ABSTRACT
When Sulla and Marius began their tussle over the Mithridatic command neither could have foreseen that the victor of that struggle was not to earn, as they imagined, the opportunity to garner immense piles of Asian loot and win an easy triumph, but rather was to take on the command of a great and difficult war against a formidable and determined opponent. Mithridates had yielded so easily in the past that the Romans found it difficult to take him altogether seriously; when they fully awoke to their peril, Asia was already lost and the king’s armies were in Greece. Marius, indeed, thought so little of the king that he seems to have been partly responsible for engineering this war in pursuit of his own ambition of winning easy glory in the East. The new quarrel with the king had begun in 91. In that year Mithridates, after chasing his one-time ally Nicomedes IV out of Bithynia and his old opponent Ariobarzanes – yet again! – out of Cappadocia, established his own puppet-princes in these kingdoms. Although preoccupied with the Social War, the Senate, in the next year, sent out an embassy to order Mithridates to withdraw from the disputed territory. As in the past, Mithridates meekly obeyed. However, two of the ambassadors, M’. Aquillius and T. Manlius Mancinus, were old friends of Marius and they now revealed their true intent. This was nothing more than a determination to provoke a war so that Marius might be given a command against Mithridates. The pair, therefore prevailed upon Nicomedes, who was heavily in debt to the Romans, to invade Pontus.
