The borders of a kingdom often extend only as far as its army can reach. The Pontic dynasty, which at one time made Amaseia its capital, built a power stretching from the mountainous Black Sea coast across much of Anatolia and even into Greece, and it owed this to one of the most varied military organizations of its age. The Pontic army was a force in which Persian tradition and Macedonian discipline, the mounted warriors of the Black Sea steppe and the citizen soldiers of Greek cities, gathered under a single banner. The best-known architect of this structure was Mithridates VI Eupator, who came to the throne around 120 BC at the age of thirteen. Most of what we know rests on sources written from the Roman side, above all Appian and Plutarch, and since these sources often inflate the size of armies, the figures below are given with due caution.

The Structure of the Army

In its basic organization the Pontic army resembled the usual royal armies of the Hellenistic period, but its recruiting ground was unusually wide. The standing army was drawn from the kingdom's own lands and from the Black Sea region; Armenians, Cappadocians, Bithynians, Galatians, Phrygians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Thracians, Bastarnae, Tauri and the Heniochi of the Caucasian coast are counted among its peoples. Troops from the Greek cities were not part of the standing army; they fought as citizens of their own cities. That peoples with different languages and weapon traditions could be united under a single chain of command depended on the personal authority of the king. Appian writes that at the start of the war Mithridates could muster an army of 240,000 infantry and 40,000 horsemen, a figure that can only be read alongside the tendency of ancient authors to exaggerate the strength of Rome's enemies.

The core of the infantry was the Macedonian phalanx, the legacy of Alexander the Great. Tight ranks holding long pikes, the sarissae, shoulder to shoulder, could deliver a powerful blow on open ground. An elite unit known for its bright bronze shields went by the name Chalkaspides, or Bronze Shields, and it is recorded that this unit was deployed against Sulla at Chaeronea. At the same battle, according to Appian and Plutarch, part of the phalanx consisted of a force of fifteen thousand drawn from freed slaves. On the cavalry side there were mounted archers, light horse and the heavy riders called cataphracts, horse and rider alike clad in armor; scythed war chariots were added to these.

Mithridates did not leave his army bound only to the Eastern tradition. According to the sources, he equipped a force of 120,000 men "in the Roman fashion" and trained them in the Roman phalanx formation. How closely these units managed to imitate the Roman legions is disputed, but the attempt itself shows that the king tried to learn from his enemy.

Scythed War Chariots

The most striking element of Pontic warfare was the scythed chariot. Drawn by four horses and carrying a crew of up to three, these vehicles were designed to plunge into the enemy line with blades fixed to the sides of the wheels and tear a gap in densely packed infantry. Horses would not willingly enter a close-set phalanx, and the blades of the chariot could overcome this problem and open a gap in the ranks. In practice, however, a disciplined army opened its ranks as the chariot approached and closed them again once it had passed through. The chariot was useful only in attack, needed open and level ground, and became a burden to its driver on broken terrain.

Mithridates' chariots once produced a real result. In the summer of 89 BC, Nicomedes IV, King of Bithynia, met the Pontic army on the banks of the River Amnias. He held the upper hand at first, but he was caught unprepared by an attack of the Scythian chariots in Mithridates' service and was heavily defeated. Soon afterward, in a cavalry clash near Mount Scorobas, a hundred Sarmatian horsemen defeated seven hundred Bithynian riders, and Pontic forces under Neoptolemus routed the army of the Roman commander Manius Aquillius at Protopachium, inflicting some ten thousand casualties. Aquillius withdrew to Pergamum, while Nicomedes fled first to Pergamum and then to Italy. By the account of the ancient sources, this is one of the few known examples of scythed chariots used successfully.

The same weapon produced a very different result in Greece. The Roman commander Sulla, who knew he would face about ninety chariots at Chaeronea in 86 BC, had stakes driven in front of his line. The chariots stopped when they met these stakes and were brought down by Roman javelins and arrows; the survivors panicked and plunged into the phalanx behind them, throwing it into disorder. At Orchomenus the picture was similar. Archelaus had placed the chariots at the front, the phalanx behind and the cavalry on the wings; Sulla's front rank opened up to reveal stakes planted at an angle. Some chariots were impaled, the rest were stopped by a shower of pila, and their crashing into their own phalanx as they fled decided the course of the battle. Other sources also describe the Romans dealing with this weapon by means of obstacles of stakes and caltrops. The last known use of scythed chariots is recorded as the Battle of Zela in 47 BC.

