[46]
When Mithridates heard of this great disaster he was astonished and terror-stricken, as was natural. Nevertheless, he proceeded with all haste to collect a new army from all his subject nations. Thinking that certain persons would be likely to turn against him on account of his defeat, either now or later, if they should find a good chance, he arrested all suspects before the war should become sharper. First, he put to death the tetrarchs of Galatia with their wives and children, not only those who were united with him as friends, but those who were not his subjects--all except three who escaped. Some of these he took by stratagem, the others he slew one night at a banquet. He believed that none of them would be faithful to him if Sulla should come near. He confiscated their property, established garrisons in their towns, and appointed Eumachus satrap of the nation. But the tetrarchs who had escaped raised an army from the country people forthwith, expelled him and his garrisons, and drove them out of Galatia, so that Mithridates had nothing left of that country except the money he had seized. Being angry with the inhabitants of Chios, one of whose vessels had accidentally run against the royal ship in the naval battle near Rhodes, he first confiscated the goods of all Chians who had fled to Sulla, and then sent persons to inquire what property in Chios belonged to Romans. For a third move, his general, Zenobius, who was conducting an army to Greece, seized the walls of Chios and all the fortified places by night, stationed guards at the gates, and made proclamation that all strangers should remain quiet, and that the Chians should repair to the assembly so that he might give them a message from the king. When they had come together he said that the king was suspicious of the city on account of the Roman faction in it, but that he would be satisfied if they would deliver up their arms and give the children of their principal families as hostages. Seeing that their city was already in his hands they gave both. Zenobius sent them to Erythræ and told the Chians that the king would write to them directly.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
Appian. The Foreign Wars. Horace White. New York. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 1899.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a medium level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.