Amaseia's passage from Pontic capital to Roman provincial town came at the end of a sequence of wars that lasted nearly half a century. Mithridates VI Eupator's attempt to erase Roman influence from Anatolia began in 88 BC and ended with the king's death in the Crimea in 63 BC; in between lay three wars, two great Roman commanders, and a different political design at each stage. Details of the armies, the fleet and the scythed chariots belong to a separate article on the Pontic military, and the city's long life under Rome and Byzantium is treated in its own article.

Background to the War

The collision between the Kingdom of Pontus and Rome cannot be separated from the circumstances of Mithridates' accession. Mithridates V was poisoned in 120 BC, and the conspirators were probably acting for Queen Laodice. According to the will, the kingdom was to be ruled jointly by Laodice and her two sons, Mithridates VI and Mithridates Chrestus, but neither son was of age and the mother kept power in her own hands as regent. The young Mithridates fled the court and went into hiding during these years; between 116 and 113 BC he returned, removed his mother and brother from the throne, and became sole ruler. The dynasty traced its descent to Persian satraps, and the king knew how to present himself as a Hellenic ruler to the Greek world and as an Iranian one to the East. The capital had by then moved from Amaseia to the Greek city of Sinope; Amaseia nevertheless kept its importance as the old centre that housed the royal palaces and rock-cut tombs.

Mithridates first brought Colchis and the Bosporan Kingdom in the Crimea under his control. Thanks to the success of his general Diophantus against the Scythian king Palacus, the northern Black Sea passed under his protection. He then turned to Anatolia and divided Paphlagonia with King Nicomedes III of Bithynia. The two kings soon fell out over Cappadocia, however. Nicomedes asked Rome for help, and between 95 and 92 BC the Romans intervened twice on Bithynia's behalf. These interventions showed Mithridates that, if he wished to go on enlarging his kingdom, a war with Rome was unavoidable. Under Nicomedes IV, Bithynia had become a government wholly in the hands of Roman advisers; Nicomedes, egged on by Rome, declared war on Pontus, and in 89 BC his army and the local levies raised in the province of Asia marched against Mithridates. Rome was at that moment absorbed in its civil war with its Italian allies and could keep very few regular troops in Anatolia. Mithridates won a decisive victory over this force, was welcomed as a liberator in the Anatolian cities along his march, and by the middle of 89 BC had defeated four allied armies and taken most of Roman Asia. In the territories he had conquered he declared a five-year remission of taxes and appointed satraps and overseers.

The Asiatic Vespers

In the first half of 88 BC Mithridates ordered the Romans and Italians of Anatolia killed on a single day. The order was a calculated reply to Rome's declaration of war and was meant to force the cities to choose sides; no city that had served Mithridates, it was reasoned, could ever again be received back into Roman allegiance. Secret letters to satraps and local leaders instructed that thirty days after the date of writing all people of Italian origin, with their wives, children and freed slaves, were to be put to death. The king offered freedom to slaves who betrayed their masters and cancellation of debt to those who killed their creditors; killers and informers were to hand half the property of the dead to the Pontic treasury. Ephesus, Pergamon, Adramyttion, Caunus, Tralles, Nysa and the island of Chios are counted among the places where it happened. Many of these cities were ruled by tyrants, and part of the population fell on their Roman neighbours willingly, blaming them for taxes, moneylending and grasping lawsuits.

The sources do not agree on the number of dead. Valerius Maximus and Memnon of Herakleia give about eighty thousand, while Plutarch speaks of a hundred and fifty thousand; modern scholars find the second figure less credible and accept that the numbers in the fragments of Cassius Dio are also exaggerated. The exact date is disputed too. A. N. Sherwin-White places the event in late 89 or early 88 BC, while Ernst Badian, saying that precision is impossible, proposes the first half of 88 BC and in any case no later than the middle of the year. The name "Vespers" comes from a retrospective analogy drawn by Théodore Reinach in 1890 with the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, and some historians today describe the event as genocide. Rome's answer was not slow in coming, though carrying it out took time. The Senate gave the command against Mithridates to Sulla, consul of the year; after Sulla took over the army at Nola, the transfer of the command to Gaius Marius set off a civil war, Sulla marched on Rome, and he could cross to the East only about eighteen months later, with five legions.

