Pompey's Settlement in Bithynia and Pontus
A detailed narrative of Pompey's campaigns in Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Syria, and Palestine can be found elsewhere;[130] we shall survey them only in the most cursory manner. Mithridates was quickly routed in battle once again by the new Roman commander in 66. Barred by Tigranes himself from taking refuge with him again, Mithridates fled to Colchis on the southeast shore of the Black Sea, one of the last remnants of his empire, presumably in an attempt to rally his fortunes by retaking possession of the Bosporan kingdom in the Crimea, now held by his son Machares, who had come to terms with Lucullus. Pompey, late in 66, left Mithridates to his desperate flight round the Black Sea and invaded Armenia, whose king, already harassed by the Parthian Phraates at Pompey's instigation, quickly came to terms. Throwing himself at Pompey's feet, Tigranes won recognition as king but was stripped of his conquests of the last thirty years, which were now at Rome's disposal as conquered territory, and required
to pay an indemnity of 6,000 talents.[131] Pompey followed up this coup with a march into the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian, which perhaps combined the objectives of pursuing Mithridates and driving him from his last possession of Colchis and of asserting Roman supremacy over former Armenian vassals and dependents in the area, which bordered land relinquished by Tigranes.[132] But Pompey turned back without making any attempt to pursue Mithridates to the Crimea and founded a city in part from his wounded and discharged veterans in Armenia Minor. Pompey laid claim to victory over Mithridates with its very name: Nicopolis.[133] Mithridates, however, remained beyond Pompey's grasp: he had continued around the Black Sea, expelled Machares, and soon reasserted control of the Crimean Bosporus.[134] Possibly it was concern over the direction of Mithridates' flight that led the Senate in 66 to decree Macedonia once again a consular province for 65, and again in 64 for 63.[135] But the need to assert Roman control over Tigranes' former possessions gave Pompey the excuse he needed to avoid the dilemma of being forced either to return home or to pursue Mithridates.
In 65 and 64 Pompey's legates and quaestor had entered Syria and Mesopotamia to stake the Roman claim to Tigranes' former southern possessions. Late in 64 Pompey himself marched into Syria, opening a new epoch in the history of Rome's Eastern expansion. His activities in Syria and Palestine in 64-63—his refusal to restore the Seleucid Antiochus XIII to the kingdom from which he had been expelled by Tigranes, in effect abolishing the moribund Seleucid monarchy, and his embroilment in the dispute between Parthia and Armenia over Gordyene and in the struggles
of the Maccabean princes—are outside the bounds of this study.[136] Finally, as the imperator marched on Jerusalem in 63, the news came of Mithridates' suicide. Saved from the embarrassment of his main foe remaining at large, Pompey could now prepare to return home. Late in 63 he reappeared in Pontus to spend the winter at Amisus, where Pharnaces, who had finally betrayed his father, Mithridates, in the Crimea, sent him the old king's body, hostages, gifts, and the murderers of M'. Aquillius, in return for which Pompey recognized his kingship over the Crimean Bosporus and later enrolled him as a "friend and ally of the Roman people."[137] The Senate, informed by Pompey of the death of the king and the conclusion of the wars, immediately decreed a public thanksgiving of ten days, twice that given Marius for his victory over the Germans (Cic. Prov. cons . 27). The long struggle with the seemingly irrepressible king of Pontus was over.
