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am no historian, but rather a poet, so I will say that it must have been the meddlesome gods who started this war, looking down on us foolish mortals just as they looked down so long ago on the doomed heroes of Greece and Troy. But the men of this age are lesser men than their ancestors, even as the wars they make are bloodier and more far-flung than Achilles or Hector could ever have imagined.
    It hardly matters who started the war. The conflict was inevitable. For years the Romans pushed their empire eastward, subduing one region after another, suborning this or that petty king with gold, taking other cities by armed force. Meanwhile, Mithridates ascended to the throne of Pontus, and he, too, began to increase his kingdom by seizing smaller, weaker kingdoms around him.
    Rome and their puppet kings came to rule much of Asia, while Mithridates and his puppets ruled the rest. On the seas, Roman galleys patrolled the Aegean and its countless islands, while the ships of Mithridates dominated the vast Euxine Sea. Like crowded men knocking shoulders, one side had to give way, or else the two must come to blows.
    The hostilities began with a puppet war. The Roman general Manius Aquillius pressured a Roman ally, King Nicomedes of Bithynia, to make war on some neighboring port cities ruled by Mithridates. Nicomedes was so deeply in debt to Rome that he could hardly refuse; when he expressed his fear that Mithridates might retaliate, Manius Aquillius assured him that Roman arms would protect Bithynia.
    What was Manius Aquillius thinking? Did he imagine that Mithridates would be so intimidated by the prospect of war with Rome that the king would allow his cities to be raped without responding, and become yet another Roman puppet? Or was Aquillius so shortsighted and so greedy for the spoils from those raids that he prodded Nicomedes on with no thought for the consequences? Or—and this is what I think—did Aquillius deliberately hope to provoke a war with Mithridates, in the expectation that Roman arms could subdue Pontus in short order so that he, Manius Aquillius, could return to Rome to celebrate a triumph as conqueror of a new province, riding in a golden chariot to the accolades of the Roman mob while the vanquished Mithridates trudged behind him in chains?
    If such was the plan of Aquillius, he was in for a rude surprise.
    After Nicomedes attacked the coastal cities, Mithridates struck back, decisively and with far greater force than Aquillius expected. The theater of the war rapidly expanded. In battle after battle, the Romans and their allies were routed. While the panicked Roman generals fled, Mithridates advanced from city to city, at each stop gaining more wealth and prestige, and adding fighting men as well, as thousands of Greek-speaking soldiers deserted the Roman armies.
    In the liberated cities, Roman bankers and merchants who once had ruled the roost were stripped of their property and thrown out of their elegant houses. Some of the most hated Romans were hunted down and killed by angry mobs. Other Romans went into hiding, or cowered inside their barricaded homes. Those natives who had been Roman sympathizers were also exposed to the wrath of the Rome-haters. Some followed the retreating Roman armies into exile. Some committed suicide in the hope that their families would be spared from retribution.
    Those were joyous days for the Greek-speakers of the world. At last, someone was standing up to the Romans—and not just standing up to them, but pushing them back and putting them in their place. The name of Mithridates, long spoken in whispers, was now shouted in acclamation. Our savior had come at last, and he was unstoppable. Roman rule in Asia had abruptly come to an end.
    Having lost his kingdom, the Roman puppet Nicomedes fled by ship to Rome. Gaius Cassius, governor of the Roman province of Asia, abandoned his capitol at Pergamon and made a headlong rush for the island of Rhodes, which remains allied