The First and Second Wars

The First Mithridatic War lasted from 88 to 84 BC. Mithridates built a large fleet that swept the Aegean and filled the gaps the Romans had left, drew Athens to his side through his partisans there, the Peripatetic philosophers among them, but for all his effort could not take the harbour of Rhodes. By the time Sulla landed in Greece, the whole Hellenic mainland had rallied to Rome, and after several successful battles Sulla drove Mithridates out of Greece. Declared an outlaw by his political opponents in Rome, Sulla hurried into peace talks in order to return to Italy. This lenient peace was never ratified by the Senate and gave Mithridates the chance to rebuild his strength. Murena, left in Sulla's place in Anatolia, attacked Pontus in 83 BC and began the Second War; in 82 BC Mithridates defeated Murena's two raw legions on the Halys and peace was made again. The core territories of Pontus did not suffer much in these two wars; it was the next war that would decide Amaseia's political fate.

The Third War and Lucullus' Campaign in Pontus

The immediate cause of the Third War was Nicomedes IV's bequest of his kingdom to Rome in 74 BC. Mithridates would not accept that these lands pass to Rome and entered Bithynia. Because the move coincided with the Sertorian revolt in Spain, Rome's best commander, Pompey, was busy elsewhere, and the Senate sent the consuls Lucullus and Cotta to the East. According to Plutarch and Appian, Lucullus had about thirty thousand infantry and between sixteen hundred and twenty-five hundred cavalry; the sources give much higher figures for Mithridates' army. In the first move Mithridates beat Cotta at Chalcedon, but at the siege of Cyzicus some time later he suffered a great disaster through hunger, plague and the loss of his cavalry at the Rhyndacus; of the army he had marched into Anatolia, only some twenty thousand effective troops are said to have remained. The naval operations and battle details of this phase are covered in the article on the army and fleet; what matters here is that from 72 BC the centre of gravity of the war shifted to Pontus itself.

In 72 BC Lucullus entered Pontus by way of Galatia. The Galatians, who hated Mithridates, gladly supplied his army with provisions, glad to see it pass through without plundering. The interior of Pontus was rich and fertile, and Lucullus let his soldiers plunder it; Mithridates, busy rebuilding his army, could not stop the devastation. The war moved on around Cabira, at first with cavalry clashes; according to Plutarch, Lucullus, with the help of a Greek guide named Artemidorus, occupied a fortress overlooking Cabira. What followed ended with the breaking up of Mithridates' army. After his defeat the king fled to his son-in-law Tigranes, King of Armenia; Lucullus took Cabira and many other fortresses, and found there great treasures, many Greek prisoners and people close to the king. As he fled, Mithridates sent the eunuch Bacchides to have his sisters and wives, who were hidden away at Pharnacia, put to death.

Lucullus then took the coastal cities of Pontus one by one. Amisus fell in spite of the defensive machines built by Mithridates' siege expert Callimachus, but the soldiers sacked the city and burned it; Lucullus, an admirer of Greek culture, said he was deeply grieved. At Sinope, the chief port of Pontus, the defence was carried on mainly by the Cilician troops Mithridates had placed in the garrison, and Lucullus therefore recognised the city's freedom. Cotta took Herakleia Pontike in 71 BC after a siege of two years. With that, nearly all the coastal cities of Pontus had passed into Roman hands.

Amaseia in the Time of Lucullus

We have no firm account of when and how Amaseia came into Roman hands. It is reported that the city was taken by a force under Lucullus in 70 BC and soon afterwards declared a free city and made the administrative centre of the province of Bithynia and Pontus; but the capture of Amaseia is not narrated anywhere in Plutarch's Life of Lucullus, and the main detail is supplied by Strabo's family memories, set down by a native of the city. Strabo writes that his maternal grandfather saw that the king was losing the war and was angry that Mithridates had recently put to death his close relatives Tibius and Tibius' son Theophilus; taking assurances from Lucullus, he caused fifteen garrisons to revolt against the king. Great promises were made in return for these services. When Pompey took Lucullus' place, however, things changed: out of personal enmity toward Lucullus, Pompey treated as enemies everyone who had sided with him, and on his return to Rome he persuaded the Senate not to ratify the honours and rewards Lucullus had promised to certain men of Pontus. His reasoning was that when one man had brought the war to a successful end, it was unjust for the distribution of prizes to be in the hands of another.

