Sulla's Arrangements in Asia Minor and Greece
We return, then, to the immediate aftermath of the settlement at Dardanus in 85. Sulla's hands were now free for the elimination of Fimbria.[14] That accomplished, Sulla restored Nicomedes to Bithynia, and Paphlagonia was added to his kingdom; Galatia was left to its local dynasts.[15] Ariobarzanes was restored to Cappadocia, but as we saw, Mithridates did not entirely relinquish the disputed region, which had been one of the precipitating causes of the war. Sulla's failure to insist on Mithridates' withdrawal while his army was still in Asia Minor clearly indicates how distracted he was from the task of restoring fully the Roman imperium throughout the peninsula.
It remained for Sulla to restore Rome's supremacy in the Greek cities of Asia provincia , and not incidentally to appease his army, which was disgruntled that the wealth of Mithridates was denied them (Plut. Sull . 24.4), by means of an alternative source of loot. The army, it must be noted, was no doubt badly in arrears of pay, for Sulla, having been declared a public enemy, had clearly been reduced to living off the land.[16] According to Appian, Sulla "left free, and enrolled as friends of the Roman people, the Ilians, Chians, Lycians, Rhodians, Magnesians, and some others, either in return for their military assistance or for what they had suffered for their support for him"[17] —or for what they paid him, for we learn from
Cicero that some communities bought their "freedom" from Sulla.[18] He then sent his army round to the rest of the cities, many of which were held by Mithridates' partisans and still offered resistance, particularly after he had repealed the manumissions the Pontic king had ordered. These cities were captured and suffered harsh treatment, especially Ephesus.[19] Appian is frustratingly vague here about precisely which cities received rewards or punishment, leaving details forever uncertain, and hardly recovered in the extensive scholarly discussion of these matters.[20] We may forego consideration of whether the Magnesia Appian says was "freed" is the town on Mt. Sipylus or the one on the Maeander, or whether Smyrna lost "freedom" at this time.[21] What must be emphasized for our purposes is that the freedom from tribute and direct Roman interference that many, perhaps most, Greek cities of Asia had enjoyed since 129 now came to an end except in a very few cases. This inference has textual support in a passage from Appian's final assessment of the Mithridatic wars: "They [sc. the Romans] recovered quickly the areas of which Mithridates had deprived them: Paphlagonia, Galatia, Phrygia and its neighbor Mysia; in addition to these Lydia, Carla, Ionia and the rest of Asia around Pergamum; also old Greece and Macedonia. And they imposed tribute upon the majority of these peoples, who had not yet been tributary to them."[22] It is regrettable that we have so little specific information on the basis of which to assess more accurately the extent of territory now made subject to tribute; but in view of the conclusion reached earlier (chap. 4) that relatively few cities became tributary after the war with Aristonicus, it appears probable that the subjection of most of the Greek cities of Asia to
this most concrete manifestation of Roman supremacy, which, as we have seen, by its nature inevitably brought with it the frequent intervention of Roman officials in the local affairs of the cities, is to be dated to the settlement of the Mithridatic War. It would be rash to extrapolate the massive exploitation of Asia and complex financial links with Rome that Cicero describes in his speech for the Manilian law of 66 back to the later second century, without pausing to consider the work of Sulla.[23]
More painful in the short run was the punishment immediately meted out to the Greek cities for their adherence to Mithridates in the war. The most noxious partisans of Mithridates and those most closely associated with the massacre of the Italians were put to death at Ephesus; Appian notes, however, that the Ephesians were singled out for their destruction of Roman statues and dedications, signaling their early enthusiasm for Mithridates' cause, not as we might expect for their special zeal in obeying Mithridates' order to kill all Italians.[24] Sulla then called to Ephesus the leaders of "the cities" (presumably only those that merited punishment, but they would very likely have been the vast majority of Asian cities, so that Appian's sweeping references are not grossly misleading)[25] and distributed equally among them a massive fine, which amounted, according to Plutarch, to about 20,000 talents, or some 120 million denarii. This was clearly spent in large part on the troops, who probably received a handsome bonus as well.[26] A further bonus for the troops—and an additional, highly unpleasant burden for the cities—was their relatively luxurious urban billeting for the winter of 85-84.[27] Licinianus tells us that Mithridates had
been obliged by the terms of the Peace of Dardanus to provide supplies of grain, clothing, and pay for Sulla's army (35.77 Criniti). Possibly Mithridates had reneged on this promise as well and Sulla, declining to force him to fulfill it, obliged the Greek cities of Asia, the only remaining convenient source of supplies, to meet alone the full demands of the Roman army in its midst.