The Test of the Battlefield

In the First Mithridatic War the strengths and weaknesses of the Pontic army show clearly in two great battles. In 88 BC Mithridates marched from Bithynia into Rome's province of Asia and took nearly the whole province. In the same year came the Asiatic Vespers, in which some eighty thousand Romans and Italians were killed in Anatolian cities; this figure from the sources is among the lowest accepted estimates. In the autumn Rhodes was besieged, but the city held out with successful sorties by land and sea. For the siege Mithridates had a huge bridge-like engine, called a sambuca and armed with catapults, built; when it collapsed under its own weight he lifted the siege. The sources report that the king blamed these failures on ill omens. From then on Mithridates avoided the front line and left the campaigns to his commanders, above all Archelaus.

Archelaus, who held Athens and Piraeus, withdrew by sea after Sulla took Athens in the spring of 86 BC. Sulla turned north to the fertile plains of Boeotia, and the northern army under Taxiles joined Archelaus. The numbers are disputed. Sulla's force was about thirty thousand, of whom fewer than seventeen thousand were Romans; for the Pontic army Memnon gives sixty thousand and Appian one hundred and twenty thousand. Archelaus favored a war of attrition, but Taxiles, at the head of the larger army, insisted on a pitched battle. Sulla meanwhile had set his soldiers to digging trenches, aiming both to protect the flanks against cavalry envelopment and to tire the men until they were ready to fight. At Chaeronea the Roman left wing was at first pressed hard by the Pontic attack, but in the center the Roman infantry, drawn back behind the stakes, stopped the chariots and broke up the phalanx. Sulla saved the situation by riding with his own cavalry between the wings. The Pontic army was routed, Taxiles was taken prisoner, and Archelaus escaped with a small force to Chalcis. Plutarch writes that the survivors numbered about ten thousand; Sulla, for his part, gives his own losses as twelve. Modern scholars put little trust in these figures, since Sulla's memoirs are known to be full of exaggeration.

After Chaeronea some eighty thousand fresh troops under Dorylaus landed on Euboea. The Pontic army again drew up against Sulla near Orchomenus, on a level plain suited to its cavalry. Sulla began to have trenches and ditches dug to keep the cavalry out of the field and draw the fighting toward the marshy parts; Archelaus attacked to stop the work, and when the Roman soldiers began to flee toward the camp, Sulla threw himself forward and rallied them with words that mean roughly, "Remember Orchomenus; if anyone asks where you left your general and ran, tell them there." In its last attack the Pontic army put the chariots in front and the phalanx behind; because of the stakes described above, the chariots were of no use. The Roman cavalry then drove back the Pontic horse, the phalanx broke, and the Romans entered the Pontic camp; most of the soldiers pinned against the marsh were killed. An account based on Appian gives thirty-five thousand dead and twenty-five thousand prisoners. Sulla had three of the defeated Boeotian towns, Anthedon, Darymna and Halae, destroyed. The battle drove Archelaus to seek peace; in 85 BC at Dardanus, Mithridates agreed to give up Asia, Bithynia and Cappadocia, to pay two thousand talents and to hand over seventy warships, but kept his kingdom and his holdings on the Black Sea.

Pontus was not only a land power. According to Appian's figures, Mithridates had three hundred decked ships and about one hundred ships with two banks of oars at the start of the war. These numbers are considered more reliable than the figures for the land army, and they gave Pontus a clear superiority on the Black Sea and in the Aegean. Like the army, the fleet had a multiethnic character: the kingdom supplied most of the ships, the Greek cities a small share, and the crews came from the kingdom's various tribes or from Greek stock. When the Roman ships guarding the straits surrendered as the Pontic army approached, the gates of the Aegean opened to the fleet. A joint Pontic-Athenian fleet took Delos in 88 BC and handed the island to Athens.

The fleet's superiority continued at the start of the Third Mithridatic War. In 73 BC Mithridates invaded Bithynia and defeated the fleet of the Roman consul Cotta at Chalcedon; sixty-four Roman ships were captured or burned and three thousand men died. But the siege of Cyzicus failed: Lucullus both surrounded the besieging army and condemned it to starvation. The sources say that of the three hundred thousand men who set out for Bithynia only twenty thousand effective soldiers made it back to Pontus; the figure may be exaggerated, but the scale of the disaster is clear. The Pontic fleet was then defeated; Lucullus captured or sank thirteen ships off Tenedos and thirty-two around the island of Neae. When Sinope was besieged, the Cilician garrison in the city burned its heavy ships and escaped in light boats.

Siegecraft and Commanders

The Pontic army was also experienced in siege warfare. Siege equipment was used against the cities of the Aegean coast; the sambuca at Rhodes is the most ambitious example. Siege knowledge was also used in defense: Mithridates left the defense of Amisus to a Greek engineer named Callimachus, who set up a series of mechanical defensive devices that gave the besieging Romans considerable trouble. Lucullus, waiting for a moment when the defenders had withdrawn to rest, took the city, which was plundered by soldiers and reduced to ruins.

