The First Mithridatic War and the Imperium Populi Romani
Mithridates and the Greeks who had sympathized with him had delivered a rather heavy shock to the imperium populi Romani in the East. Inevitably the acceptance of that imperium and loyalty to it were now thrown into question in a way they had not been before. This new tension emerges quite dearly even in our, on the face of it, rather austere epigraphic evidence.
Constant emphasis in the texts of this period on the demonstration of loyalty to Rome, expressed in the most obsequious terms, is most striking. The recurrence in these years of the phrase "those who have preserved the Roman friendship" is surely significant.[81] Cities that had received from Sulla grants of rights or territory naturally inscribed and conspicuously displayed the senatorial decrees that confirmed them on temples or in the marketplace.[82] These texts, prominently displayed, thus by their very nature served to attest to loyal service to Rome, and to its due recognition. In addition, however, they reproduced in abbreviated form the lengthy disquisitions presented in the Senate by the cities' ambassadors on their valiant efforts and sufferings in the Roman cause, and often contained some explicit senatorial acknowledgment of the veracity of these claims. So the embassy of the Stratoniceans speaks at length of their friendship toward Rome in peace and in the recent war, of their alacrity in resisting Mithridates, and of their torments at his hands; the Senate responds by assuring them that it has received word of their faithful assistance from commanders in Asia and Greece, and Sulla in his cover letter adds more
remarks of the same nature.[83] Some of the phrases used are indeed remarkable: the Stratoniceans declare that their city had "managed its own affairs according to their [sc. the Romans'] policy"; the Senate that it knows they had "most eagerly protected the Roman public interest with soldiers, grain [?], and great expenditures [?]"; and Sulla adds that they had "accepted eagerly many and various dangers for the sake of our public interest."[84] The Thasian embassy elaborated on the theme: "they had sworn oaths among themselves to kill their children and wives and to meet the forces of the enemy in battle, and to die for our [sc. the Roman] public interest in a time of need, rather than to appear in a crisis to have abandoned the friendship of the Roman people"; hence they underwent a siege, full of hardships and dangers.[85] We may imagine that the senatus consultum for Chios of 80 expressed like sentiments: it expounded the services the islanders had performed for Rome against Mithridates, and what they had suffered in consequence.[86]
A similar point was made in dossiers published by some cities after the war that advertised their loyalty or that of their prominent citizens. Nysa in Caria published a series of documents—one letter of the proconsul C. Cassius and two written by Mithridates—that attested to the great services performed by their citizen Chaeremon for the Romans when the tide of war was against them, and to his hostility toward the Pontic king.[87] A similar dossier has been found at Aphrodisias attesting to the city's dutiful assistance and that of its citizen Artemidorus during the Roman defeat.[88] Although the preserved texts were inscribed in the second century A.D ., they are likely to have been copied from an earlier monument for Arte-
midorus,[89] and it seems probable that Aphrodisias, like Nysa, did not let pass the opportunity to advertise its support for Rome in the immediate aftermath of the First Mithridatic War. One of the texts, a decree of the city passed in 89, reminded its readers of how, in response to an urgent request from Q. Oppius for military assistance, the Aphrodisians wished him to be informed immediately through Artemidorus "that the whole population was prepared to risk their lives, together with their wives, children, and property, for Quintus and the Roman interest, and that we do not even choose to live without the hegemony of the Romans."[90] A later letter of Oppius, written after his release from captivity probably in 84, was also published. In it Oppius recognized Aphrodisias's services to himself and to the Roman state: when he had requested soldiers from them they had sent them promptly, thus doing "what was incumbent upon good allies and friends of the Roman people to do."[91] In return Oppius, who now accepts their plea for him to become their patronus , will look to their interests in the future and will ensure that the Roman Senate and people know of Aphrodisias's services.[92]
Not surprisingly, the Chaeremon and Artemidorus dossiers stress assistance to Rome precisely at the moment when Roman fortunes were at their lowest ebb: aid offered during the collapse of Asia's defenses in 89-88 gave no impression of timeserving. But even those cities that had taken the lead in declaring allegiance to Mithridates sought now to proclaim their unwavering loyalty to Rome. The Ephesians, who had lost no time in declaring for Mithridates through the symbolic act of overthrowing Roman dedications in their city, and whose slaughter of Italians in the Artemision was one of the most notorious local manifestations of the massacre ordered by the Pontic king, now insisted rather lamely, in the
prescript to a document that dates to 86 or 85 and is clearly intended as much for subsequent Roman readers as for citizens of Ephesus, that
while the people [?] was preserving its long-established [?] goodwill toward the Romans, the common saviors [?] of all, and was enthusiastically receptive [?] to all demands, Mithridates, king of Cappadocia, violated the agreement with the Romans; and, having collected his forces, he attempted to become master of land that in no way belonged to him. After first seizing the cities in front of ours, he captured our city too by treachery [?], overwhelming us by his superiority in numbers and the suddenness of his attack. But our people, preserving from the first its goodwill toward the Romans, has now found an opportunity to help in the common project and has derided to declare war against Mithridates for the sake of the supremacy [hegemonia ] of the Romans and the freedom of all, all the citizens having offered themselves with one accord to the struggle for these goals.[93]
At Ephesus, however, the decision came too late to serve as a convincing gesture; as we saw, Sulla punished the city despite its professions of loyalty. For us the significant point is that the Greek cities of Asia Minor, however spotty their record in the war, took such pains to stress in their published documents their loyalty to Rome in the recent terrible circumstances. None of Rome's previous Eastern wars had elicited such a highly publicized outpouring of ostensible goodwill; the First Mithridatic War would appear to have been a crisis of allegiance on an altogether novel scale.
