Rome's Great Eastern War

Lucullus, Pompey and the Conquest of the East, 74–62 BC

Gareth C Sampson

• Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526762696
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Despite Rome's conquest of the Mediterranean, by the turn of the first century BC, Rome's influence barely stretched into the East. In the century since Rome's defeat of the Seleucid Empire in the 180s BC, the East was dominated by the rise of new empires: Parthia, Armenia and Pontus, each vying to recreate the glories of the Persian Empire. By the 80s BC, the Pontic Empire of Mithridates had grown so bold that it invaded and annexed the whole of Rome's eastern empire and occupied Greece itself. As Rome emerged from the devastating effects of the First Civil War, a new breed of general emerged, eager to re-assert Roman military dominance and carve out a fresh empire in the east, treading in the footsteps of Alexander. This work analyses the military campaigns and battles between a revitalized Rome and the various powers of the eastern Mediterranean hinterland, which ultimately heralded a new phase in Roman imperial expansion and reshaped the ancient East.

Part I

Rome and the Hellenistic East – From Periphery to Hegemony (323–74 BC)

Chapter 1

Rome and the Rise and Fall of the Hellenistic World Order (323–80 BC)

The clear danger of studying the background to the war which broke out in the Near East in 74 BC, and which would engulf virtually all the kingdoms and empires of the region, is to judge it simply from the perspective of Rome, a task made easier by the bulk of the surviving sources for these conflicts being Roman. Thus it is easy to construct a narrative that Roman expansion was inevitable and that the foes whom they faced were merely the latest in a long line of ‘enemies of Rome’, who rose up, were at first successful, but were ultimately defeated.

Yet as always, the reality is a far more complicated picture, and this war saw Rome finally immerse itself into the heart of the ancient world after centuries of trying to avoid such entanglements. The danger in studying Roman history in isolation is that we ignore events in the wider ancient world, and furthermore invert the centre of attention, making Italy and the Western Mediterranean the centre of events rather than the periphery, as it was for much of Rome’s existence.

Rome and the Eastern World – On the Periphery (to 338 BC)

Across the ancient world we can see three clusters of civilizations rising and falling: China and India, which fall outside the scope of this work, and then the Mediterranean/Middle East region, within which Rome developed. Founded on the western side of Italy, Rome found itself in the very periphery of the ‘civilized’ world, which had its heartlands in an arc from the Nile to Mesopotamia. Reading early Roman history (though written much later), we find annual struggles between kingdoms and cities no more than a few miles apart, with very little reference to events in the wider world. In many respects this was reciprocated, with very few people in the wider world seeming to care what was taking place in ‘barbarian’ territories on the very edges of civilization.

Yet whilst Rome was still being ruled by its kings, the ancient world was reshaped when the world’s first mighty empire was created in the Middle East. In the mid-sixth century BC, Cyrus the Great created the largest empire the ancient world had seen when he overran Media, Mesopotamia and Lydia, thereafter ruling a vast territory that stretched from the Indus to the Mediterranean. By the time the city of Rome had founded its Republic, this empire had expanded to include Egypt and had crossed into mainland Europe (namely Thrace).

With the Roman Republic only twenty years old, the mighty Persian Empire decided to continue its annexation of the Mediterranean and expand in a limited way into mainland Greece. Victory for the Greeks (at Marathon) was merely an annoyance to the King of Kings in Persepolis. Ten years later, the full resources of the Persian Empire were thrown at the upstart city-states in Greece, which by the end of 480 BC had been conquered as far as the Isthmus of Corinth, with Athens being burnt. Had Greece fallen at this point, the victorious Persian monarch Darius would have soon expanded across the Adriatic and added Italy and Sicily to his kingdom. In contrast, Rome at this point was locked into a war with its major rival, the Etruscan city of Veii, just 10 miles away.

