The Grass Crown Read online

  At first it had seemed as if Pontus would retain the title Friend and Ally of the Roman People, earned by the fourth King Mithridates when he assisted the second Attalus of Pergamum in his war against King Prusias of Bithynia. The fifth Mithridates had continued in this alliance with Rome for some time, sending help against Carthage in the third of Rome's Punic wars, and against the successors of the third King Attalus of Pergamum after his will had revealed that he had left his entire kingdom to Rome. But then the fifth Mithridates had acquired Phrygia by paying the Roman proconsul in Asia Minor, Manius Aquillius, a sum of gold into his own purse; the title Friend and Ally had been withdrawn and enmity between Rome and Pontus had persisted ever since, cunningly fostered by King Nicomedes of Bithynia—and by anti-Aquillian senators in Rome.

  Roman and Bithynian enmity or no, the fifth Mithridates had continued his expansionist policies, drawing Galatia into his net, and then succeeding in getting himself named heir to most of Paphlagonia. But his sister-wife didn't like the fifth King Mithridates; she had conceived a desire to rule Pontus on her own behalf. When young Mithridates Eupator was nine years old—the court was at Amaseia at the time—Queen Laodice murdered the husband who was also her brother, and put Mithridates Chrestos, aged eleven, on the throne. She, of course, was regent. In return for a guarantee from Bithynia that the borders of Pontus itself would not be breached, the Queen relinquished the claims of Pontus to Paphlagonia, and liberated Galatia.

  Not yet ten years old, young Mithridates Eupator fled from Amaseia scant weeks after his mother's coup, convinced that he too would be murdered; for, unlike his slow and biddable brother Chrestos, he reminded his mother of her husband, and she had begun to say so with increasing frequency. Completely alone, the boy fled not to Rome or some neighboring court but into the eastern Pontic mountains, where he made no secret of his identity to the local inhabitants, only begging them to keep his secret. Awed and flattered, predisposed to love a member of the royal house who would choose exile among them, the local people protected Mithridates fanatically. Moving from village to village, the young prince came to know his country as no other scion of the royal house ever had, and penetrated deeply into parts of it where civilization had slowed, or stopped, or never started. In the summers he roamed utterly free, hunting bear and lion to win a reputation for daring among his ignorant subjects, knowing that the bounty of the Pontic forests would yield him food—cherries and hazelnuts, apricots and succulent vegetables, deer and rabbits.

  In some ways his life was never again to yield to him so much simple satisfaction—nor any subjects to yield him so much simple adoration—as during the seven years Mithridates Eupator hid in the mountains of eastern Pontus. Slipping silently beneath the eaves of forests brilliant with the pink and lilac of rhododendron, the pendulous cream of acacia, never it seemed without the roar of tumbling white water in his ears, he grew from boy into young man. His first women were the girls of tiny and primitive villages; his first lion a maned beast of huge proportions that he killed, a reincarnation of Herakles, with a club; his first bear a creature far taller than he was.

  The Mithridatidae were big people, their origins Germano-Celt from Thrace, but this was admixed with a little Persian blood from the court (if not the loins) of King Darius, and through the two hundred and fifty years the Mithridatidae had ruled Pontus, they had occasionally married into the Syrian Seleucid dynasty, another Germano-Thracian royal house, descended as it was from Alexander the Great's Macedonian general Seleucus. An occasional throwback to the Persian strain provided someone slight and smooth and creamy-dark, but Mithridates Eupator was a true Germano-Celt. So he grew very tall, grew shoulders wide enough to support the carcass of a fully developed male deer, and grew thighs and calves strong enough to scale the crags of a Pontic peak.

  At seventeen he felt himself sufficiently a man to make his move; he sent a secret message to his uncle Archelaus, a man he knew to bear no love for Queen Laodice, who was his half sister as well as his sovereign. A plan was evolved through a number of furtive meetings in the hills behind Sinope, where the Queen now lived permanently; one by one, Mithridates met those barons whom Archelaus thought trustworthy, and took their oaths of allegiance.

