Lucullus

Though many now advised Lucullus to suspend the war, he paid no heed to them, but threw his army into the king’s country by way of Bithynia and Galatia.[*](73 B.C.) At first he lacked the necessary supplies, so that thirty thousand Galatians followed in his train, each carrying a bushel of grain upon his shoulders; but as he advanced and mastered everything, he found himself in the midst of such plenty that an ox sold in his camp for a drachma, and a man-slave for four, while other booty had no value at all. Some abandoned it, and some destroyed it. There was no sale for anything to anybody when all had such abundance.

But when Lucullus merely wasted and ravaged the country with cavalry incursions, which penetrated to Themiscyra and the Illains of the river Thermodon, his soldiers found fault with him because he brought all the cities over to him by peaceable measures; he had not taken a single one by storm, they said, nor given them a chance to enrich themselves by plunder.

Nay, they said, at this very moment we are leaving Amisus, a rich and prosperous city, which it would be no great matter to take, if its siege were pressed, and are following our general into the desert of the Tibareni and the Chaldaeans to fight with Mithridates. But these grievances, not dreaming that they would bring the soldiers to such acts of madness as they afterwards performed, Lucullus overlooked and ignored.

He was, however, more ready to defend himself against those who denounced his slowness in lingering there long while, subduing worthless little villages and cities, and allowing Mithridates to recruit himself. That, he said, is the very thing I want, and I am sitting here to get it. I want the man to become powerful again, and to get together a force with which it is worth our while to fight, in order that he may stand his ground, and not fly when we approach.