As is well known, the Greeks were able to defeat the Persians and drive them out of mainland Greece, thus saving both themselves and their neighbours from being absorbed into Darius’ universal empire. With Greece acting as a buffer between Italy and the Persian Empire, territories such as Rome were free to continue their local squabbles. Though the Persian threat had receded, Rome still found itself in part of a wider Mediterranean system, with events elsewhere continuing to shape its fortunes. For at least the previous century, the greatest power in Italy were the Etruscans, yet in 474 BC, they suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Cumae at the hands of Hiero I of Syracuse. This setback and subsequent Gallic incursions over the Alps into the Po Valley reduced and then broke Etruscan power and domination over northern and central Italy, allowing other local powers to try to fill the vacuum.

For the rest of the fifth century, Rome continued its local struggles, especially with Veii, all confined within central western Italy, hampered by its own internal dissensions. In the wider world, Persia shrugged off its reversal on the very western edge of its empire but began to be affected by Athenian attacks on its possessions around the Eastern Mediterranean coastline. No serious threat to the empire emerged, especially when the Greek states fell into a decades-long war between the rival powers of Athens and Sparta. By 415 BC, this war spilled out of mainland Greece and into the Western Mediterranean with the attempted Athenian conquest of Syracuse, one of the leading powers in Sicily (the other being the Carthaginians of North Africa). The Athenian defeat at Syracuse in 413 BC ended this brief conjoining of worlds, by which time Rome had the upper hand in its war with Veii.

Athens was to fall to Sparta in 404 BC, whilst Veii finally fell to Rome in 396 BC. Rome’s triumph was short-lived though, as the Gallic tribes – whose expansion into northern Italy had done so much to end Etruscan power – began migrating further south into central Italy and famously defeated a Roman army at the Battle of Allia, subsequently sacking Rome itself in c.390/386 BC. Rome was able to recover from this destruction and rebuild both its armies and nascent empire – such as it was, confined to Latium – much as Athens was able to shake off its defeat to Sparta and recover some of its former glory.

Events to the south of Rome, however, showed the Italian peninsula’s involvement in the wider power struggles of the ancient world. In the period 390–386 BC, Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse, had invaded and conquered much of southern Italy, adding it to his greater Syracusan Empire. Dionysius then used southern Italy as a launch pad to invade Epirus across the Adriatic Sea and place a puppet ruler on the throne.1 Though Dionysius’ empire soon crumbled, it showed the danger that Rome faced from across the Greek world. Had it remained, Dionysus’ empire would have fought any rival trying to create a powerbase in Italy.

As it was, Dionysius’ empire collapsed, barely impinging on Rome and its wars in Latium. Whilst Rome rebuilt and continued its local expansion, the Persian Empire continued to dominate the ancient world, occasionally interfering in Greek matters, though never militarily. The Western Mediterranean continued to be dominated by the wars of Carthage and Syracuse in Sicily, with neither gaining a permanent upper hand and thus being able to expand further northwards into Italy, as Dionysius had.

It was in mainland Greece that the next major change to the world order originated. Athens’ defeat in 404 BC was followed within a generation by that of Sparta in 371 BC at the Battle of Leuctra at the hands of the city-state of Thebes. Yet the Theban state was never able to turn its brief military supremacy into anything more lasting, and was soon exhausted. It was into this vacuum that a new power emerged, the Kingdom of Macedon. Macedonia was a region to the north of mainland Greece, sandwiched between Greece proper and Thrace, with its borders fully exposed to the tribes of Central Europe. Like Rome, it had been on the periphery of the Greek world and slowly trying to establish itself as a regional power. But unlike Rome, it found itself directly in the path of Darius’ expansion of the Persian Empire and swiftly capitulated, becoming part of his empire. Xerxes’ defeat saw Macedonia recover its freedom, but it too spent the whole of the fifth century fighting off tribal incursions, attacks from Thrace and Athens’ colonization of its coastline.

Like Rome, Macedon’s expansion in its own region was slow but also had the potential to amass far more human resources than its rival powers, if only they could be harnessed. Within a generation, both Rome and Macedon were able to do just that, the key factor in their sudden rise to supremacy in their own (for now) separate worlds. In Macedon’s case it was primarily down to one man, King Philip II, who forged the various regions under nominal Macedonian control in one unified and centralized state, with strongly defended borders and a large army. Trained under Theban commanders, but with far greater resources than Thebes could ever muster, Philip created the most powerful kingdom in Greece. Once he had secured his northern borders, he set his sights on dominating the weakened powers of central and southern Greece. This process culminated in 338 BC at the Battle of Chaeronea, where a Macedonian army defeated the combined forces of Athens, Thebes and a host of smaller cities. With this victory, Philip now stood as master of Greece, a position no other had achieved.