Strabo describes the territory of Amaseia in the same place and lists the marks of the war: in his native country there are many demolished strongholds and deserted tracts of land because of the Mithridatic War, yet the region is well wooded, part of it is suited to horse-breeding and the keeping of other animals, and the whole of it is excellent for habitation. In the same pages Amaseia is described by its own geography: a high and precipitous rock descending sheer to the river, offering the advantages of a city and a fortress together, the wall enclosing the palaces and monuments of the kings, two channels hewn inside the rock for water, two bridges over the river, and then a valley opening into the plain of Chiliocomum, the "land of a thousand villages". This description also explains why the city was valued so highly, strategically, as it passed from Pontus to Rome.

The End of Lucullus and Pompey's Command

Lucullus entered Armenia in 69 BC. His victory at Tigranocerta and his success the following year on the road to Artaxata were not enough to crush Mithridates and Tigranes; the army's weariness with long campaigns, and a discontent spreading among the troops that Lucullus was fighting only for his own profit, finally turned into mutiny at Nisibis. The agitation of his brother-in-law Publius Clodius Pulcher, said to have acted in Pompey's interest and pay, seriously undermined Lucullus' command. In the spring of 67 BC, while Lucullus was occupied in Armenia, Mithridates suddenly returned to Pontus and defeated the Roman forces in the battle near Zela; about seven thousand Romans died, among them twenty-four tribunes and a hundred and fifty centurions. Lucullus managed to march his soldiers back to defend Anatolia, but the army refused to fight Mithridates. They threw their purses at Lucullus' feet and told him to carry on the war by himself. Lucullus withdrew to Galatia, and Mithridates and Tigranes recovered part of their kingdoms.

In early 66 BC, on a proposal by the tribune Gaius Manilius, the Lex Manilia, Pompey was given supreme command of the war against Mithridates and Tigranes. His authority stood above that of the provincial governors and included the right to appoint his own legates, to decide on war and peace and to conclude treaties. Pompey first made a treaty with the Parthian king Phraates III to secure Parthian neutrality, and then, at the instigation of Tigranes' rebellious son, brought about a Parthian attack on Armenia, so that Tigranes had to turn to defending his own country. It is also reported that Pompey blockaded the whole coast of Anatolia and sent three legions to protect Cappadocia. Mithridates withdrew into the interior, burned the crops and tried to stretch Pompey's supply lines, but Pompey was superior in logistics. The king pitched camp on a well-watered hill called Dasteira in the valley of the Lycus and was beaten in a night attack around the end of 66 BC. At least ten thousand Pontic soldiers died in the battle, and Mithridates broke out of the encirclement with only eight hundred horsemen. Strabo says that after the defeat the king fled over the mountains from the region of Dasteira, where Pompey had besieged him, into Colchis and from there to the Bosporus; Pompey founded the city of Nicopolis in that district. Tigranes refused to receive his son-in-law and even set a price of a hundred talents on his head.

The Death of Mithridates

In 65 BC Pompey defeated the Albanians and Iberians in the Caucasus, followed Mithridates' trail, and then left him and returned to the work of settlement in the East. The king crossed from Colchis to the Crimea, settled at Panticapaeum, and drew up a plan to march on Italy by way of the Danube and renew the war against Rome. These preparations wore down the local nobles and the people. According to Appian, his son Pharnaces plotted against his father; the conspirators were seized and tortured, but Mithridates spared his son, and Pharnaces nevertheless exploited discontent in the army and organised a rising among the Roman deserters and the other camps. Cassius Dio's account contains different details but reaches the same result. In 63 BC Mithridates tried to kill himself with poison and failed, having inured himself to every poison during his life. According to Appian he ordered his Gallic bodyguard Bituitus to kill him with the sword; Cassius Dio writes instead that the king could not die by his own hands and that the men his son had sent finished the work with swords and spears. At Pompey's order his body was buried beside his ancestors; the sources give the city as either Sinope or Amaseia, and this uncertainty has never been resolved. We have no document that would establish whether the royal tombs at Amaseia have any connection with this burial.

