First Mithridatic War — The Asian Vespers
Mithridates VI of Pontus had some 80,000 Italians killed in a single coordinated day in 88 BC. He had spent twenty years building a kingdom around the Black Sea, absorbing the Bosporan territory in the Crimea, Colchis and Armenia Minor, and presenting himself to the Greek cities of Asia as a liberator from Rome and a Hellenistic monarch of the old kind. The Roman province of Asia had been governed for fifty years by tax farmers whose contracts required them to extract more than the province could produce, and by governors who ruled with them. That is what made the massacre possible. Mithridates sent sealed instructions to the cities to kill every Roman and Italian resident on the same day, and they were carried out — men, women, children and freedmen — in Ephesus, Pergamon, Adramyttium and elsewhere, with the cities implicated collectively so that none could negotiate separately afterwards. He then crossed into Greece, and Athens joined him. Rome's response was delayed by its own civil war: the command was given to Sulla, transferred by popular vote to Marius, and Sulla marched on Rome to get it back. He then took Athens by storm in 86 BC, destroyed two Pontic armies at Chaeronea and Orchomenus, and made peace at Dardanus in 85 BC on terms that left Mithridates on his throne — because Sulla needed to get back to Italy and fight Romans. The province of Asia was fined 20,000 talents and quartered troops for the winter. The massacre is also the strongest evidence we have about how Roman provincial government was experienced. Whole cities killed their resident Italians on a single day's notice, which required no persuasion and a great deal of accumulated grievance.
- Year: 88 BCE
- Category: Military