  Everything went exactly according to plan; Sinope fell because the struggle for power went on within its walls, never threatened from without. The Queen and Chrestos and those barons loyal to them were taken bloodlessly; when blood did flow, it gushed out from under an executioner's sword. Several uncles, aunts and cousins perished at once, Chrestos somewhat later, and Queen Laodice last of all. Pious son, Mithridates threw his mother into a dungeon under Sinope's battlements, where—how could it have happened?—someone forgot to feed her, and she starved to death. Innocent of matricide, the sixth King Mithridates ruled alone. He was not yet eighteen.

  He felt his oats, he itched to make a great name for himself, he burned to see Pontus become more powerful by far than any of its neighbors, he hungered to rule the world; for his huge silver mirror told him he was no ordinary king. Instead of a diadem or a tiara, he took to wearing the skin of a lion, its huge fanged mouth jammed down across his forehead, its head and ears covering his scalp, its paws knotted on his chest. Because his hair was so like Alexander the Great's—the same yellow-gold color, as thick, as loosely curled—he wore it in the same style. Then, wanting to demonstrate his masculinity, he grew not a beard or a moustache (they were beyond the boundaries of Hellenic taste) but long bristling side-whiskers in front of each ear. What a contrast to Nicomedes of Bithynia! Virile, a man entirely for women, huge, lusty, fearsome, powerful. Such were the qualities his silver mirror showed him, and he was well satisfied.

  He married his oldest sister, another Laodice, then married anyone else he fancied as well, so that he had a dozen wives and several times that number of concubines; Laodice he appointed his Queen, but—as he told her quite often— that would last only as long as she was loyal. To reinforce this warning, he sent to Syria for a Seleucid bride of the reigning house, and—there being a plethora of princesses at that moment—he received his Syrian wife, whose name was Antiochis. He also acquired one Nysa, who was the daughter of a Cappadocian prince named Gordius, and gave one of his younger sisters (yet another Laodice!) to the sixth King Ariarathes of Cappadocia.

  Marriage alliances, as he quickly found out, were extremely useful things. His father-in-law Gordius conspired with his sister Laodice to murder Laodice's husband, King of Cappadocia; looking smugly at a decade and a half of regency, Queen Laodice put her baby son on the throne as the seventh Ariarathes and held Cappadocia in thrall to her brother Mithridates. Until, that is, she succumbed to the blandishments of old King Nicomedes of Bithynia, for she fancied ruling independently of Mithridates and his Cappadocian watchdog, Gordius. Gordius fled to Pontus, Nicomedes assumed the title King of Cappadocia, but remained in Bithynia and allowed his new wife Laodice to act precisely as she wanted within Cappadocia provided she had nothing friendly to do with Pontus. An arrangement which suited Laodice very well. However, her little son was now nearly ten years of age, and like all the kingly oriental breeds, he had developed autocratic tendencies already; he wanted to rule by himself. A clash with his mother saw his pretensions crushed, but not his convictions. Within a month he presented himself at the court of his uncle Mithridates in Amaseia, and within a month more his uncle Mithridates had installed him alone on his throne in Mazaca, for the army of Pontus was permanently in a state of readiness, that of Cappadocia not. Laodice was put to death, her brother watching impassively; the tenure of Bithynia in Cappadocia was abruptly severed. The only thing which annoyed Mithridates was that the ten-year-old seventh King Ariarathes of Cappadocia refused to allow Gordius to return home, steadily maintaining that he could not play host to his father's murderer.

  All this Cappadocian meddling had occupied but a small part of the young King of Pontus's time; during the early years of his reign, his main energies were directed at increasing the manpower and
excellence of the Pontic armies, and the wealth in the Pontic treasury. He was a thinker, Mithridates, despite his leonine affectations, his grandiose posturings, and his youth.

  With a handful of those barons who were also his close (and Mithridatid) relatives—his uncle Archelaus, his uncle Diophantus, and his cousins Archelaus and Neoptolemus— he took ship in Amisus for a voyage around the eastern shores of the Euxine Sea. The party went in the guise of Greek merchants looking for trade alliances and passed muster everywhere they landed, as the peoples they encountered were neither learned nor sophisticated. Trapezus and Rhizus had long paid tribute to the Kings of Pontus and were nominally a part of the realm; but beyond these two prosperous outlets for the rich silver mines of the interior lay terra incognita.

