Free The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean by John Julius Norwich

should be utterly destroyed and that its inhabitants should not be permitted to rebuild their homes anywhere within ten miles of the sea. Appalled, they decided after all to resist. The result was a terrible two-year siege, after which, in 146 BC , the threatened destruction took place, not one stone being left on another. Cato was obeyed: Carthage was deleted.

     
    The Kingdom of Pontus–a hitherto somewhat insignificant state lying along the southern shore of the Black Sea–should have no place in a history of the Mediterranean. Nor would it have had but for its young king Mithridates VI, who for twenty-five years was the principal thorn in the flesh of the Roman Republic. Although by race he and his subjects were Persian, he always liked to think of himself as a Greek, a proud champion of Hellenism who would inspire all the Greek cities to rise up against their Latin oppressors. In 88 BC he invaded the Roman province of Asia 17 and engineered a mass uprising which ended in a massacre of some 80,000 Italian residents; then, emboldened by this success, he crossed the Aegean and occupied Athens. Several other Greek cities fell to him in their turn.
    Clearly, Rome had to act; and the Roman Senate chose as supreme commander of its expeditionary force a fifty-year-old patrician by the name of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, possessed of a fine military record and a first-hand knowledge of Asia. Just as he was about to embark, however, the democratic faction in the Senate successfully moved that he be replaced by an old and somewhat decayed general under whom he had once served, Gaius Marius. It was a disastrous decision, and Sulla categorically refused to accept it. With his army behind him to a man, he marched on Rome, liquidated his enemies and, without more ado, set off for Greece. He stormed Athens, destroyed its port of Piraeus, won two decisive victories in the field and eventually concluded a peace treaty with Mithridates–though on what to many seemed surprisingly easy terms. All this, however, he had achieved without any semblance of authority from the government in Rome–where, in his absence, the Marian party had returned to power.
    Hastening back to the capital, Sulla routed them for the second time and assumed the role of dictator, unhesitatingly ordering the mass murder of nearly 10,000 of his political enemies, including forty senators and some 1,600
equites
, or knights. He then passed a series of highly reactionary laws which had the effect of putting back the clock by at least half a century. Finally, with this work successfully completed, he abdicated and returned to his home in Campania. Here he led an extremely dissolute life, terrorising his many slaves. From time to time–
pour encourager les autres
, perhaps–he would sentence one or two of them to death, usually taking care to be present when the sentence was carried out; but one day in 78 BC , while he was watching a strangulation, the excitement became too much for him. He suffered a sudden seizure and died soon afterwards.
    The next forty years were dominated by the three military men who, even more than Sulla before them, were to put their indelible mark on republican Rome. They were Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to us as Pompey), Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gaius Julius Caesar. Pompey had won victories for Sulla–to whose stepdaughter he was married–in Sicily and North Africa, for which services he had been grudgingly granted the rare privilege of a Triumph. 18 Unlike most noble Romans of his day he had little interest in money, and politics bored him stiff. What he liked was power. He was a soldier through and through, and a highly ambitious one.
    Crassus, the second of the three giants, could hardly have been more different. Born rich, he had made himself still richer by clever if unscrupulous wheeling and dealing in the Roman property market. He too was a first-rate general when he wanted to be, but while Pompey was forever seeking means