The fate of Pharnaces is also tied to the lands of Pontus. Pharnaces, who had risen against his father, taken the throne of the Bosporan Kingdom and was regarded as a client king of Rome, took advantage of Rome's immersion in civil war and of Caesar's delay in Egypt to seize Colchis and Lesser Armenia. He defeated Calvinus at Nicopolis in 48 BC and occupied most of Cappadocia, Pontus and Bithynia, but in 47 BC he was beaten by Caesar at Zela. Caesar announced this victory with the words "I came, I saw, I conquered." Zela had been run in the age of the kings as a sacred precinct dedicated to the Persian gods, the place where the people of Pontus swore their most important oaths; the last great resistance of Pontus to Rome thus came to an end in the immediate neighbourhood of Amaseia.

Pompey's Eastern Settlement

The reorganisation Pompey carried out in Asia Minor and the Levant in the 60s BC is known in history as the Eastern Settlement. After his suppression of the pirates, his victory in the Third Mithridatic War and the disappearance of the Seleucid state, the whole Near East had come under Roman control. The settlement created, alongside an enlarged province of Asia, the provinces of Bithynia and Pontus in the north and Cilicia in the south; the Seleucid lands were annexed as the province of Syria. In the interior, native allied kingdoms were left to serve as a buffer against the Parthian Empire. The area brought under direct Roman rule was that near the coasts of the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, where the old tradition of Greek cities had prepared a social system that Roman administration could settle into without difficulty. Pompey also made reforms in provincial administration and taxation and founded new cities.

Strabo describes the Pontic part clearly. Pompey took over Pontus within the boundaries Mithridates had held: the land from the Halys to the Tibareni and Armenia, reaching on the coast to Herakleia in the west and to Colchis and Lesser Armenia in the east. He distributed the parts facing Armenia and Colchis to rulers who had fought on his side, and divided the rest into eleven city-states and added them to Bithynia, so that a single province was formed out of the two regions. Pontus never became a separate province; it was simply attached to its former rival Bithynia, with its name tacked on at the end. Strabo lists Pompey's arrangements one by one. To the Galatian tetrarch Deiotarus he gave Gazelonitis, Pharnacia and the Trapezus country as far as Colchis and Lesser Armenia, with the title of king. At Comana he appointed Archelaus priest and added a territory of sixty stadia in circuit to the sacred land. He enlarged the half-finished Eupatoria and made it a city under the name Magnopolis; he built up Cabira as Diospolis, gave city status to Zela and to Megalopolis, declared the village of Phazemon the city of Neapolis and named the surrounding region Neapolitis. He dedicated Mithridates' hidden treasures in the Capitolium. He had the garrisons of fortresses such as Sagylium, above the territory of Amaseia, pulled down and the water cisterns choked, because he did not want these places to become refuges for brigands or rebels; and when Arsaces, one of the sons of Pharnaces, later took refuge there and attempted an unauthorised bid for power, the fortress was taken by starvation.

The full list of the eleven cities is not given in one place in this part of Strabo; here and there the ancient author mentions coastal cities such as Herakleia, Amastris, Sinope and Amisus, and inland cities that Pompey named or reorganised. Despite this uncertainty, the logic of the settlement is clear: Pompey made the existing Greek civic governments the support of his own administrative system. The centralised structure of the kingdom was dissolved, and small units made up of a city and its territory took its place. Because the settlement was made without the advice or approval of the Senate, it went unratified for several years; this drove Pompey to join Crassus and Julius Caesar in the first triumvirate, and ratification of the settlement became one of the main legislative aims of Caesar's first consulship in 59 BC. Many of its provisions remained in force for centuries, into the imperial age.