  The expedition explored legendary Colchis, where the Phasis River poured into the sea and the peoples who lived along it suspended the fleeces of sheep in its stream to catch the many particles of gold it carried down from the Caucasus; they gaped up at mountains even taller than those of Pontus and Armenia, sides perpetually crusted with snow, and kept a wary eye out for the descendants of the Amazons who had once lived in Pontus where the Thermodon spread its alluvial plain into the sea.

  Slowly the Caucasus decreased in height and there began the endless plains of the Scythians and Sarmatians, teeming peoples of almost settled habits who had been somewhat tamed by the Greeks who had set up colonies on the coast— not militarily tamed, but exposed to Greek customs and culture—most alluring, most exotic, most seductive.

  Where the delta of the Vardanes River cut up the shoreline, the ship bearing King Mithridates entered into a huge and almost landlocked lake called Maeotis and sailed along its triangular shape, discovering at its apex the mightiest river in the world, the fabled Tanais. They heard the names of other rivers—Rha, Udon, Borysthenes, Hypanis—and tales about the vast sea to the east called Hyrcanus or Caspium.

  Wheat was growing everywhere the Greeks had established their trading cities.

  "We would grow more, did we have a market," said the ethnarch of Sinde. "Liking their first taste of bread, the Scythians have learned to break ground, grow wheat."

  "You sold grain to King Masinissa of Numidia a century ago," said Mithridates. "There are still markets. The Romans were willing to pay anything not long ago. Why aren't you actively seeking markets?"

  "Perhaps," said the ethnarch, "we have grown too isolated from the world of the Middle Sea. And the taxes Bithynia levies for passage through the Hellespont are very heavy."

  "I think," said Mithridates to his uncles, "we will have to do what we can to help these excellent people, don't you?"

  An inspection of the fabulously fertile near-island called the Tauric Chersonnese by the Greeks and Cimmeria by the Scythians was all the further proof Mithridates needed; these lands were ripe for conquest, and must belong to Pontus.

  However, Mithridates was not a good general, and was wise enough to know it. Soldiering intrigued him for short periods, and he was no coward, far from it; but somehow the knowledge of what to do with many thousands of troops evaded him, and that before ever he tried it in practice. Whereas he found that he enjoyed organizing a campaign, assembling armies. Let others better qualified than he lead them.

  Pontus yielded troops, of course, but its King was aware that their quality left much to be desired, for the Greeks who inhabited the coastal cities despised warfare—the native peoples, descendants of the Persic strains who had once lived around the south and west of the Hyrcanian Sea, were so backward they were almost impossible to train. So, like most eastern rulers, Mithridates was forced to rely upon mercenaries. Most of these were Syrians, Cilicians, Cypriots, and the hot-blooded citizens of those quarrelsome Semitic states around the Palus Asphaltites in Palestina. They fought very well and very loyally—provided they were paid. If the pay was one day late, they packed up and started to walk home.

  But having seen the Scythians and Sarmatians, the King of Pontus decided that from these peoples he would in future obtain his soldiers; he would train them as infantry and arm them like Romans. And with them he would set out to conquer Anatolia. First, however, he had to subjugate them. And for this task he chose his uncle Diophantus, son of his father's blood sister and a baron named Asklepiodorus.

  His pretext was a complaint the Greeks of Sinde and the Chersonnesus had made about raiding incursions by the sons of King Scilurus, dead now, but the craftsman of a Scythian state of Cimmeria which had not entirely collapsed after he died. Thanks to the efforts of the Greek outpost at Obia to the west, they were farming Scythians, but they were warlike.

  "Send to King Mithridates of Pontus for help," said the false merchant visitor before he left the Tauric Chersonnese. "In fact, I'll carry a letter on your behalf, if you like."

  A proven general from the time of the fifth King Mithridates, Diophantus espoused his task with enthusiasm, and took a large and well-trained army to the Tauric Chersonnese in the spring following the visit of Mithridates. The result was a triumph for Pontus; the sons of Scilurus crumbled, as did the inland Kingdom of Cimmeria; within the first year Pontus possessed all of the Tauric Chersonnese, huge Roxolani territory to the west, and the Greek city of Olbia, much reduced by constant Sarmatian-Roxolani incursions. In the second year the Scythians fought back, but by its end Diophantus had subjugated the eastern parts of Lake Maeotis, the inland Sindian Maeotians under their king, Saumacus, and had established two strong fortress towns facing each other across the Cimmerian Bosporus.

