Collections: Phalanx's Twilight, Legion's Triumph, Part V: Epilogue

Bret Devereaux

May 3

This is the fifth part of our ~~four(ish)~~ five part (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc) look at how the Roman legions were able to overcome the Macedonian sarisa phalanx in the third and second centuries BC.

We have covered the decisive battles in the story, although after 168 it is not entirely clear if everyone understood the magnitude and implications of Rome's astounding run of military success in the first half of the second century. Indeed, we'll see that the Greek poleis most certainly did not, to their great misfortune. Nevertheless, while the Romans will fight in the East after Pydna, it will never again be against anything like 'peer' opponents. Still, how events proceed and how gains are consolidated after 'decisive' victories are often as important, if not more important, than the victories themselves, and so that is what we will look at here.

This post thus forms an epilogue to the series, briefly covering the broad outlines of Rome's role in the Hellenistic East through the second and first centuries BC down to the end of the last substantial Hellenistic state (Ptolemaic Egypt, long since reduced to military irrelevancy) in the region in 30 BC. In practice, that process has a few phases, which we might break down as:

The Immediate Aftermath of Pydna (168)
The Assertion of Roman Hegemony in Greece (150-129)
The Mithridatic Wars (88-63)
Final Consolidation (63-22)

Naturally, covering so much in a single post means this is going to be a bit of a schematic overview. But that is also largely necessary, because our sources for this period are much weaker than what we had for the main of the series. Polybius' later books barely survive in fragments, but his Histories would have ended in 146 in any event. Livy's Ab Urbe Condita originally covered this whole period, but the surviving books of his history cut out in 168, leaving us with just extremely brief summaries. That leaves us reliant on weaker sources for much of this period: Plutarch's biographies (which, being biographies, don't cover everything), Appian and - in even less depth - later 'universal' histories like those of Cassius Dio. These sources, writing at much greater chronological remove and with a lot less granularity, almost never give us enough detail to allow for the reconstruction of battles with the kind of specificity we've been doing here, so often we can say who won, but not necessarily why or how and we often lack good detail on the structure or composition of non-Roman armies.

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The Consequences of Pydna

For the Antigonid Kingdom of Macedon, the consequences of the Roman victory at Pydna were total. While the Romans have a well-earned reputation for relentlessness, they were hardly averse to peace treaties that fell well short of total conquest, so long as Rome was the clear 'winner' in the agreement. But on the one hand, this was the Third Macedonian War and it is clear that Roman patience with the Antigonid dynasty was over; efforts by Perseus to negotiate as a king, rather than a captive, were rejected out of hand (Livy 45.4.4-7). On the other hand, Lucius Aemilius Paullus and the Roman Republic more broadly were in a position to be so imperious and high handed because of how staggeringly complete their victory had been. As we noted last time, the reports of near total Macedonian casualties are probably exaggerated, but it is clear that Perseus was unable to reconstitute basically any army at all after the battle and the Roman victory at Pydna left the whole of Macedon open to Paullus' armies.

Via Wikipedia, a section of the Lucius Aemilius Paullus monument, a column initially meant to honor Perseus of Macedon which was repurposed by Aemilius Paullus to serve as a monument to the victory at Pydna. A frieze depicting the Battle of Pydna (168) was added to the rectangular plinth, on which was placed a large equestrian statue, presumably of Aemilius Paullus. The base survives in fragments, but the statue is gone.

And then the Romans actually capture Perseus himself (Livy 45.6-7), reportedly abandoned by all of his soldiers and supporters save for his eldest son. So the Romans could write essentially any peace they wanted.

It is striking then, in this context, that they do not simply annex Macedon. Instead, while the Antigonid treasury is seized, to the tune of c. 30m drachma (Polyb. 18.35.3, Livy 45.40.1; Plut. Aem. 33.2-24; Diod. Sic. 33.8) and the Macedonian kingship abolished, Macedon itself was divided into four rump republics (centered on Amphipolis, Thessolonika, Pella and Pelagonia, respectively). Livy understands this as the Macedonians (and Illyrians) being made 'free peoples' (Livy 45.19.1) but the Romans do away with the general Macedonian popular assembly, formed four new republics out of Macedon and laid tribute on those republics equal to half of the what they had paid to the king in taxes, while also shutting down some of the region's profitable mines.