Amaseia's Place in Pompey's Settlement

Amaseia appears in Strabo's words: "Amaseia was also given to kings, though it is now a province." This sentence indicates that the city was not among the eleven cities incorporated directly into the province in Pompey's first settlement, that it remained for a time under dependent rulers, and that in Strabo's own day (the early first century AD) it lay within a Roman province. The sentence does not tell us which king received the city or how long it stayed so. Strabo describes the land of his native city as bordering Phazemonitis and calls it "by far the largest and best"; this suggests that Amaseia may have been, in territory, the largest of the small city-states Pompey organised. Amaseia lies at the same distance from Magnopolis as Cabira, about a hundred and fifty stadia, and the Iris and the Lycus meet at Magnopolis. The city thus stands as a junction between the north-east and the south-west in the network of new inland settlements that Pompey organised.

The political frame stayed in motion in the following years. In 39 BC Mark Antony gave Lesser Armenia, the remnant of the old Kingdom of Pontus, to Darius; when Darius died in 37 BC he appointed Polemon king of Cilicia and Arsaces king of Lesser Armenia, and with Arsaces' death the next year Polemon became king of Pontus. After Polemon's death his wife Pythodoris continued the rule; Strabo describes her as wise and fit to preside over affairs of state. Pythodoris held the country around Zela, Megalopolis and Cabira, which she adorned and made her own residence under the name Sebaste. Amaseia, after a transitional phase in this period, was fully incorporated into the Roman administrative structure. Around 3 to 2 BC it was attached to the province of Galatia, to the district known as Pontus Galaticus; around 112 the emperor Trajan joined it to the province of Cappadocia, and in the second century the city received the titles of metropolis and "first city". The details of these later centuries are given in the article on the Roman and Byzantine period.

The human cost of the wars also remained in Amaseia's memory. Strabo tells how his family, which had served Mithridates, drew down both the king's wrath and Pompey's mistrust; his mother's line, the house of Dorylaus, after a position close to the king, again suffered hard days in the collapse of the kingdom. Persian culture continued to live on in Amaseia after Mithridates and Tigranes were beaten; scholars have wondered how the Strabo family's pro-Roman stance was received in the city and whether it was perhaps rewarded with Roman citizenship, but there is no firm document on this. Strabo was born about 64 BC into a well-born family of the city, and as the witness of the generation that lived the political transformation of the age most closely, he set down both the old Pontus and the new Roman order in his Geography.

Chronology

120 BC: Mithridates V is poisoned; the kingdom is left to the joint rule of Laodice and her two sons.

116-113 BC: Mithridates VI removes his mother and brother from the throne and becomes sole ruler.

95-92 BC: The Romans intervene twice in the Anatolian dispute on Nicomedes' behalf.

89 BC: Mithridates defeats the pro-Roman forces and takes most of Roman Asia.

88 BC: The Asiatic Vespers; the Romans and Italians of Anatolia are killed. The First Mithridatic War begins.

84 BC: The First War ends with Sulla's lenient and unratified peace.

83-81 BC: The Second War, after Murena's attack; the battle of the Halys in 82 BC.

74 BC: Nicomedes IV bequeaths his kingdom to Rome; Mithridates enters Bithynia.

73 BC: Chalcedon and Cyzicus; Mithridates' Anatolian campaign collapses.

72-71 BC: Lucullus enters Pontus by way of Galatia; Mithridates is beaten around Cabira and flees to Armenia.

71 BC: Cotta takes Herakleia Pontike.

70 BC (according to some sources): Amaseia is taken by Lucullus' forces.

69 BC: Lucullus defeats Tigranes at Tigranocerta.

67 BC: Mithridates returns to Pontus and routs the Romans at Zela.

66 BC: Pompey becomes supreme commander under the Lex Manilia; toward the end of the year he defeats Mithridates on the Lycus.

65 BC: Pompey defeats the Albanians and Iberians in the Caucasus.

63 BC: Mithridates dies at Panticapaeum.

59 BC: In his consulship Caesar secures ratification of Pompey's Eastern Settlement.

47 BC: Pharnaces is beaten by Caesar at Zela.

Around 3/2 BC: Amaseia is attached to the Pontus Galaticus district of the province of Galatia.

Around 112: Trajan attaches Amaseia to the province of Cappadocia.

Bibliography

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