  Home sailed Diophantus, leaving his son Neoptolemus to settle the affairs of Olbia and the west, and his son Archelaus to regulate the new Pontic empire of the northern Euxine. The job had been splendidly done, the spoils considerable, the manpower for Pontic armies bottomless, the trade possibilities most promising. All this did Diophantus report to his young King in tones of pride; whereupon his young King, jealous and afraid, executed Uncle Diophantus.

  The shock waves traveled through every level of the Pontic court and eventually reached the northern Euxine, where the sons of Diophantus wept in mingled terror and grief, then bent with redoubled energy to finish what their father had started. Down the eastern seaboard of the Euxine marched and sailed Neoptolemus and Archelaus, and one by one the little kingdoms of the Caucasus yielded to Pontus, including gold-rich Colchis and the lands between the Phasis and Pontic Rhizus.

  Lesser Armenia—which the Romans called Armenia Parva—was not actually a part of Armenia proper; it lay to the west and on the Pontic side of the vast mountains between the Araxes and the Euphrates Rivers. To Mithridates it was rightfully his, if for no other reason than that its king regarded the Kings of Pontus as his suzerains rather than the Kings of Armenia. As soon as the eastern and northern Euxine belonged to him in fact as well as in name, Mithridates invaded Lesser Armenia, leading his army in person because he was sure nothing more than his presence would be necessary. He was correct. When he rode into the little town of Zimara, which called itself the capital, he was hailed by the whole populace with open arms; King Antipater of Lesser Armenia advanced toward him in the garb of a suppliant. For once in his life Mithridates felt like a general, so it was not surprising that he became entranced with Lesser Armenia. He eyed its ranks of snow-clad peaks, its boiling spring-fed torrents, its remoteness and inaccessibility, and decided that here he would house the bulk of his rapidly accumulating treasure. The orders went out immediately; fortress repositories would be built on any insurmountable rock, atop the cliffs of some great alpine wall, on the far banks of murderously swift rivers. For one whole summer he amused himself riding about selecting this chasm, that gorge; by the time the project was finished, over seventy strongholds had come into being, and word of his fabulous wealth had traveled as far as Rome.

  Thus it was that, not yet thirty years old but already the owner of a far-flung empire, the custodian of staggering riches, the commander-in-chief of a dozen armies now made up of Scythians, Sarmatians, Celts and Maeotia
ns, and the father of a large brood of sons, the sixth King Mithridates of Pontus sent an embassage to Rome to ask that he be awarded the title of Friend and Ally of the Roman People. It was the year that Gaius Marius and Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar beat the last division of the Germans at Vercellae, so Marius himself had only heard of events secondhand, mostly through the medium of letters from Publius Rutilius Rufus. King Nicomedes of Bithynia had complained at once to the Senate that it was impossible for Rome to name two kings Friend and Ally of the Roman People when those kings were at permanent loggerheads, and pointed out that he had never varied in his allegiance to Rome since his assumption of the Bithynian throne over fifty years before. Tribune of the plebs for a second time, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had sided with Bithynia, and in the end all the money the envoys of Mithridates had paid out to needy senators went for nothing. The Pontic embassage was refused, and sent home.

  Mithridates took the news hard. First he had a temper tantrum which saw his court scatter, shaking in terror, while he roared up and down his audience chamber calling down curses and frightful imprecations upon Rome and all things Roman. Then he lapsed into an even more horrifying quiet, and sat for many hours alone on his royal lion seat, brooding. Finally, after a brief instruction to Queen Laodice that she was to rule the kingdom in his absence, he left Sinope, and was not seen again for over a year.

  He went first to Amaseia, the original Pontic capital of his ancestors, where all the early kings were buried in tombs hewn from the solid rock of the mountains ringing Amaseia round, and stalked up and down the corridors of the palace for several days, oblivious to the presence of his cowering servants and the seductive pleas of the two wives and eight concubines he kept permanently installed there. Then, as suddenly and completely as a storm was blown away across the mountains, King Mithridates emerged from his furor and settled down to make plans.