Helmet and spear

by Alfred John Church

Sertorius won considerable distinction as a soldier in the campaigns against the Cimbri and Teutones. When the Consul Cæpio was defeated he narrowly escaped with his life, swimming across the Rhone in full armour; he fought at Aquæ Sextiæ, having done good service by entering the camp of the Teutones as a spy. When the Civil War broke out he declared for the democratic party. After various changes of fortune the aristocrats were victorious, and then Sertorius found himself in a most difficult position. The democratic leaders had given him a command in Spain, as much to get rid of him, for he was too honourable to suit them, as for any other reason. By degrees he drifted into the position of an enemy. He opposed the march of a Consular army sent across the Pyrenees by the Roman government, crossed to Africa when he could no longer remain in Spain, and came back again to take command of the Lusitanians when this tribe rebelled against Rome. Here he was joined by other adherents of the democratic party, the most important of whom was a certain Perpenna, who brought with him a considerable force, and became his second-in-command. All this time, though waging war with Roman consuls and proconsuls, he claimed to be the Roman governor of Spain, establishing, for instance, a Senate into which no one but Roman citizens were admitted. In 77 B.C. Pompey, who was already famous as a soldier—he had enjoyed the honour of a triumph at the age of twenty-five—was sent into Spain. But Pompey found his task more than he could perform. He won, it is true, victories over Sertorius' lieutenants, but he could not claim any decided success over the great man himself. In a great battle fought on the banks of the Sucro he was routed with the loss of six thousand men. Nor during the three years that followed did he make much way. What really happened during this time it is not easy to say. By some accounts Sertorius became self-indulgent and arbitrary; according to others, his Roman colleagues in command, many of them of better birth than their superior, were jealous of him. What is certain is that it was by a Roman hand that he fell. In 72 B.C. he was assassinated by the orders of Perpenna. Perpenna was wholly unequal to the position which he hoped to attain by the death of his chief. He was defeated in the first battle which he fought with the Roman armies, and was taken prisoner. To save his life he offered to put into Pompey's hands the private letters of Sertorius. Many of them had been sent from Rome, and would probably have compromised various persons of distinction. Pompey ordered the letters to be burnt and Perpenna to be executed.

One Spanish people, the Cantabri, represented by the modern Basques, still retained their independence. They were not finally subdued till fifty years after the death of Sertorius, and even then they had to be watched and kept in order. Spain, however, as a whole became the most thoroughly Italian in manners and speech of all the provinces of Rome.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] Æmilius Paullus. This son had been adopted into the Fabian family.

[36] Possibly in recollection of the Royal Companions in the army of Alexander the Great, vide p. 130.

V

ACROSS EUPHRATES

It would be impossible to pass over without notice one of the most formidable enemies that Rome ever encountered—Mithradates, King of Pontus. Mithradates was, indeed, hardly to be called a barbarian. He had a taste for art and letters, had a museum of Greek and Persian antiquities, and played the part of a generous patron to poets and philosophers. But he was a barbarian at heart, savage and cruel in his dealings with his kinsfolk and his servants, and with no conception of enlightened rule. Rome, however oppressive and short-sighted her individual citizens might be, was an agent of civilisation, and her final triumph over the King of Pontus, the ablest, it may be said, of the Eastern potentates with whom she came into connection, was for the general good of mankind.

Mithradates came to the throne of Pontus in early youth. He cherished from the first ambitious schemes of extending his dominions. At first his efforts were directed against his neighbours on the north and east; when he attempted to extend his frontiers westward he naturally came into collision with the Romans. It is needless to go into details; it will suffice to say that war was declared in B.C. 89. The time suited Mithradates very well, for it found Rome in a very helpless condition. What is called the Social War, i.e., the revolt of the Italian allies against Rome, was still in progress, and there was positively no army available to meet the huge host, nearly 300,000 in all, which the King brought into the field. All that the Roman officers in Lesser Asia could do was to shut themselves up in such fortified towns as they could hope to hold against the King. Mithradates now gave orders for an act which was as foolish as it was wicked. He was at Ephesus—the fact shows how little remained to Rome—when he directed that all Italians sojourning in Lesser Asia should be put to death. Had he said "Romans," not "Italians," he might have secured the combination with himself of the Italian adversaries of Rome. As it was he hopelessly alienated them.

Nor did he make himself better liked by his new subjects in Asia. They found that in exchanging masters they had lost much more than they had gained. The Romans were often oppressive, but they had at least some kind of system, and were, in theory at least, subject to law; the King was a capricious tyrant, whose whims, often as cruel as they were strange, had to be instantaneously humoured under pain of death or torture. The end was that Mithradates was beaten everywhere. An army which he had sent into Greece was destroyed. His arms were equally unsuccessful in Asia. An attempt to make common cause with Sulla's political opponents—some of the democratic leaders were actually in arms—came to nothing. Finally, in 84 peace was made. The King had to give up all his conquests, to surrender for punishments the men who had taken a leading part in the massacre, and to pay a war indemnity of 20,000 talents.[37]