On the one hand, these are clauses that may have caused one to doubt the true 'liberty' of the Macedonian people - they were internally self-governing, but the terms of the peace were clearly intended to be militarily crippling. On the other hand, I suspect leaving these states in Macedon was not entirely altruistic on the Romans' part either. The regions around Macedonia more broadly - Thrace to the East, Illyria to the West and the Danube Basin to the North - were the sort of the regions that had the habit of generating large invading 'barbarian' armies at regular intervals. No one was likely to have forgotten, for instance, the large-scale Gallic invasion of Greece and Anatolia by the Galatians in 279. The four self-governing republics thus also served, at least in theory, to replace the traditional kingdom of Macedon's role as a buffer-state shielding much of Greece from their northern neighbors.

Meanwhile, the Ptolemaic-Seleucid 'Syrian Wars' had kicked up again, while Rome had been busy with Perseus. The Ptolemaic court evidently though that, with Rome distracted, they might be able to move against Antiochus IV (Diodorus 30.15-16), and so after preparations, invaded Seleucid-controlled Syria, initiating the Sixth Syrian War (170-168). The Ptolemaic army, however, seems to have quickly been intercepted and defeated by Antiochus IV - perhaps more prepared than they thought - and Antiochus IV then moved into Egypt proper, on the excusing that he was supporting Ptolemy VI Philometer (r. 180-145) against his younger brother Ptolemy VIII Physcon (r. 170-164, 145-132, 127-116), both of whom were 'co-rulers' at the time, but evidently not seeing eye to eye. In practice, Antiochus IV's success put him on the verge of conquering Egypt.

The Romans sent several senators as legati - senatorial legates, in this case functioning as ambassadors - to deliver to Antiochus IV the senatus consultum that it was the opinion of the Senate that he ought to withdraw. The scene that results, related by both Polybius (29.27) and Livy (45.12), is both memorable but also a testament to the impact of the Roman victory at Pydna. Antiochus IV stretches out his right hand to greet the lead legate, Gaius Popilius Laenas (cos 172, 158) who curtly places the senatus consultum in his hand instead of what would basically have been a handshake. When Antiochus reads it and then attempts to stall, saying he needs to talk it over, Laenas' response is to take a stick and draw a circle in the sand around Antiochus IV and then declares, "before you leave this circle, give me a response which I may take back to the Senate." Antiochus hestitates, but then concedes, responding that he will do what the Senate suggests. Only then does Popilius Laenas extend his own hand in a gesture of friendship.

Polybius suggests that the only reason Antiochus IV backed down when confronted - with nothing but a few senators and a piece of paper - was his knowledge of Perseus' defeat at Pydna. After all, that meant that Antiochus IV could know that if he chose to fight, he would have Rome's undivided attention and moreover that Roman armies appeared still quite capable of disposing of Hellenistic armies quite handily. He might also have been aware, given the fate of Perseus, that the Romans had run short of patience with intransigent Hellenistic kings and might well abolish his kingdom too, if he chose to try the matter in war.

As a result, the Roman legati not only set up those four Macedonian republics, they also settle affairs in Egypt, reconciling the two Ptolemies (one assumes with a fairly stark 'or else' attached), expelled Seleucid troops from Cyprus (returning it to the Ptolemies) and in so doing essentially asserted Roman hegemony over the Eastern Mediterranean, as Rome now became the guarantor of the political order in the East. In the process, they prematurely terminated the last resurgence of the Seleucid dynasty: from this point onward, the Seleucid kingdom will slowly shrink and atrophy, beginning almost immediately with the Maccabean Revolt in 167, though this is hardly the place to get into the complexities of that. One also wonders if the promise of Roman protection contributed to the steady decline of the Ptolemaic Kingdom; shorn of the pressures to defend itself against a peer opponent, the quality of Ptolemaic rule declines markedly.