After the conclusion of the fighting in Asia Minor, Sulla, still formally a public enemy, had written to the Senate recounting his services to the res publica , particularly stressing his recent victories against Mithridates and the recovery for Rome of the territory the Pontic king had seized, and raising the issue of the exiles from the Cinnan regime and his own civil status.[28] The report on the campaign against Mithridates should be seen in the context of other such reports of victorious commanders to the Senate, which normally resulted in the immediate dispatch of a commission of ten to see to the details of the settlement in concert with the commander in the field.[29] It is possible that Sulla's account of the Mithridatic campaign was intended to give the Senate the option of sending such a senatorial commission, which would of course implicitly involve recognition of his status as Rome's imperator . The Senate, moved by a speech by its princeps , L. Valerius Flaccus, did indeed send legati to Sulla, but their discussions with the rebellious proconsul seem not to have gone beyond the question of his status and impunity for the Cinnans.[30] Thus the terms of the agreement reached at Dardanus remained without full legal force, while Sulla's
acta regarding individual communities in the aftermath of the campaigns remained without the sanction of a senatorial commission, and the legal status of such grants, conferred by a formally proclaimed public enemy, was open to doubt. The communities of the East were therefore left in a state of considerable uncertainty about the formal status of the Sullan grants until the proconsul himself was safely ensconced back in Rome. Indeed, as noted above, it was known that some of them had paid Sulla good money for his conferral of "freedom",[31] all the more reason to protect their investment by pressing immediately for senatorial ratification. Hence it is no wonder that in 81 and 80 a veritable flock of embassies from the East beat a path to Rome to obtain validation of Sulla's arrangements. We know, mainly from the random evidence of preserved inscriptions, of embassies sent in these two years to confirm grants of territory, revenues, and various guarantees, from Stratonicea, Rhodes, the guild of Dionysiac artists of Ionia and the Hellespont, Tabae, Thasos, Oropus, Chios, and Cormi.[32]
We do not hear of ratification by the Senate of Sulla's Eastern arrangements en bloc. The lex Valeria of 82, which conferred upon him the dictatorship, gave impunity and legal force to his future acts during his tenure of the office; but, contrary to one influential interpretation, we should not suppose that it formally ratified all of Sulla's acta as proconsul.[33] Appian,
it is true, says that previously, in the period between Sulla's capture of Rome and his formal election as dictator, his acts as consul and proconsul were voted to be secure and legal.[34] But it is hard to reconcile this with more specific evidence concerning Sulla's Eastern arrangements. A quotation of the lex locationis imbedded in a senatorial decree for Oropus implies the contrary when it notes that exemptions made by Sulla for territory possessed by temples and religious sanctuaries needed subsequent senatorial confirmation to be valid.[35] Certainly, as we have seen, the peace with Mithridates was never regarded as formally ratified, as it should have been had all of Sulla's acta been regarded as legally binding. Perhaps the evidence only appears to be contradictory. Appian's focus at this point is very much on Rome's internal strife; the decree to which he refers may well have been concerned with the immediately pressing question of legal immunity for Sulla himself and his actions in the civil wars since 88. We may compare Plutarch's version, which speaks explicitly of a grant of immunity (
).[36] Such a ruling, of course, would not have entailed ratification of Sulla's Eastern arrangements.
In addition to the assurance that formal confirmation by the Senate would provide there is sufficient evidence in the texts of the decrees that much remained still to be put into practice, and that a visit to Rome was partly intended to spur movement in that direction. Only as a result of the embassy of the Stratoniceans in 81 did Sulla get around to determining just how much the cities he had assigned to Stratonicea were to pay it in taxes.[37] Nor, it seems, had he done more in the case of Thasos than confer benefits on paper. In 80, seven years after a Thraco-Pontic army had swept
through Macedonia, the Thasians had still not got back the land that had been seized from them by Thracians, or taken over Peparethos and Sciathos, both of which had been given to them by Sulla; in that year or the next, the proconsul Cn. Cornelius Dolabella bestirred himself to begin a letter-writing campaign on their behalf.[38] Plutarch remarks on the stream of embassies that met Sulla as he marched through Boeotia in 87;[39] this pattern doubtless recurred wherever Sulla went during his campaign. On such occasions he will rarely have clone more than write letters conferring certain benefits in rather broad terms;[40] it remained to the parties directly involved subsequently to approach the Senate and ensure that the grants were given full formal recognition and actually enacted. For obvious reasons, that could not be done until Sulla was in control of Rome.