Pompey spent the winter of 63-62 settling conditions in Pontus and Bithynia. It is unclear how much remained for Pompey to do in Bithynia. Whatever arrangements Iuncus had made in 74-73 were likely swept away with the loss of Bithynia in the following spring and the years of warfare that followed. Bithynia was, of course, entirely in Roman hands by 71, but it is noteworthy that Cicero, in his speech for the Manilian law, lays no stress whatever on possible revenues from Bithynia and notes only its ravaged state in 66 (Leg. Man . 5). We know that Pompey invalidated Lucullus's arrangements in general,[138] and that he imposed certain revisions, to be considered below, of the constitutions of the cities of the former kingdom of Bithynia. It seems, therefore, that the settlement of Bithynia was left for Pompey to undertake perhaps already in the latter part of 65 and the subsequent winter before his intervention in Syria. By 63—before Pompey's Eastern arrangements had been ratified—the publicani had certainly returned to Bithynia and were collecting rents from the former royal lands, now public land of the Roman people.[139]
The chief business, then, that confronted Pompey at Amisus was to settle the condition of the huge expanse of territory he had himself seized from Mithridates, Tigranes, and the hapless Seleucid. Native Icings and chiefs flocked to him as Pompey rewarded loyal allies and friends with a
share of the spoils.[140] From the former possessions of Mithridates, Paphlagonia was given to Attalus, Colchis to Aristarchus, and the priestly domain of Comana to Archelaus, son of the former Pontic general who had deserted to Murena after the first war with Mithridates. Pharnaces, Mithridates' son, like Tigranes, formally relinquished his kingdom of Crimean Bosporus and received it back from Pompey along with the title "friend and ally of the Roman people." Pompey, however, "freed" the city of Phanagorea, removing it from Pharnaces' dominion—an instructive example of how even now Roman conferral of the status of "free city" did not necessarily imply a privileged position in relation to Rome but titular freedom from any outside control.[141] From Tigranes' former possessions in Asia Minor, the wretched Ariobarzanes, now restored to his kingdom in Cappadocia, received a portion; Armenia Minor was given to some native dynast, perhaps Deiotarus of Galatia; Sophene was granted first to Tigranes' son, and then, when he refused to hand over its treasury to Pompey, given to Tigranes himself; and Tarcondimotus, a native chieftain in Cilicia, was given a domain between Trachea and Pedias.[142] Of Tigranes' Syrian and Mesopotamian possessions, and the former Seleucid territory, Pompey also made certain gifts to native kings and dynasts, while Hyrcanus was instated as high priest of Judaea only upon regular payment of tribute to Rome.[143] It has been argued that many of the kings to whom Pompey gave rewards of territory were similarly made subject to tribute. This hypothesis seems to rest merely on the parallel of Judaea and the magnitude of additional revenues that Pompey boasted in his triumph to have added.[144] It is perhaps unwise to accept the literal truth of Pompey's vaunt. Further, Judaea may well have been a special case: Pompey may have simply claimed for Rome, as heir to the Seleucid possessions, the
obligations once due to that dynasty. There seems insufficient reason therefore to assume that the other territories handed over to loyal local dynasts in the usual fashion were also made subject to Roman tribute. Enough revenues were to come in from the new conquests to make such a novelty unnecessary. Pompey even gave at least one major city within the former area of Roman control the reward of "freedom" from Roman tribute and magisterial interference.[145] But what was truly novel about Pompey's settlement is not the extent to which the new conquests were left in the hands of native powers—a time-honored practice, especially in Asia Minor[146] —but how much he had expanded Rome's commitments and revenues in the East. In addition to the recent acquisition of Bithynia, Pompey made much of Pontus and Syria-Palestine, as well as eastern Cilicia (Trachea and Pedias), subject to Roman tribute and supervision.
As usual the information we possess about Pompey's leges in the new provinces is highly incomplete,[147] dependent as we are on chance citations in the sources. In Cilicia, Pompey may have done little more than settle former pirates in numerous "cities" and extend arrangements for the collection of Roman revenues to Trachea and Pedias, now formally wrested from the Armenian king. Our sources tell us only that Pompey brought Cilicia fully under Roman power.[148] What remained of the Pontic kingdom after the awards to Roman allies was joined to the former kingdom of Bithynia to form one province (Strabo 12.3.1, C541). We hear of only two cities freed from Roman tribute and recognized as autonomous entities: Sinope and Amisus, former residences of the kings, both freed by Lucullus in an act evidently upheld by Pompey.[149] The formerly free and allied city of Heraclea Pontica had now lost that privilege by its adherence to the cause of Mithridates.[150]
The most remarkable feature of Pompey's settlement of Pontus was his division of the former kingdom into eleven communities (
