the Romans prevailed.

The most interesting part of Photius's summary is the fall of Cabeira. After the defeat Mithridates ordered the women of the royal house to be killed and decided to escape from Cabeira without his people's knowledge. Some Gauls pursued him but, not knowing who he was, stopped to plunder a mule laden with gold and silver, and the king reached Armenia. Lucullus besieged Cabeira, and the city surrendered under a truce. He then turned to Eupatoria. There he deliberately conducted the siege slackly, lulled the enemy, and suddenly had ladders raised and his soldiers sent up the walls; the city was taken and immediately destroyed. Amisus fell by a similar method, and Lucullus gave the surviving citizens their city and territory back. Memnon's fifteenth book closes with the letter Tigranes wrote to Lucullus: Tigranes refused to hand over Mithridates and said he would respect the bond of kinship, but the letter did not address Lucullus as "general." Lucullus in turn had not addressed Tigranes as "king of kings" in his own letters, and this matter of protocol deepened the tension between the two.

Memnon and Appian see the same events from different points. Appian dwells on the mechanics of sieges and the words of commanders, while Memnon foregrounds how alliances were formed, who helped whom and under what pressure a port city made its decisions. Because the two writers describe events such as the fall of Eupatoria in similar terms, it is possible to say that we have two separate testimonies for the operations in the interior of Pontus.

Plutarch and the Character of Commanders

Plutarch of Chaeronea was born around AD 46 and died around 120. In the Parallel Lives he pairs a Greek with a Roman; Lucullus is matched with Cimon, and Pompey with Agesilaus. His aim is less the detail of war than the morals and fate of individuals. Even so, the scenes from the interior of Pontus appear vividly in his text.

In the Life of Lucullus Plutarch describes Mithridates standing at Cabeira, gathering forty thousand foot and four thousand horse, crossing the river Lycus and offering battle on the plain. Lucullus, wary of the enemy's superiority in cavalry, did not go down to the plain; Artemidorus, an elder among some Greeks who had taken refuge in a cave, undertook to lead him to a place safe for his camp and commanding Cabeira. Neither army meant to fight at once, but a skirmish that began when some of the king's men chased a stag grew into a battle. Lucullus went out alone before his fleeing soldiers, turned them back, and afterward set the runaways to dig a trench twelve feet wide in ungirt tunics while the other soldiers looked on. Plutarch chose this detail to show Lucullus's idea of discipline.

In the same chapters a Dandarian prince named Olthacus takes refuge in the Roman camp with the king's approval in order to kill Lucullus; Lucullus admits him to his table and his council, and the plan collapses when he tries to enter Lucullus's tent during the midday rest and is stopped by the servants. The Olcaba story in Appian may be another telling of this tale, but because the two texts differ in detail it cannot be said with certainty that they describe the same event.

The great turning point in Plutarch's Lucullus comes in the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth chapters. The soldiers, worn out by the lengthening campaign, grumbled that Pompey's men had settled on fertile lands and in rich cities while they themselves wandered in deserts. When news came that Mithridates had beaten Fabius they were ashamed and followed Lucullus, but Triarius wanted to win the victory before Lucullus arrived and suffered a great defeat. Plutarch reports that more than seven thousand Romans fell, among them a hundred and fifty centurions and twenty-four tribunes, and that the camp was captured. When Lucullus arrived a few days later he hid Triarius from his enraged soldiers. The commissioners sent from Rome to settle the affairs of Pontus found Lucullus scorned by his own army.

In the Life of Pompey the night battle is famous. According to Plutarch, Pompey caught Mithridates by the Euphrates after besieging him for forty-five days and attacked at night as the moon was setting; because the Romans' shadows stretched out in front of the enemy, the enemy misjudged the distance, threw their javelins in vain, and more than ten thousand were killed. Mithridates broke through with eight hundred horsemen and ended with three companions, one of them a concubine named Hypsicrateia, whom the king called Hypsicrates. What matters for the interior geography of Pontus is that Plutarch records the discovery of the king's private papers in the fortress of Caenum, the place Strabo calls Kainon Chorion. Among them were notes showing that he had poisoned his son Ariarathes, interpretations of dreams, and letters written to him by Monime. Stratonice, the keeper of the fortress, surrendered it to Pompey and, of the gifts she brought, had him accept only those that would adorn the temples of Rome, keeping the rest. The king's body was finally sent to Sinope. Plutarch adds that Pompey could not bring himself to look at the face and sent the body away to appease divine jealousy.