Two brothers, Archelaus and Neoptolemus, stand out in the command structure. Neoptolemus defeated the first Roman armies in Anatolia, while Archelaus carried the weight of the campaign in Greece. The king's son Arcathias advanced into Greece with a large army by way of Thrace and Macedonia, but died of illness at Tisaeum and was succeeded by Taxiles. Metrophanes led the force that took Euboea and Magnesia. This staff was strong enough to link armies spread across a scattered geography, but the king's withdrawal from the front line became a factor weakening the unity of command.

The Third War on Home Ground

The second great reckoning with Rome began after Bithynia was bequeathed to Rome by will. In 72 BC Lucullus entered the interior of Pontus by way of Galatia and had the region plundered; Mithridates had to raise his army anew. Around Cabira he assembled, according to Plutarch, an army of forty thousand made up of thirty-six thousand infantry and four thousand horsemen. While Lucullus held an old fortress and had supply convoys brought in from the direction of Cappadocia, Mithridates tried to wear Rome down by attacking those convoys. The ten cohorts escorting the first convoy threw the Pontic horsemen back with heavy losses. Against the second, Mithridates sent a force of four thousand combining infantry and cavalry, but the Romans saw that the narrow valley restricted the movement of the cavalry, counterattacked and destroyed half of the attackers. As Mithridates was deciding to withdraw, panic broke out in his army; Lucullus noticed this, attacked the camp, and the army dissolved. The king fled to Armenia, to his son-in-law Tigranes.

In 67 BC Mithridates returned to Pontus. Gaius Valerius Triarius, who was in the region with two legions because Lucullus was engaged in the siege of Nisibis, faced Mithridates on the plain near Zela. The king had prepared the battlefield in advance; he threw his whole force against one section of the Roman formation and the Romans were routed. Seven thousand Roman soldiers, twenty-four tribunes and one hundred and fifty centurions died. Mithridates thus regained control of Pontus.

With Pompey's assumption of command the situation changed. Pompey set up a blockade of the Anatolian coasts, cut off Tigranes' support by getting the Parthian king Phraates III to attack Armenia, and stationed legions in Cappadocia. Mithridates burned the crops and withdrew into the mountainous interior to stretch the Roman supply lines, but Pompey's logistical superiority defeated this strategy. In late 66 BC, in the Lycus Valley, the Pontic army, some thirty thousand infantry and two or three thousand cavalry, encamped on a hill called Dasteira, was struck by Pompey's night attack. Because the moon was behind the Romans, the Pontic soldiers loosed their arrows and spears far too early; once the legionaries entered the camp, their superiority in close combat decided the fight. Mithridates cut his way out of the encirclement with eight hundred horsemen but left at least ten thousand of his soldiers behind. Tigranes would not receive him, and the king crossed from the Caucasian coast to Crimea. In 63 BC, during the revolt begun by his son Pharnaces, his attempt to end his life by poison did not work and he was killed by the sword of his Gallic bodyguard. It is reported that, by Pompey's order, his body was buried beside his ancestors, either in Sinope or in Amaseia; the sources do not agree on a single place.

Chronology

89 BC: At the River Amnias the army of Nicomedes is defeated by Pontic Scythian chariots; Aquillius is beaten at Protopachium.

88 BC: The province of Asia is taken, the siege of Rhodes fails, Delos is handed to Athens.

86 BC: At Chaeronea Sulla defeats Archelaus and Taxiles; in the autumn the second Pontic army is destroyed at Orchomenus.

85 BC: The Treaty of Dardanus ends the First Mithridatic War.

73-71 BC: The Pontic fleet prevails at Chalcedon, the siege of Cyzicus fails, Lucullus wins at Cabira.

67 BC: The army of Triarius is defeated at Zela.

66 BC: Pompey's night attack in the Lycus Valley scatters Mithridates' army.

63 BC: Mithridates dies in Crimea.

The Power Behind Amaseia

The royal tombs carved into the cliffs of Amaseia are the political counterpart of this military power. That a dynasty could last so long, rule such wide lands and resist Rome for about a quarter of a century, between 89 and 63 BC, during the Mithridatic Wars, is unthinkable without such an army and navy. The move of the capital from Amaseia to Sinope shows the kingdom's center of gravity shifting toward the coast and the Greek world; Amaseia remained the rock fortress of the interior and the seat of the dynasty's royal tombs.

Sources

Other sources