These embassies also, naturally, had an eye to the future of their relationship with the ruling power. This explains one striking feature attested among the requests of at least two of the embassies, which doubtless came up more often than appears in our lacunose evidence. Both Stratonicea and Chios asked, in addition to confirmation of the Sullan grants by the Senate, for explicit recognition of the continued validity of their own traditional laws; Stratonicea also asked for confirmation of decrees passed "on account of the war that they declared on King Mithridates," while Chios apparently wanted explicit recognition of the principles that the Romans among them must obey Chian law, and that the city was not to be formally bound by any edict of a Roman magistrate.[41] The requests for explicit recognition of rights that would seem to be implicit in the status of a "free" Roman "friend and ally" call for comment. At first glance it would seem to imply an extraordinary degree of Roman interference in local affairs and unprecedented precariousness of local legal autonomy if
one enjoyed the fight to "use one's own laws" (suis legibus uti ) only with Rome's explicit approval; thus, according to Pliny and the emperor Trajan, in Pontus of the early second century A.D. a community without the privilege suis legibus uti was "bound by Roman law" (Romano iure obstrictum ).[42] But we are still nearly two centuries from Pliny and Trajan, and better explanations lie ready to hand for these requests than a general debasement of "freedom" at the time of the Mithridatic War.[43] The need for confirmation of the local legal autonomy of Chios emerged directly from the peculiar historical circumstances following the recent, catastrophic war.[44] The population of the city had been deported by Mithridates, all rights of possession had been thrown into confusion, and it is very likely that Romans, whom we know to have held considerable property on the island, had attempted to make use of Roman officials in the province for the purpose of reclaiming their property. Explicit confirmation of the primacy of Chian law and the principle of legal autonomy did not alter Chios's legal status vis-à-vis Rome but simply made it more difficult in practice for Roman officials to intervene; this case should be compared with the continuous struggle of Colophon, revealed in the honorific decrees for Menippus and Ptolemaeus, for full enjoyment of its autonomy.[45] The same applies to the Stratoniceans' request for confirmation of their legal autonomy. Here the impetus for reiterating this principle may have been the danger that Roman officials might be induced, perhaps by Roman citizens, to tamper with the decrees, mentioned in the same breath, that were passed "for the sake of the war." The parallel for such decrees that comes to mind is that of the emergency measures of Ephesus of 86/85 alleviating debts and enfranchising noncitizens,[46] which may well have annoyed men who had the ear of Roman officials. The problem of proconsular interference in the affairs of "free" cities was, we have seen, nothing new, but it gained particular urgency in the immediate aftermath of the Mithridatic War as Romans returned to Asia Minor and attempted to regain their
losses or to exploit favorable conditions for their individual interest. Those communities therefore that had managed to preserve good relations with Rome wisely lost no time in obtaining from the Senate explicit acknowledgment of their rights of local judicial autonomy.
Not only were some, perhaps many, of the privileges Sulla had granted yet to be put into practice at the end of the 80s, but much remained unsettled concerning the revenues to be taken in from communities newly reduced to tributary status for their behavior in the war. I have argued (above, pp. 59-65, 264-66) that in the aftermath of the First Mithridatic War there was an enormous increase in the area subject to Roman taxation, which probably now included most of the Greek cities of western Asia Minor, as well as much of central Greece, namely, Boeotia, Phocis, and Euboea. How many of these crucial decisions are to be attributed to Sulla's actions on the spot, and how many to subsequent senatorial decisions, may be questioned. Certainly we have direct testimony of Sulla's grants of "freedom" to a number of cities and communities in Asia Minor and the extraction of a fine from the others; however, we know from a reference in Cicero that the Senate subsequently (presumably soon after Sulla's death in 78) annulled some of the exemptions on the grounds that they had been bought.[47] This may suggest that a senatorial review of the new Eastern revenues took place in the early 70s and expanded considerably the area made tributary by Sulla.[48] Remarkably, it was not until 74 (probably following upon a sale of contracts in 75) that the question of whether Oropus was subject to Roman revenues was raised: Sulla had merely consigned its revenues to the Amphiareum, without any mention, as is clear from the dispute itself, of Roman taxation.[49] This may suggest that at the time of the grant (presumably 86-85) he did not assume that Roman tribute would be levied on Boeotia, and that this was done at some subsequent date. The evidence does not suggest that Sulla did more in the field than grant exemptions on his somewhat dubious authority (which could, as we have seen, yield cash and presumably more active assistance) and levy his great fine; the details could all be worked out at a later stage through the
Senate once the wars were won and enshrined in a lex locationis .[50] In any case, as we have seen, the Senate was not entirely bound even by the arrangements Sulla had made.