Cassius Dio and the View from the State

Cassius Dio of Nicaea lived from about AD 164 to 235 and was a senator and twice consul. His Roman history in eighty books records events from the administrative viewpoint of the empire. Books thirty-six and thirty-seven, which deal with the Mithridatic War, cover the last years of Lucullus and Pompey's Eastern campaign.

Dio's scenes from Pontus are a testimony separate from Appian and Plutarch. He writes that on Mithridates' return the people, who felt they had been badly treated, joined the king; that in defeating Marcus Fabius he was helped by Thracian former mercenaries and the slaves in the Roman camp; and that the king entered battle although he was over seventy years old. Appian gave the king's age as sixty-eight or sixty-nine, and Dio's "over seventy" creates a disagreement among the sources on this point. According to Dio, Fabius was besieged in Cabeira and rescued by Triarius, who pursued the king as far as Comana. The following year Mithridates encamped opposite Triarius near Gaziura and drilled his army in plain sight of the Romans; he tried to draw Triarius into battle by sending men against Dadasa, where the Roman baggage was kept. Dio tells how a Roman soldier, pretending to be an ally of the king, approached and wounded him, and how the king, sensing the danger, sent the soldiers off to their tents on the pretext of a review and so weeded out the Romans hidden in the camp. This detail is another version of the centurion story in Appian.

In Dio's narrative the reports are given together: Lucullus could not dislodge Mithridates, who had taken a high position near Talaura; the other Mithridates, coming from Media, fell on the scattered Romans; Tigranes was approaching; and the army mutinied. Dio notes that the chief instigator of the mutiny was Publius Clodius, whose sister was married to Lucullus, so that the man who made trouble for Lucullus was his own relative. In book thirty-seven comes the last period of Mithridates: a great earthquake destroyed many cities, the army mutinied, some of his sons were carried off to Pompey, and the king had several children he suspected put to death. His son Pharnaces, out of fear and in the expectation of receiving the kingdom from the Romans, rose against his father. Mithridates took poison, but because he had accustomed himself to antidotes all his life it had no effect; the sword blow, too, failed because of the weakness of his aged hand, and in the end he was killed by the men sent against him. Dio sums up the scene as one in which the king died both by his own hand and at the hands of his enemies.

Dio and Appian differ slightly on the king's funeral. Appian writes that Pompey had him buried in the royal tombs at Sinope; Dio says he ordered him buried among the tombs of his ancestors; Plutarch says only that the body was sent to Sinope. What the three have in common is that no indignity was done to the body. Dio also writes that when the men Pompey sent after the king, who had fled beyond the Phasis, could not catch him, Pompey settled wounded and aged soldiers in a city, whose inhabitants later remained part of the province of Cappadocia under the name Nicopolitans. This is a small example of how Pontus and Lesser Armenia passed into the Roman order.

How These Narratives Connect with Amaseia

The link between the places in these accounts and Amaseia is made by Strabo. He writes that the Iris, after flowing through Comana, the plain of Dazimonitis and Gaziura, an ancient royal residence that was then deserted, passes by the very wall of Amaseia and reaches Phanaroea, where it joins the Lycus. At the confluence stands Eupatoria, founded by Mithridates, the city Pompey found half-finished, completed, and named Magnopolis. Cabeira lies a hundred and fifty stadia south of Magnopolis, about twenty-eight kilometers, and Amaseia lies the same distance west of it. The plain of Cabeira, where Appian and Plutarch set the fighting, is therefore Amaseia's eastern neighbor. Dio's Gaziura is the same place Strabo lists on the river that runs to Amaseia.

