The Roman Recessional
WE may if we wish believe - as Livy would have us
believe - that the Romans conquered their entire empire in self-defence, or at
least out of a sense of justice and fair play. There was always another
oppressed people to be succoured or a more distant enemy who needed humbling;
and so the Roman Empire grew by a chain of circumstances that in retrospect at
least seems inevitable. Philip V of Macedon and Antiochus the Great were
crushed. Eumenes II of Pergamon and the Rhodian republic had been Rome's allies;
but once the more formidable enemies had been overcome, they in their turn were
too conspicuous and had to be humiliated. And, on the other side of the Aegean,
Greece was finally reduced to impotence by Roman arms. The effect of this
heavy/handed intervention on the political initiative of the Hellenistic states
was stultifying. Attalus III recognised the futility of trying to postpone the
inevitable outcome. He made Rome his heir; and after his death in 133 bc the
kingdom of Pergamon became a Roman province. Before long, Italian business
corporations were conv peting with provincial governors for the profits of Roman
rule; Italian capital was invested in the neighbouring kingdom of Bithynia, and
the independent spirit of the ruler of Pontus soon appeared as a cause of
offence.
Mithridates VI of Pontus was descended from a noble Persian family; and a
natural impetuosity, combined with the traditional Iranian virtues and a Greek
cultural background, mark him out as the last picturesque monarch of free
Anatolia. Neither he nor the Roman Senate wished to become involved in a major
war. But there was not room in Asia Minor for Mithridates' ambition as well as
Italian business interests. When war at last came in the year 88 bc, the King
swept through the province of Asia; he was hailed as a liberator by the Greeks,
and at his command tens of thousands of Italians were massacred. For a moment
there was jubilation. But Mithridates could not hold what he had won; and it was
only because of the many distractions that beset Rome as a world power that he
was able for a quarter of a century to maintain a state of uneasy peace or open
defiance. Eventually, in 66 B.c, he was driven out of Asia Minor to his last
refuge in the Crimea; and Pompey the Great thereupon laid the foundations of a
lasting settlement in which all Asia up to the Euphrates was brought under
direct or indirect Roman rule.