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.
Next year Tigranes had gathered a fresh army and Lucullus determined to
smash him by taking Artaxata, the capital of Armenia. But here he
failed. The campaign was dreadful: the ground was covered with snow; the
rivers icy. At last mutiny broke out, his men refused to go on. News
came from Rome that Lucullus had been superseded. The plotters at Rome
had got their way.
The fruits of victory had been snatched from Lucullus and left for
Pompeius to garner. His soul might well be filled with bitterness as he
came back to Rome. No one there realized what he had done; he had no
party. The political struggle disgusted him more than ever. His
solitariness had been increased by years of absolute power in the East.
He withdrew into silent isolation, and the banquets which were the talk
of Rome. Men gaped, but did not understand either the man or his work.
_After Strenuous Years_
In the life of Lucullus, as in Old Comedy, we find at the
beginning the acts of a soldier and a statesman, but towards the
end eating and drinking, and little else but revels and
illuminations, and mere frivolity. For I count as frivolous his
costly houses, with their porticoes and baths, and still more the
pictures and statues and his pains in collecting such works of art
at great expense, lavishing the magnificent fortune amassed during
his campaigns on the site where even now, though luxury has
increased so much, the gardens of Lucullus are counted among the
noblest belonging to the Emperor. At Naples, too, and on the
neighbouring coast he pierced hills with great tunnels, surrounded
his house with ponds and channels of salt water for breeding fish,
and even built out into the sea, so that Tubero, the Stoic
philosopher, at the sight of this magnificence called him 'Xerxes
in a toga'. Besides all this, he had country seats near Tusculum,
with gazebos and rooms and porticoes open to the air, where
Pompeius came on a visit, and blamed him for lodging himself
excellently in summer, but making a house that was uninhabitable
in winter. Lucullus merely smiled and said, 'Do you think that I
have less sense than the cranes and storks, and do not change my
home according to the season?' At another time, when a Praetor was
anxious to make his spectacle magnificent, and begged for a loan
of some purple cloaks to dress the performers, Lucullus replied
that he would give him some if he found that he had any. Next day
he asked how many were wanted, and hearing that a hundred would be
enough, he offered two hundred. Horace is thinking of this when he
remarks that he considers a house poor when the valuables hidden
and overlooked are not more than those known to the master.
Plutarch, xxxvi. 39.
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