Strabo reports that Mithridates' palace, water-mills, zoological gardens, hunting grounds and mines were at Cabeira, and that the king's most precious treasures were kept at Kainon Chorion and were afterward dedicated by Pompey in the Capitolium. The documents and cups that Plutarch and Appian record as Pompey's finds agree with this information in Strabo. The same Strabo also says that in the territory of Amaseia there are several demolished strongholds and much deserted land because of the Mithridatic War. The clearest testimony to the mark the war left on this region comes not from the distant scenes of the ancient authors but from the pen of the city's own son.

The fortress of Sagylium is perhaps the most striking example. Strabo writes that in this stronghold above the territory of Amaseia Arsaces, one of the sons of Pharnaces, was captured by starvation after attempting to play the dynast without permission from the Roman prefects, and that the wells of its reservoir had been choked with huge rocks by order of Pompey. Pompey's purpose was to pull down garrisons that could serve as refuges for those wishing to carry out robberies. It is a concrete detail of how Pompey, in reorganizing Pontus as a province, dismantled the old military network of the kings. The same Pompey divided the coastal part of Pontus into eleven administrative units and joined them to Bithynia; Amaseia was in this arrangement given to kings for a time, and in Strabo's day it was provincial territory.

When and how Amaseia exactly passed under Roman rule is not recorded as a detailed event in these four writers. Modern accounts say the city fell to Rome during Lucullus's campaign and became the administrative center of the province of Bithynia and Pontus under Pompey, but the texts quoted above contain no siege or surrender agreement. It is therefore more sound to consider the city's fate together with the general consequences of the war across the region than to pin it to a precise date. The most visible trace of the city's age as a seat of the Pontic kings is the rock-cut tombs; Robert Fleischer's article on the Pontic royal rock tombs at Amaseia is one of the principal scholarly studies of the subject.

Reading the Four Authors Together

That the four authors drew on independent or partly shared sources can be seen from the points where they overlap and where they conflict. The Pomponius scene appears in both Appian and Plutarch; the casualty figures for Triarius's defeat, twenty-four tribunes and one hundred and fifty centurions, match exactly in Appian and Plutarch, while Dio narrates the defeat with other details. The king's age, the place of his burial and whether Olcaba and Olthacus are the same person remain open questions among the sources. What follows from this comparison is that the tradition narrating the Pontic war drew separately on the Roman stage, on the local memory of the Black Sea and on Plutarch's portrait-centered writing, and that none takes the place of another.

Amaseia stays in the background of this tradition. The river flowing under its walls, the rock that held the royal palace and tombs, and the fortresses and plains that governed Mithridates' movements in the region form the setting around every scene of the war that is narrated. To know the city one must turn to Strabo; to understand the war one reads Appian, Memnon, Plutarch and Dio. Taken together, they give a picture of a valley that passed from royal capital to Roman province, seen both in its own voice and through the pens of those who looked from outside.

Chronology

Winter 73/72 BC: Lucullus enters Pontus; Amisus, Eupatoria and Themiscyra are besieged, and Mithridates gathers a new army at Cabeira.

72 BC: Cavalry skirmishes around Cabeira; Mithridates finally withdraws to Armenia.

71 and 70 BC: Lucullus takes the garrisons and coastal cities one by one; siege of Sinope.

Winter 68/67 BC: Mithridates returns to Pontus with the troops Tigranes gave him and defeats Fabius.

67 BC: Triarius is defeated near Zela; Lucullus's army disintegrates.

66 BC: Pompey defeats Mithridates in a night battle by the Euphrates; the reorganization of Pontus begins.

63 BC: Mithridates dies at Panticapaeum after the revolt of his son Pharnaces.

61 BC: Pompey's triumph in Rome; Mithridates' throne, scepter and golden statue are carried in the procession.

47 BC: Pharnaces is defeated by Caesar near Zela.

Bibliography

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