Except that Mithridates himself, unyielding still in his defiance, had managed to slip through Lucullus’ fingers. A man with such an instinct for self-preservation that he had conditioned his body to tolerate poison was never going to accept defeat lightly. Instead, dodging every Roman attempt to capture him, he crossed the mountains to neighbouring Armenia, where he threw himself on the mercy of its powerful king, Tigranes. Lucullus promptly dispatched Appius to demand Mithridates’ surrender. This was the first official mission that Rome had sent to Armenia, a kingdom that had rarely disturbed the Republic’s calculations before, for it had always been remote from Rome’s sphere of influence, and its rise to prominence had been only a recent phenomenon. In little more than a decade Tigranes had established himself as the dominant power in what is now Iraq, adopting the grandiloquent title of the ‘King of Kings’ and all the gorgeous ritual of an Oriental court. Wherever he rode he was attended by four client kings, puffing as they ran to keep pace with his horse. Whenever he sat the same kings stood waiting beside his throne, ready to hop like slaves to their master’s bidding. Naturally, none of this flummery cut the slightest ice with Appius. When he met Tigranes he treated the King of Kings as the Claudii always treated everyone – with supercilious disdain. Tigranes, not used to being sneered at by anyone, still less by foreigners in their early twenties, was outraged. He refused to hand over Mithridates. The diplomatic chill further intensified when Appius, in defiance of all international niceties, turned his nose up at the gifts that Tigranes offered him and contemptuously accepted only a single cup.
So it was that Lucullus, without any official authorisation, found himself at war with a country of which few back in Rome had even heard. Despite the lateness of the season he acted with his customary decisiveness. Braving the floods of the Euphrates, he struck eastwards. His target was Tigranocerta, a city that the Armenian king had not only lovingly built from scratch, but honoured with his own royal name. At the news that his showpiece capital was under siege, Tigranes came storming to its relief. This was exactly what Lucullus had been banking on, despite the fact that he was now further from Rome than any Roman general in history, and that his legions were, as usual, vastly outnumbered. Tigranes himself, when he saw the pitiable size of the force opposed to him, joked that the Romans ‘were too many to be an embassy, and too few to be an army’.2 The royal quip provoked much sycophantic mirth, but the smile was soon to be wiped from Tigranes’ face. In one of the most stunning victories in the annals of the Republic, Lucullus not only annihilated the Armenian army, but stormed Tigranocerta and literally took it to pieces. With their customary brutal efficiency, the Romans stripped the city bare, Lucullus taking the royal treasures, his men everything else. Then the city was levelled. Tigranes, a fugitive within his own kingdom, was powerless to intercede. Of the splendid monuments and palaces that the King of Kings had so recently erected to his glory barely a brick was left.
But the destruction – and the profit – were not as total as they might have been. By the accepted rules of war, Lucullus would have been perfectly justified in enslaving the defeated population. Instead he set them free. Most had been forcibly transported to Tigranocerta, and by sending them back to their homes Lucullus aimed to foster separatist movements across Tigranes’ kingdom. It was a policy that combined shrewdness and humanity in equal measure. No Roman ever questioned that the defeated should pay for the privilege of being conquered, but Lucullus combined an eye for plunder with a strong sense of noblesse oblige. He certainly did not regard himself as an agent of slave-dealers or publicani, breeds for whom he had nothing but aristocratic contempt. Already, before setting out on the war against Tigranes, he had moved to deal with the blood-sucking that had disfigured Asia for so long. Interest rates had been slashed. The more scandalous abuses of the moneylenders had been banned. Regulation had been rigorously imposed. As a result, the indemnities that had left the Greek cities of Asia mortgaged to the hilt had at last begun to be paid off. Within a bare four years they would all be cleared.
The ancient ideals of the aristocracy had always provided the Republic’s empire with its conscience, but in the figure of Lucullus the traditional paternalism of a senator combined with a radical new interpretation of Rome’s globalising mission. His passion for Greek culture enabled him to see clearly that Roman rule had no long-term future in the East unless the Greeks were given at least a stake in it. The clemency shown to the population of Tigranocerta had reflected a consistent policy. In Pontus Lucullus had not only spared Greek cities that held out against him, but paid for their restoration once they had been stormed. By refraining from their obliteration, he invested in their future and the empire’s own security and long-term health.
Naturally, this did nothing to quieten the howls of indignation back in Rome. Debt relief for provincials was not a popular policy with big business. For as long as his provincial record remained one of brilliant success, Lucullus was unassailable, but the storming of Tigranocerta marked the high point of his career, and from that moment on he became ever more vulnerable to attacks on his command. Breathtaking though his victory over Tigranes had been, he had failed in his primary objective: Mithridates remained on the loose. Throughout the following year of 68 BC, Lucullus found himself on a wild-goose chase through the badlands of Armenia, harried by an enemy that now knew better than to meet him face to face. Increasingly, his triumphs seemed to be melting in his grasp. Back in Rome the financial lobby no longer had any qualms about unleashing their tame politicians on him. Various tribunes began to strip Lucullus of his provinces one by one, snapping at him like wolves on the trail of a wounded beast. In Pontus the irrepressible Mithridates popped up with yet another army and won a series of quick victories over the Roman garrisons. Meanwhile, Lucullus himself was bogged down far away from the field of these disasters, in southern Armenia, vainly attempting to bring the war against Tigranes to a satisfactory close. The strategically important city of Nisibis was captured, and Lucullus prepared to hunker down there for the winter. But the gravest threat to his position no longer came from Tigranes. Instead, as he was soon to discover, it would emerge from within his own camp.
During that winter of 68 Lucullus was surrounded by soldiers who had been with him for six years. Subject to merciless discipline, paid the barest minimum required to keep them alive, they had been marched across mountains and over deserts, zigzagging backwards and forwards, for over a thousand miles. To many of them – and some had been serving in the East for almost two decades – home must have seemed the haziest of memories. Yet all dreamed of returning there. It was why they fought: not merely to test themselves, in the approved Roman manner, against the savagery of the enemy and the fear of a violent death, but to reclaim a status that poverty had caused them to lose. The regard of his fellow citizens was as much of an obsession for the outcast as it was for the rich. Only war enabled him to demonstrate what even the most snobbish acknowledged, that ‘there is no condition so base that it cannot be touched by the sweetness of glory’.3 And – of course – of loot.