Confirming Roman Rule in Greece (150-129)

The next major episode in the East is triggered by the Fourth Macedonian War (150-148). Roman victory at Pydna had brought the Greek world under much more direct Roman control - although not yet Roman rule - and it is clear that over time quite a bit of dissatisfaction simmered in both Macedon and Greece. As with most of the events of today's post, our sources here consist of brief descriptions of events in much larger histories rather than the sort of focused narrative we get in Polybius and Livy, which leaves us mostly only with the broad outlines of events.

Some time in the late 150s, a fellow by the name of Andriscus began claiming he was secretly the son of Perseus and thus heir to the Macedonian throne, taking the appropriately dynastic name 'Philip.' He bounces around a bit, briefly serving in the Seleucid army of Demetrius I Soter, who packs him off to Rome, from which he escapes back to Thrace, where the Odrysian king Teres III makes the bold decision to back him; the Romans miss a few chances to nip this problem in the bud, each time concluding that Andriscus was no threat. So naturally, in 149, Andriscus, with his handful of troops, invades Macedon and seizes control of the country and then even pushes into Thessaly.

Via Wikipedia, a drachma of Andriscus, labeled 'King Philip' as he had taken that as his regnal name.

The Roman response was complacent, with the war initial entrusted to a praetor, Publius Iuventius Thalna, with the task of reasserting control. That's not an uncommon Roman response to what they consider popular revolts, but evidently not at all sufficient to the event, as Iuventius' small army - we aren't told how small, but praetors don't generally command full-sized field armies - is intercepted and defeated by Andriscus. At this point, the Romans send a proper, full-sized army (Zonar. 21.71.28) commanded by Quintius Caecilius Metellus (cos. 143, cens. 131), the praetor of 148.

If you are wondering, "what the hell were the consuls doing in 149 and 148?" the answer is, mostly, 'The Third Punic War' (149-146). Both consuls in 149, Lucius Marcius Censorinus and Mancius Manilius were deployed to Africa, while in 148, of the two consuls, Spurius Postumius Albinus Magnus and Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the former seems to have been deployed to Gaul, the latter to Africa.

In any event, with a full-sized army Q. Caecilius Metellus confronts Andriscus at Pydna - the natural entryway into Macedon, for the same reasons as before - and after a cavalry skirmish in which Andriscus came off well, Andriscus opts to try to be clever and split his army and Metellus takes the opportunity to attack, routing both forces. Andriscus retreated then to Thrace, where he is captured, while Metellus spends the rest of the year and some of the next pacifying Macedon. Rome responds by implementing direct Roman control of the new provincia Macedonia, to which a praetor and at least a legion would be dispatched essentially every year. Roman control in Macedon was now permanent.

Meanwhile, relations between the Romans and the Achaean League had been souring for some time. There had already been, since the Second Macedonian War, tensions in the Achaean League over if they should chart an independent foreign policy, or follow Rome's directions. Naturally for the Romans, this was a self-answering question. Here, the issue is that Greek eleutheria ('freedom, independence') is not quite the same as Latin's libertas ('freedom' 'liberty'). A state with eleutheria, in the Greek sense, is free and independent, with its own foreign policy; a free citizen with eleutheria accepted no masters save the community as a whole. By contrast, in the Roman mind, one could be free while still existing in systems of hierarchy: an enslaved person, once freed, for instance, became the client (cliens) of their former owner, and that status had customary expectations that came with it.

So over the decades before 146, as the Greek states of the Achaean League buck against Roman wishes, the Romans don't immediately swing into action, but they are annoyed by it, because the Greeks are being bad clients - having been freed by the Romans they ought to show loyalty and gratitude to the Romans (who in turn would then safeguard their freedom).

The main problem here was - wait for it - Sparta. This is, I should stress, not quite the Sparta of the classical period; Hellenistic Sparta was a much more normal polis, albeit still a quite large one in terms of territory. Under the tyrant Nabis, Sparta had made a play for relevance in 195, only to have been slapped down by the Achaean League and Rome in the Laconian War. As a consequence of that, Sparta is forced into the League, but uncomfortably so, with repeated Spartan demands for more autonomy, including appeals to Rome; Rome responds by reasserting the League's authority, mostly to not be bothered. The Spartans then broke free (in 149/8) and the Achaeans moved to crush them - of course in this moment the Romans are busy with Andriscus (and Carthage).

