[IX]
Lucius Licinius Lucullus
If great men are those whose action brings about great changes, Lucius Licinius Lucullus was one of the greatest men of his time. His campaign in Asia Minor started an altogether new policy. Hitherto Rome had acquired provinces in an accidental way; there had been no purpose of conquest. In Spain and Africa the influence of Carthage had to be wiped out; in Greece Rome was nominally a protector only, called in to help against outside dangers. In Asia Minor it was more or less the same. As regards Asia Minor no one in Rome was satisfied with the treaty Sulla had made with Mithridates. It was felt to be a disgrace to Rome that the man who had caused the murder of hundreds of thousands of Italians in cold blood was recognized as the ‘friend and ally’ of Rome and left in undisturbed possession. Mithridates had got to be punished. When Lucullus went to the East it was for this purpose. But he did far more. He discovered that these great Asiatic monarchies, with their myriad armies, looked strong but were really weak; they could not maintain themselves, if attacked. He did not merely make Rome safe against their attack; he marched through kingdom after kingdom, conquering and subduing them to Rome. Thus, in fact, if not yet in name, he made Rome an empire.
The work he thus began Lucullus did not complete. The idea was his; it was his hard fighting, the courage with which he overrode instructions and disregarded the Senate’s order to return, which paved the way for conquest. Pompeius, whose slow mind and cautious temper could never have started such a policy, saw from Rome what Lucullus’s fighting was leading up to. He saw the golden prize at the end of his efforts and determined to snatch it from him. In this he succeeded. But the credit or blame of making Rome an imperial power, a power that rules by force over alien races, belongs not to him but to Lucullus. This was not understood at the time. Lucullus, disappointed and embittered, came back to Rome and was known to his contemporaries not as the man who laid the foundations of the empire, but as the giver of the most luxurious and extraordinary banquets ever eaten. The proverb associated with his name—‘Dining with Lucullus’—shows this. His feasts were famous; the rarest foods from every part of the known world were on his table. His gardens too were wonderful, and his house glowed with all the treasures of the distant East. Among the treasures he brought back was one little noticed in his day—the cherry-tree. This soon grew all over Italy, but that Lucullus had brought it was forgotten. Like everything else that he did, it failed to bring him fame.
The family of L. Licinius Lucullus was one of the oldest in Rome and one of those not too numerous ones which maintained not only the pride of ancient race but the idea that good birth carried duties with it. He was poor but excessively proud, and belonged to that small Conservative group from which Rutilius Rufus and Livius Drusus came. His mind was clear and highly educated, cultivated in the full sense. As a soldier he was extremely able. The way in which the ordinary politician made money and bought votes disgusted him. In the main he stood sternly aloof from the scramble for office and wealth.
After Sulla’s death—he had been one of Sulla’s most capable officers—he retired to private life and watched with cold scorn the way in which the affairs of the State were mismanaged both at home and abroad; the long struggle with Sertorius, the rise of Pompeius, by good luck rather than, he thought, by merit. He had strong feelings and a good deal of the ambition that moves in almost every mind that is aware of its own powers, but he detested intrigue and had no aptitude for it. He was unpopular, because of his habit of saying what he thought, both in public and in private, about the corrupt politicians and vulgar scrambling money-makers whom other politicians abused in private but dared not offend in public. He had no party. Until he was fifty he had held no command or office of the first rank.
But when the question of the campaign against Mithridates came up Lucullus felt that he had a claim to it and was prepared, despite his ordinary aloofness, to push that claim through. Nicomedes, the old King of Bithynia, had just died (74) and left his rich territory—a buffer state between the Roman provinces in Asia Minor and Mithridates’ kingdom of Pontus—to the Roman people. This the able and wily King of Pontus was not going to allow. He declared war, made an alliance with Sertorius, and marched into Bithynia. This was a serious menace. When Mithridates invaded Cilicia (73) people remembered the massacre of fifteen years ago and trembled. Pompeius wanted the command, but he was still busy in Spain; in the end Lucullus was appointed.
The difficulties of the campaign were at first overwhelming. Lucullus was not in sole control and his colleagues were refractory. But the defeat of Cotta, the other consul, at last left him a free hand. Many of his captains were dismayed by the reduction of the Roman army. Lucullus remained calm. Mithridates had attacked the port of Cyzicus, far from his own base, with an army so large that to provision it was extremely difficult. Lucullus took up a position from which he could cut off his supplies and so close him in a trap between the town and his own army. With his smaller army Lucullus refused battle, and when Mithridates endeavoured to make his way out by dividing his forces Lucullus attacked the two parts in turn, though it was the dead of winter, and defeated them disastrously. A vast army perished in the snow. Lucullus was able to overrun Bithynia and force Mithridates to retreat into Pontus.
It was now that Lucullus took the step which makes his career profoundly important in the history of Rome. Instead of waiting for instructions from the Home Government—instructions which he knew would probably have ordered his recall and certainly a halt in his operations—he resolved to act boldly on a plan of his own. That plan was no less than the invasion of Mithridates’ kingdom. Nearly all his generals opposed him, but Lucullus’s mind was clear. He burned to wipe out the treaty of Dardanus and had come to the conclusion that Eastern monarchies were not so strong as they looked: that their loose organization could not stand against the disciplined force of Rome. Mithridates himself had something of genius; but Mithridates was old.
The progress of the campaign showed that Lucullus was right. Entering Pontus in the late autumn, he overran the rich country without meeting with any serious opposition; Mithridates’ armies had been scattered at Cyzicus; he had not yet collected fresh ones. Immense plunder—slaves and cattle, gold and silver, ivory and precious stones, rare stuffs and wondrous embroideries—were sent home to Rome. In the following spring when Mithridates did advance with his new army Lucullus defeated it decisively. Cabira was taken and Lucullus spent the winter with the royal palace as his head-quarters, training his army for the work before it. Here the defects of his character came into play. Proud and passionate, Lucullus had an inordinate sense of his own dignity and of the greatness of his own purpose; he forgot that the greatest general is only the leader of other men, on whom his triumphs depend. To Lucullus his soldiers were mere instruments, not human beings; the army a machine. Great generals like Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander and, in his degree, Sertorius, owe their lasting success to the power they have to make each man in the army feel that he is a man, whose devotion matters, on whom in the last resort everything depends. When soldiers feel this, when they feel that they and their general are part of one living thing, they can perform miracles. Lucullus had no such power. He was harsh, tyrannical, and inhuman in his attitude and, overwhelmed by a mass of work, never found time to relax. The sternness of discipline never unbent. He seemed to grudge the soldiers any share in the vast booty sent to Rome. He had no kindly word or look for individuals. It was this growing feeling of bitterness that the discontented officers in his army, and especially his brother-in-law Clodius, who was secretly working for Pompeius against him, used to sow the seeds of mutiny.
Lucullus, absorbed in the mighty design he had conceived, did not realize what was happening, even when after the capture of Amisus his men paid no heed to his orders that the city should be spared, but sacked and looted it. By the autumn all Pontus was in Roman hands. Lucullus, again refusing to await orders from Rome, pushed on into Armenia and attacked Tigranes, with whom Mithridates had taken refuge. This campaign was brilliantly carried out. With his small army, hardly 20,000 in all, Lucullus inflicted a series of crushing defeats on the Armenian forces. Armenia was under his feet. He had shown all the qualities of a great commander: clearness and steadiness of purpose, complete confidence, the boldness and unresting energy of genius. As he rested in winter quarters in South Armenia planning the conquest of Persia and Parthia, he might well compare himself with Alexander.