Particularly noteworthy is the sudden readiness of both Greek and Roman authorities to speak frankly in official documents of a Roman hegemonia . If Polybius is representative, Greeks had, of course, spoken of Rome's hegemonia for as much as a century,[94] but the appearance of the word as part of the formal diplomatic vocabulary, openly declared and inscribed in public records, is nevertheless an important step toward the full acknowledgment of the Roman imperium . As we have just seen, the Aphrodisians declare that "they do not even wish to live without the Roman hegemonia "; while sacrifices were offered, under Sulla's dispensation, at the Amphiareum at Oropus "for the victory and hegemonia of the Roman people."[95] The Ephesians present their decision to declare war against Mithridates as one taken "for the sake of the Roman hegemonia
and the freedom of all."[96] This sharp juxtaposition of Rome's supremacy with Greek freedom, implying the complete compatibility of the two, is striking and may well have been meant to be so; if we take into account the circumstances of the decree, already noted above, we recognize the distinct possibility that the Ephesians are expressing their hopes more than any realistic expectation. And yet, although the Ephesians for their own rhetorical purposes gave especially sharp expression to the idea that Rome's hegemonia did not preclude their own enjoyment of freedom, the same idea is probably implicit in the Aphrodisians' insistence that life itself was unthinkable without Rome's supremacy, and in the similar phrases we have surveyed above, from the lips of Stratonicean and Thasian ambassadors, about the priority of Roman interests—or rather, the identity of Roman with Greek interests.
Nor did Romans entirely shy away from frank acknowledgment of their hegemonia or, as they will have put it, imperium in the East. Sulla uses the word in his cover letter to the Stratoniceans: "I am quite aware that for generations you have performed all your obligations toward our hegemonia."[97] According to a convincing restoration of an epigraphic lacuna,[98] the Stratoniceans in 81 B.C. offered sacrifice on the Capitol not merely in thanks for Rome's victory, as was by now rather traditional,[99] but also, for the first time in our evidence, for "the hegemonia of the Roman people." If the restoration is correct, we have further evidence of a significant evolution in the terms in which the imperium was expressed in Rome itself, at the Capitolium, the focus of Roman public pageantry. As it happens, these signs of the full consciousness and the open profession of the existence of a Roman imperium in the East coincide chronologically with what, as Gruen rightly emphasizes, is "the first unequivocal assertion by a Roman that his state holds imperium orbis terrae " in the extant
evidence.[100] Perhaps the coincidence of evidence is fortuitous. But we may, on the other hand, justifiably suppose that emergence from the crisis in Italy and successful, if not glorious, confrontation of the first real challenge to the established Roman presence in the East gave a more concrete and more self-conscious conception of Roman world rule than had been expressed hitherto.
More evidence on this point comes once again from the Capitolium, on which was built precisely in these years, on the most probable view, a striking new monument to Roman power in the East.[101] On it were inscribed a number of texts, in many cases copied from earlier originals, dedicated on the Capitol by at least fifteen kings and peoples of Asia Minor, attesting to the benefits and security conferred on them by Rome.[102] The selection of these dedicatory tablets exclusively from Asia Minor and their publication on a single monument of some grandeur—its perimeter has been estimated at some twenty meters, and some relief sculpture has been attributed to it (though perhaps rashly)[103] —can hardly have been a random act just now, after Rome had for a brief period actually lost, then reestablished, its imperium on the Anatolian peninsula. Particularly interesting is the republication on the monument of some rather old dedications, a
few of which seem heavily ironical in view of the same parties' behavior in the recent war. A Lycian dedication that was probably nearly a century old will have harmonized well with that people's resistance to Mithridates in the war; more awkward, however, were a text advertising the "friendship and alliance" that obtained between Mithridates Eupator's grandfather (Mithridates IV) and Rome, and a commemoration by the Ephesians of the "freedom" established for them by the Romans, surely in 133-129.[104] The monument reminded Roman viewers of the power and authority their maiores had wielded in Asia Minor, set the recent victory in the context of an abiding tradition—and underscored the treachery of some dedicators' unworthy descendants.