Metellus, the praetor dealing with Andriscus asks the Achaeans if they would please desist from attacking Sparta; Rome had promised to send a senatorial legation to settle the matter diplomatically. The Achaeans decline initially, but when Metellus presses the point in 148, the Achaeans agree to a truce, with the Spartans then foolishly violate, at which point the Achaeans drop the hammer and beat Sparta into submission.

The following year, the promised senatorial legates arrived and propose that Sparta be detached from the League, but also a number of other key cities, including Corinth and Argos; the League, infuriated, responds by clamping down on the Spartans and the Roman delegation will at least claim it was forced to flee. Gruen suggests (following Polybius) that this was a failed play by Rome at a strong opening bargaining position - that the strong terms were meant to communicate that Rome was unhappy being ignored, but that the plan may have been to get 'negotiated down' to Spartan independence and communicate to the League that any more wars of conquest would not be welcome, a "form of intimidation, designed to alarm the Achaeans into good behavior." When that obviously didn't work, the Romans sent a second, more cordial, delegation to smooth things over, but the Achaean strategos of the year, Critolaus, opts to try delay, further annoying Rome, while the Achaeans prepared for further action against Sparta.

Gruen's reading of the events, which I think is broadly correct, is that the Achaeans were driven by internal politics, not to go to war against Rome, but to punish Sparta for its defiance. The Romans, looking to avoid a war, issued one polite request for peace after another, occasionally engaging in threats, which the Achaeans read as Roman unwillingness to get involved and thus a green light to proceed. But for the Senate, the repeated rejection of their kind advice wore away the Senate's patience and so when the Achaeans went to war against their recalcitrant members, it was Rome's turn now to drop the hammer. And of course, drop the hammer the Romans did.

Via Wikipedia, a map of the Achaean War, showing the advances of Metellus and Mummius, as well as the extent of the Achaean League (in darkest grey).

The Senate sent one of the consuls of 146, Lucius Mummius to Greece to resolve the problem, but he would take some time to arrive. Quintius Caecilius Metellus, now Macedonicus, was still in Macedon settling affairs and moves south with his army, meeting the Achaean force under Critolaos at Scarpheia and smashing it before the onset of winter. At this point the other key Achaean politician, Diaeos, is elected strategos, clamps down on the pro-peace party and prepares to fight the Romans in earnest, raising an army of 14,000 infantry and 600 cavalry (Paus 7.15.7). Meeting the Romans outside of the key Achaean city of Corinth, they are promptly buried under Mummius' 23,000 infantry and 3,500 cavalry (Paus. 7.16.1). We don't get the details of the battle or the composition of the Achaean army (though a Hellenistic-style force seems certain), but we are told that the Roman victory began with its cavalry wing overpowering the Achaean cavalry, before the Roman infantry overcame the Achaean infantry by envelopment.

Mummius then seizes Corinth - the chaos of the defeat and Diaeos' own flight to Megalopolis had left it functionally undefended - and functionally destroys it. The Romans will refound the city in 44 BC and while the site isn't uninhabited in the meantime, the Roman destruction was complete enough to send shockwaves through the Greek world, especially coming in the same year the Romans would also destroy Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War (149-146). The Roman Republic now sets a rather firmer policy in Greece: while the Greek states will remain nominally independent, they are demilitarized, their defensive walls removed (Paus 7.16.9) and all federal leagues disbanded. Moreover, the Romans reconfigured the internal government of the poleis towards broad oligarchies with property requirements (that is, states rather more like Rome), presumably concluding that the chaotic democracies had been part of the political pressure that had produced the war.

