“And what if some sympathetic Ephesian snatches me up and takes me straight to the temple, and the priests make a great fuss, and a crowd gathers, and there in front of everyone the goddess ‘cures’ me? As soon as I open my mouth…”
“Artemis will have lifted your affliction-but given you a Roman accent!” Kettel laughed heartily, causing various parts of his body to jiggle. “The jests of the gods can be strange indeed!”
“I suppose I’ll deal with the problem of being ‘cured’ when and if it should happen,” I said. “Very well, I now have a name, Agathon, and a city of origin, Alexandria. I have an excuse not to speak-the affliction of muteness. And I have a reason for visiting Ephesus-to worship at the Temple of Artemis, seeking to regain the power of speech. And I have someone to speak for me-my faithful slave and traveling companion, Bethesda.”
She and I looked at each other and smiled. The eunuchs nodded.
Just how wildly impractical-and dangerous-such a scheme would turn out to be I could not then have imagined. It was the sort of harebrained idea that could only have been concocted by a young wanderer with delusions of invincibility and two sexless courtiers who knew a great deal about palace intrigue but very little about the challenges of traveling from one city to another in a time of chaos and confusion. But, having come up with a plan, I was determined to return to Ephesus.
[From the secret diary of Antipater of Sidon:]
This morning, in a cold sweat, I woke from a nightmare-the nightmare, I should say, for I have been afflicted by this nocturnal terror almost every night since I witnessed the horrible end of Manius Aquillius.
I suppose I should finally write down what I saw that day. Perhaps, by recounting the incident, I can rid myself of this curse of revisiting it over and over in my dreams.
Some say it was Manius Aquillius who started the war. Others say it was Mithridates. Historians will no doubt argue the question for centuries to come. I am no historian, but rather a poet, so I will say that it must have been the meddlesome gods who started this war, looking down on us foolish mortals just as they looked down so long ago on the doomed heroes of Greece and Troy. But the men of this age are lesser men than their ancestors, even as the wars they make are bloodier and more far-flung than Achilles or Hector could ever have imagined.
It hardly matters who started the war. The conflict was inevitable. For years the Romans pushed their empire eastward, subduing one region after another, suborning this or that petty king with gold, taking other cities by armed force. Meanwhile, Mithridates ascended to the throne of Pontus, and he, too, began to increase his kingdom by seizing smaller, weaker kingdoms around him.
Rome and their puppet kings came to rule much of Asia, while Mithridates and his puppets ruled the rest. On the seas, Roman galleys patrolled the Aegean and its countless islands, while the ships of Mithridates dominated the vast Euxine Sea. Like crowded men knocking shoulders, one side had to give way, or else the two must come to blows.
The hostilities began with a puppet war. The Roman general Manius Aquillius pressured a Roman ally, King Nicomedes of Bithynia, to make war on some neighboring port cities ruled by Mithridates. Nicomedes was so deeply in debt to Rome that he could hardly refuse; when he expressed his fear that Mithridates might retaliate, Manius Aquillius assured him that Roman arms would protect Bithynia.
What was Manius Aquillius thinking? Did he imagine that Mithridates would be so intimidated by the prospect of war with Rome that the king would allow his cities to be raped without responding, and become yet another Roman puppet? Or was Aquillius so shortsighted and so greedy for the spoils from those raids that he prodded Nicomedes on with no thought for the consequences? Or-and this is what I think-did Aquillius deliberately hope to provoke a war with Mithridates, in the expectation that Roman arms could subdue Pontus in short order so that he, Manius Aquillius, could return to Rome to celebrate a triumph as conqueror of a new province, riding in a golden chariot to the accolades of the Roman mob while the vanquished Mithridates trudged behind him in chains?
If such was the plan of Aquillius, he was in for a rude surprise.
After Nicomedes attacked the coastal cities, Mithridates struck back, decisively and with far greater force than Aquillius expected. The theater of the war rapidly expanded. In battle after battle, the Romans and their allies were routed. While the panicked Roman generals fled, Mithridates advanced from city to city, at each stop gaining more wealth and prestige, and adding fighting men as well, as thousands of Greek-speaking soldiers deserted the Roman armies.
In the liberated cities, Roman bankers and merchants who once had ruled the roost were stripped of their property and thrown out of their elegant houses. Some of the most hated Romans were hunted down and killed by angry mobs. Other Romans went into hiding, or cowered inside their barricaded homes. Those natives who had been Roman sympathizers were also exposed to the wrath of the Rome-haters. Some followed the retreating Roman armies into exile. Some committed suicide in the hope that their families would be spared from retribution.
Those were joyous days for the Greek-speakers of the world. At last, someone was standing up to the Romans-and not just standing up to them, but pushing them back and putting them in their place. The name of Mithridates, long spoken in whispers, was now shouted in acclamation. Our savior had come at last, and he was unstoppable. Roman rule in Asia had abruptly come to an end.
Having lost his kingdom, the Roman puppet Nicomedes fled by ship to Rome. Gaius Cassius, governor of the Roman province of Asia, abandoned his capitol at Pergamon and made a headlong rush for the island of Rhodes, which remains allied with Rome. One of the Roman generals, Quintus Oppius, took refuge in the city of Laodicea, but the Laodiceans promptly expelled his ragged, half-starved army and handed Oppius over to Mithridates.
But what of Manius Aquillius, who started all this trouble by prodding Nicomedes into a puppet war?
Even before this man appeared on the scene, the name Aquillius was hated by the Greeks. In the previous generation the father of Aquillius was a provincial governor notorious for the harshness of his rule, and in particular for his suppression of the so-called “Citizens of the Sun,” a group of Greek rebels who went so far as to preach the abolition of slavery. Tired of besieging their strongholds, the elder Aquillius poisoned their water supplies, causing the deaths of an untold number of women and children along with the men on the barricades. After stamping out all resistance, the elder Aquillius ruthlessly taxed his subjects. Roman bankers defrauded the natives and confiscated family estates. Roman soldiers raped virgin daughters. When the natives sued for redress, the elder Aquillius ordered them to be fined and beaten and thrown into the street. Romans such as this sowed the seeds of further resistance, and drove a man like myself to become a spy.
To be sure, on his return to Rome, the elder Aquillius was accused of maladministration by a fellow Roman senator. Aquillius was even made to stand trial, but he avoided conviction by bribing the judges. So much for Roman justice.
When Manius Aquillius, the son of Aquillius, was posted to command a Roman army, his very appearance on the scene seemed a provocation, a deliberate snub by the Roman Senate against those who had suffered for so many years under Roman rule. Even before Aquillius began his manipulation of Nicomedes and set in train the machinations that would lead to his own destruction, the Greek-speakers of Asia were ready to hate him.