It is further noteworthy that no Roman prescript or superscript has been discovered that might have served as an official commentary on the texts. Instead, the monument speaks, as it were, entirely in the words of non-Romans, the exterae gentes , and makes no explicit claims beyond what was directly and ostensibly spontaneously acknowledged by those subject to Rome's power. The recurring themes of the monument are Rome's high moral character (virtus or
), its goodwill (benivolentia or ), the expression of these qualities through the conferral of benefits upon others (beneficium or ), and indeed Rome's activity for their salvation (salus , hence ) and recovery of their freedom (libertas , , or ). The point was emphasized by the location of the monument: adjacent to the Temple of Fides, the guarantor of Rome's relations with other states.[105] The image of the imperium that the monument projected was precisely that of a benevolent protector, a patrocinium potius quam imperium much like that somewhat wistfully recalled by Cicero in the De officiis .[106] Implicitly the monument acknowledges, as do the texts examined earlier quite explicitly, that Asia Minor
was subject to Roman hegemony, that is, the imperium of the Roman people. Like those texts, which proclaimed in Greeks' words their enthusiasm for the Roman hegemonia , this monument signals, likewise from the testimony of Greeks, that this is all to the good of the weaker parties, for whom the Roman people is the source of benefits, security, and freedom.
It should be noted, of course, that this "official version" of the character of Rome's imperium is a construction on which Greeks and Romans collaborated; indeed, in our documents, the message is even now loudest and most direct in the voices of Greek rather than Roman speakers. But Cicero shows how well these sentiments fit into traditional Roman categories of patronage, while Sulla's cover letter cited above, the drafting of senatorial decrees that stressed the language of loyalty and the imperium , and the construction in the focal point of Rome itself of the Capitoline monument of Asian peoples and kings all conspire to demonstrate dearly enough that Greeks were saying what they knew was expected or desired of them.
The First Mithridatic War and its conclusion are an epochal moment in the history of Rome's Eastern imperium . The Romans came very dose to being expelled from the Greek East altogether. Mithridates had badly shaken the tradition according to which the imperium populi Romani could be upheld without committing more than one or two legions east of the Adriatic on a regular basis and might be reasserted against potential challenges on rare occasions by a consular army or diplomatic bluster. For the moment, Sulla had to leave Eastern affairs in considerable disarray; there was little time for a comprehensive settlement. There can be little question here of the imposition of a grand new design upon the Eastern imperium ; Sulla, the Senate, and the various affected communities muddled through a messy process of ad hoc, piecemeal revisions of the previous status quo. And yet the new emphasis on loyalty to the imperium populi Romani stressed in Greek documents, senatorial decrees, and the monument on the Capitol give a clear sense of the changed atmosphere: a novel consciousness of, or frankness about, Roman domination and the duties on both sides implicit in it. In reality Sulla had not managed to reassert fully the Roman imperium in the East. A convincing response to the disaster of 89-87 came only in the next decade, in the form of an unremitting military offensive on a number of fronts as Sulla's successors attempted to revive Roman power in the East and face down all challengers.
In the meantime, however, one crucial change of wide-ranging importance had been at least initiated by Sulla, if the details remained to be
sorted out in the Senate house over the next few years. If arguments presented in this and earlier chapters are sound, the settlement of the First Mithridatic War vastly increased the area that paid revenues to the Roman people, imposing for the first time vectigalia on the mass of the Greek cities of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor and even on a number of Mithridates' onetime allies in central Greece. Magisterial intrusion would naturally increase in step with financial exploitation, as the spread of the harvest of Roman revenues demanded a wider sphere of supervision by proconsuls, who presided over the settlement of tax contracts (pactiones ) between publicani and individual communities and might act to restrain the gatherers' excesses.[107] The increased demands of the Roman state, especially Sulla's harsh fine on the Asian cities, required an infusion of capital ultimately supplied, sometimes at extortionate rates of interest, by an army of Roman financiers and businessmen, who, attracted by the investment opportunities, moved East in far greater numbers than before.[108] In the future, mediation between debtor states and Roman creditors would become an increasingly important part of the duties of officials, especially in Asia Minor; eventually, in 60, a senatorial decree had to be passed barring Roman magistrates from intervening in such affairs involving free cities.[109] The decisions taken by Sulla and by the Senate immediately following the First Mithridatic War, then, not only created something of a Roman bonanza in Asia both for the res publica and individuals but unconsciously set in motion a process that would greatly increase the administrative burden of Roman officials in the Eastern provinces and bring an intrusive Roman presence to a considerably wider area than before. Roman rule, such as it emerges from the pages of Cicero, is largely the product of the First Mithridatic War.