The final episode in this period comes a decade later with the end of the Kingdom of Pergamon. The last king of the Attalid dynasty, the son of Eumenes II of whom we've seen so much, was Attalus III. He died childless in 133 and in his will bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman Republic. It's possible that Attalus supposed the Romans would select an appropriate member of his extended family tree, but for internal political reasons intersecting with the already-quite-complicated career of Tiberius Gracchus, the Romans opted to annex the kingdom and turn it into a province. A pretender named Aristonikos attempted to lead a popular resistance to Roman rule, manages to fend off Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus (cos. 131), but was defeated by Marcus Perperna (cos. 130) the following year. We don't have a lot of information about the tactical composition of Aristonikos' army; our sources represent Aristonikos as primarily raising an army of slaves promised freedom if they fought for him.

Via Wikipedia, the territorial control of the Roman Republic by 133. As you can see, in addition to mopping up the Aegean, the Romans have been quite busy in North Africa, Spain and southern Gaul.

The Mithridatic Wars (88-63)

The next major set of Roman wars and Roman expansion in the East concern the Kingdom of Pontus and its king, Mithridates VI (r. 120(ish)-63). The Kingdom of Pontus was an odd fragment of Alexander's empire: in the chaos after Alexander's death, a noble Persian family - the Mithridatic dynasty, so named because most of its kings took the name Mithridates - who had been the rulers of Cius, a city in Mysia (which is not in Pontus, but is in Anatolia) had ended up securing control of the region and established a kingdom and a dynasty in the 280s. The kingdom was a complex one as well: the coastal regions had been exposed to steady Greek colonization in the 8th and 7th centuries, resulting in a bunch of coastal poleis, but the interior populace was Cappadocian and Paphlagonian, with an ethnically Iranian aristocracy and quite a bit of Persian Zoroastrian religion, alongside quite a bit of Greek religion and the language of the bureaucracy, at least by the Mithridatic Wars was Greek. A complex place.

The Kingdom of Pontus had been broadly pro-Roman during the later half of the second century, but that policy changed markedly in the first century with the reign of Mithridates VI Eupator. Mithridates was ambitious, aggressive, charismatic and capable and set about expanding his kingdom, engaging in early conquests along the Black Sea, in the Crimea and in central Anatolia. This eventually fell afoul of Rome in the 90s over Mithridates' efforts to subdue the kingdom of Cappadocia. Mithridates had overthrown the relatively long-standing Ariathid dynasty in 95BC and occupied the kingdom; the Romans demanded restoration of Cappadocian rule and initially, Mithridates complied (App. Mith. 10). At roughly the same time, Mithridates had also defeated Nicomedes III of Bithynia; the Romans demanded that he back off of that too (App. Mith. 11) and it seems like at this point Mithridates was looking for a ripe opportunity to try to expel Roman influence from Anatolia.

Via Wikipedia, a map of the Kingdom of Pontus at its greatest extent. The darkest purple indicates the core Pontic state.

The opportunity comes with the outbreak of the Social War in Italy (91-88), which left minimal Roman forces in the East. Mithridates took the opportunity (along with a continuing conflict with Roman-allied Bithynia) to overrun basically all of Roman-controlled Anatolia, overrunning Cappadocia and Bithynia in 89 and then the Roman province of Asia (what had been Pergamon) in 88, defeating the relatively modest Roman forces in the East. According to our sources, Mithridates also instigated the mass slaughter of Roman and Italians in the province of Asia by the local populace; these fellow would have included the publicani - the tax farmers - who collected Rome's taxes and were widely hated for their corruption, but also a wide array of merchants, businessmen, bankers and so on, profiting off of Rome's new empire. Our sources give various unreliable figures (Val. Max. 9.2.3 says 80,000; Plut. Sulla 24.4 says 150,000; App. Mith. 22-3 reports the massacre but gives no numbers) for the number killed in the massacre - which has become known as the 'Asian Vespers.'

This, unsurprisingly, leads to a series of wars we generally divide into the three Mithridatic Wars (88-85, 83-81 and 75-63), though it's not clear these were always understood as separate wars so much as phases in a continuing conflict with pauses. These wars are further complicated by the fact that they occur in some cases in parallel with Rome's on-going civil wars. I don't want to get too deep into the details. Those interested in a blow-by-blow should start by consulting our most thorough source for the wars, Appian.