),[151] for the most part new creations which replaced the old royal division into .[152] The new "cities" were at the same time given a constitutional form that still served as their basis in the second century A.D. , when we hear about some of the provisions of the lex Pompeia in the correspondence of the younger Pliny with Trajan. Pliny cites it for a minimum age limit of thirty for the holding of magistracies and sitting in the council, alludes to its provisions for a Western manner of enrolling the councils, complete with censors and the co-optation of ex-magistrates, and refers to a ban on dual citizenship between cities in the province.[153] Pompey parcelled out substantial portions, if not all, of Mithridates' royal lands to the new cities, contrary to assumptions prevalent in Rome in 63.[154] Under Pompey's arrangements, the publicani evidently made contracts with the individual cities for the amount of tribute due, the collection of which was left to the communities themselves; thus the notorious Roman tax gatherers were kept at one remove from the native inhabitants.[155] Although the evidence is far from compelling, it seems most probable that the sale of the tax contracts for Bithynia and Pontus, as for Asia, was to take place in Rome.[156]
The foundation of cities in the East by a Roman commander was not entirely without precedent. Already in 83-82 we hear of the foundation by L. Murena of a city in Cappadocia, called after himself Licinea, to guard against Mithridates' raids—an act remarkably reminiscent of Hellenistic monarchy.[157] But nothing more is heard of this place, which was presum-
ably stillborn in the decades of war that followed. But Pompey claimed to have founded, in addition to eight cities of "Cappadocians"—that is, in Pontus and Cappadocia—various colonies (ten?) of Cilicians, as well as others in Coele-Syria and Palestine.[158] Like Murena, Pompey did not hesitate to name the new communities after himself: in Pontus, Eupatoria, Mithridates' own unfinished project commemorating himself, appropriately became Magnopolis, and Pompeiopolis and Megalopolis also appear. In contrast to the other cities, which were settled by local inhabitants, Nicopolis in Armenia Minor, a foundation that commemorated victory over Mithridates in the battle of 66, was peopled in part by Pompey's wounded and discharged veterans, and thus became the first foundation of Roman citizens in the East.[159]
Pompey's city-foundations were motivated by more than self-glorification, however, or, as has been sometimes fashionable to suggest, imitation of Alexander.[160] The numerous colonies of Cilicians were the settlements of ex-pirates already noted above, most of them of course in Cilicia itself—among these a resettlement of Soli which received the name Pompeiopolis—but also around the Mediterranean in Achaea, Calabria, and Cyrenaica.[161] In Pontus Pompey's establishment of the political forms characteristic of the polis has been explained as an answer to the novel problem of imposing Roman administration in a land formerly organized along tribal and quasi-feudal lines.[162] This is plausible and might be elab-
orated somewhat. The Romans had long faced such a situation in Spain; and the Spanish precedent may help explain the Western flavor of the new constitutions, for Pompey had recently spent six years there fighting Sertorius and his Spanish allies.[163] Above all, we should note that the new cities played a central, intermediary role in the collection of revenues, as we have just seen. It would have been an exceedingly costly and inefficient business for the publicani to gather the taxes of the Roman people from the myriad of local chiefs and tribal communities that existed before; but by dividing Pontus into eleven poleis, Pompey had provided a structure that could itself assume much of the burden of the collection of revenues. But the likely priority of fiscal considerations in the administrative restructuring of Pontus ought not to obscure the radicalism of Pompey's intervention.
Equally remarkably, Pompey's constitutional arrangements for the new "cities" of Pontus were made operative in Bithynia as well,[164] where, unlike Pontus, urban life was well established and highly developed. We need not assume that by extending the lex Pompeia to Bithynia as well the constitutions of the Bithynian cities were revised from their foundations, but at the very least the law provided for a new kind of council unfamiliar to the East, which was enrolled from ex-magistrates and subject to the scrutiny of "censors" (
) on the Roman model.[165] A property qualification for councillors is not explicitly attested but would hardly be a surprise in view of the precedents provided by Flamininus in Thessaly and Mummius in Achaea.[166] That Pompey, in establishing a new political structure in Pontus, adopted some familiar features from the Roman experience is perhaps no surprise, but his readiness to alter the constitutions of the Bithynian cities in ways that must be considered fundamental is a novelty in the history of Roman intervention in the East and calls for an explanation.[167] Perhaps the answer is to be found in the apparent hostility of the Bithynian cities to Rome in 73 attested by Plutarch (Luc . 7.5). A council that was effectively insulated by its permanence from changes of the popular will, and accountable not to the public but to censors, would be more
easily amenable to the demands of the ruling power, and thus the local elites could be encouraged to act as virtual allies of the Roman authorities—often regarded, without good evidence, as a constant in Roman policy toward Eastern communities already from the second century.[168] The era subsequent to the First Mithridetic War is rich in novelties. Pompey's reorganization of Pontus, and his regulation of the constitutions of Pontus and Bithynia, are striking evidence of the new readiness of the Romans to resort to sweeping administrative restructuring in order to establish more securely not only their power but their capacity to draw the revenues that maintained it.