By coincidence, 338 BC was also a milestone in Roman history, as it saw Rome’s victory in the war against the Latin League which had begun in 343. Up to this point, Roman power in Latium had come through domination of the Latin League of city-states. Inevitably, the cities of the League attempted to throw off Roman hegemony, which resulted in five years of war and their eventual defeat. However, the victorious Romans decided to institute a new system. The Latin League was dissolved, and in its place a new system was created, with three central pillars: treaties, colonies and citizenship.

Each defeated city was to have a direct treaty with Rome, which left it with its own language, laws and customs, but bound to Rome in matters of military and foreign policy. Prime farming land was confiscated from the defeated, with colonies created for Rome’s excess population, thereby creating a Roman bastion in foreign territory. Finally, a new graded citizenship system was created, with Roman citizenship (the highest) being granted to individuals and communities. Further grades of Latin and Italian citizenship, each with lesser privileges in Roman law, were also extended, again not on a geographic basis, but with grants to individuals, clans and communities.

Of these three pillars, it was the citizenship and the treaties that laid the foundations of Rome’s future greatness: the treaties stated that each defeated city would send Rome their troops to fight in Roman armies, thus allowing Rome to move beyond a citizen army and tapping into the wider manpower of Italy. This, combined with subordinating the local elites into the Roman system – via citizenship and access to the Roman political system – gave Rome the tools needed to expand from a city-state into a regional power.

Rome and the Eastern World: Expansion and Defence (338–229 BC)

Rome and Macedon, having created a solid base for expansion, set about overturning the ancient world order. Philip set his sights on the ancient world’s only superpower, the Persian Empire, which though territorially the same as in Darius’ day, had been riven by internal rebellions (most notably Egypt), weak emperors and conspiracies within the ruling dynasty. Persian Emperor Artaxerxes III, who had recovered Egypt, died in 338 BC from suspected poisoning. With the loss of a strong rival leader, Philip judged the time right to attack what he judged to be a vulnerable Persia. Unfortunately for him, he too was assassinated in 336 BC just as his campaign was in its early stages.

He was famously succeeded by his son Alexander III, better known as Alexander the Great. In just over five years, Alexander spectacularly overturned two centuries of history when he defeated and conquered the Persian Empire, replacing it with an Alexandrian one which spanned from the Adriatic to the Indus.

Consequently, Rome once again suddenly found itself with no buffer between the dominant universal empire and its own region. One of the ancient world’s greatest ‘what ifs’ will always be what would have happened if Alexander the Great hadn’t died at such a young age? Given his thirst for conquest and the desire for empire, his attention would surely soon have turned westwards towards the tempting targets of Sicily and Carthage, with the conquest of Italy (and Rome) a by-product.

Though Rome had laid the foundation for its future greatness, at the time it was contesting a three-decade-long war against its greatest rival for domination of Italy, the Samnite Federation. Rome, controlling just the western half of central Italy, would have been no match for the armies of Alexander. Livy himself, in one of history’s earliest works on counterfactual history, devoted time to consider the clash between Rome and Alexander,2 but Livy’s Rome was one that had enjoyed three centuries of further development, not the Rome of the late fourth century BC. Yet once again, the threat to Italy (and Rome) from a universal empire in the east dissipated before being realized. Alexander died at the age of 32, and his new universal empire died with him, fracturing into a lengthy war between his various successor generals.3

The wars of the successors created a new regional world order, with three mighty empires emerging from the decades of conflict: the Macedonian Empire controlling Greece, the Ptolemaic Empire controlling Egypt and the Seleucid Empire controlling from Asia Minor to Bactria. More importantly, however, for the future of the ancient world, the various wars they fought meant that they ignored the Western Mediterranean, which allowed two states in particu...