Pompey returned in the spring of 62 to Italy, making impressive stopovers at Mytilene, Ephesus, Rhodes, and Athens.[169] An inscription from Mytilene which dates to 63 or 62 honors Pompey for "having put an end by land and sea to the wars besetting the world."[170] In November of 63 Cicero spoke of the termination of all foreign wars by means of the prowess of one man and repeatedly echoed the theme in subsequent years; the bold claim was even made in the preamble to a Roman law drafted by A. Gabinius in his consulship—the man who had been responsible for conferral of the piracy command on Pompey.[171] After twenty-seven years of nearly constant warfare and chronic instability in Eastern lands and seas, Greece and Asia Minor were again able to enjoy relative peace, although preparations for C. Antonius Hybrida's ill-starred campaign against the Dardani in this very year were likely an unpleasant burden on the allies of the Greek mainland and Macedonia.[172] The augmentation of the imperium was duly celebrated in Rome. Cicero was inspired in 63 to put a new twist on
an old theme—Pompey had made the imperium coterminous with the orbis terrarum —and liked the formulation so much that he repeated it, with variations, numerous times in subsequent years.[173] For his part, Pompey advertised the extent of his conquests on placards carried in his triumph of 28-29 September 61, and on a dedicatory inscription on his temple of Minerva, which, according to Pliny's citation, asserted that Pompey had conquered an expanse from Lake Maeotis to the Red Sea.[174] He boasted that Asia, the most distant of the provinces when he had taken charge of it, was now surrounded by others.[175] The crisis that had begun with Mithridates' invasion in 89 was declared to be past; the prestige of the imperium populi Romani was at last restored, indeed vastly augmented and extended into exotic lands previously almost unheard-of.
The principle of maintaining the imperium against all challengers was an old one. In the past it had had little to do with territorial occupation, administration, or financial exploitation. But the long confrontation with Mithridates, which required a huge commitment of troops in the East over an extended period of time,[176] had brought a permanent change. For Pompey, the increase of Roman revenues was very much at issue. After his Spanish victories, the land grants voted his soldiers could not be carried out because of the weakness of state finances.[177] It is clear that the new revenues and Eastern booty gave a boost to the resumption of efforts toward land distribution from 63, and it is surely plausible to suppose that the increase in the urban grain subsidy secured by M. Porcius Cato in 62
was palatable to fiscal conservatives only in view of the fantastic sums anticipated from the East.[178] Pompey was of course alert to all of this. Plutarch tells us that, in addition to the placards indicating the wide extent of Pompey's conquests and the cities and ships taken, others contained inscriptions which indicated that
whereas the public revenues from taxes had been 50 million drachmas, they were receiving from what Pompey had conquered for the city 85 million; and that 2,000 talents in coin and gold and silver objects were being deposited in the public treasury, without counting what had been given to the soldiers, of which the smallest portion had been 1,500 drachmas.[179]
With all due allowance for self-interested exaggeration, Pompey's claim to have added 85 million denarii to the annual revenues of the state and to have nearly tripled its previous income makes clear the extraordinary nature of the increase on any accounting.[180] Such explicit reference to nova vectigalia , put on a par with the more traditional elements of a triumphal catalog of conquest, is striking. Cicero, speaking for the Manilian law, had chosen to stress the importance of securing the Asian revenues; Pompey,
returning from the campaign authorized by that very law, boasts of having multiplied the vectigalia populi Romani . The emphasis on exploitation of the imperium is unprecedented in our evidence.
In the roughly two decades after Sulla's departure from the East a combination of factors, mostly already present to some degree, conspired to transform decisively the Eastern imperium . Fundamental were the massive offensives in the Balkans and northern Asia Minor and the more sporadic operations against the pirates conducted by the Sullani in the 70s, a sequence of simultaneous, large-scale campaigns unparalleled in the history of Roman intervention in the East. Successes against the Thraco-Illyrian tribes and Mithridates were not matched by the efforts against the pirates, but Roman supremacy, the imperium in the old, restricted sense, was for the most part not only restored out of the shambles left by the First Mithridatic War but considerably enhanced. But that conflict also had forcefully brought home a new lesson: that the survival of the imperium itself and the material interests of many Roman citizens were directly bound up with the maintenance and indeed expansion of revenues from the East, particularly those from Asia Minor. Already in 88 enough private Roman capital was invested in Asia that its loss caused a collapse of credit in Rome, with unhappy consequences for citizens of all classes.[181] The loss to the state treasury of Asian revenues during the anarchy of the 80s must have been acutely felt as well. Sulla's great extension of tributary status in Asia Minor and Greece at the very time when fiscal demands imposed by extensive military commitments on various fronts soared made the Eastern revenues indisputably the foundation not only of the imperium but also of the amenities (commoda ) enjoyed by the Roman people. With the revival of the tribunate in 70, this link between exploitation of the Eastern imperium and the people's commoda became the linchpin of imperial policy, leading under Pompey first to a belated but decisive response to the plague of piracy and then to the greatest single accretion of territory subject to Roman tribute and the commands of Roman magistrates yet seen in the history of the imperium populi Romani .