After some civil war shennagins, Rome responds by sending Lucius Cornelius Sulla (cos 88, 80, dict. 82-80) east to Greece, where Mithridates had managed to convince many of the Greek cities to revolt, presenting himself as the champion of Hellenic identity and culture against the encroachment of Roman domination. Sulla, operating with one eye on Rome (now controlled by his civil enemies), fought Mithridates' general Achelaus in Greece, defeating a large Pontic army at Chaeronea in 86 and then smashing him again the following year (after Achelaus had been reinforced) at Orchomenos. He also plundered much of Greece with brutality and rapaciousness (described in Plutarch's Sulla), sacking Athens, which had joined Mithridates, in 86 as well; this left Greece back under Roman control.

Meanwhile in Asia, a second Roman army under Lucius Valerius Flaccus arrived (having taken the northern route through Macedonia) with orders to fight both Mithridates and Sulla (because of the civil war). Flaccus, however, ends up murdered in a mutiny instigated by his subordinate, Gaius Flavius Fimbria, who then proceeds to secure the province of Asia, defeating an army led by Mithridates' son (also named Mithridates). But by that point, Sulla had also crossed in Asia and made a peace with Mithridates that left Mithridates ruling Pontus but without his recent conquests in 85. The incompleteness of the peace seems an obvious consequence of Sulla's need to get back to Rome in the context of the civil wars, though before turning to Rome, he backs Fimbria into a corner and the latter, recognizing he had no hope of winning a battle, commits suicide. Sulla then leaves Lucius Licinius Murena behind with two legions to re-consolidate Roman control of Asia, before heading off to Rome to become a bloodstained dictator.

Hostilities only ever really briefly pause and by 83, Murena, fearful that Mithridates was preparing to resume hostilities, moved his army into Cappadocia and raided into Pontic territory (specifically the town of Comana). While Murena continued to raid (claiming that Sulla had left no written treaty), Mithridates tried to appeal to the Senate, which eventually sent Quintus Calidius to tell Murena to cool it, which Murena did not do (App. Mith. 65), instead launching an invasion of Pontic territory, at which point Mithridates defeats him and secures Cappadocia (again). At this point, Sulla (now acting as dictator) sends Aulus Gabinius to tell Murena to chill the hell out and while Murena may have figured he could ignore the Senate, he was not fool enough to ignore Sulla and so the second war ends in 81.

The Third Mithridatic War (73-63) likewise sees Mithridates taking advantage of the outbreak of civil war within the Roman Republic, in this case Sertorius, a rogue Roman governor (who had been on the wrong side of Sulla's Civil War), operating in Spain. Appian (Mith. 68) represents Mithridates and Sertorious exchanging ambassadors and actively coordinating, though one wonders how seriously to take this. Still, it seems that, "strike when the Romans are fighting each other" was a deliberate strategy of Mithrdates', and he invaded Bithynia, once again asserting his rule over it. The Senate dispatches Lucius Lucius Lucullus with an army and Marcus Aurelius Cotta with a fleet (both cos. 74) to deal with Mithridates (while Gnaeus Pompeius is off in Spain fighting Sertorius).

Lucullus spends the next several years first fighting Mithridates out of Bithynia, before invading Pontus. Lucullus enters Pontus proper (probably in 72 or 71), defeats Mithridates at Cabira (same dates), at which point Mithridates flees to the allied kingdom of Armenia. Lucullus finishes securing Pontus, then invades Amernia, meeting and defeating the Armenian army first at Tigranocerta (69) and then again at Artaxata (68). Mithridates manages to evade capture however and slips back into Pontus, defeating the small Roman force left there (as most of the troops were with Lucullus, dealing with Armenia) at the Battle of Zela in 67. Worried victory was slipping away from them (it wasn't), the Romans dispatched Gnaeus Pompey to take command, which he does, arriving in 67 to find the victory essentially won, but never actually tracks down Mithridates (who escapes first to Colchis and then to Crimea), who commits suicide in 63 when his own son, Pharnaces II revolts against him.

Assessing the structure of the army of Pontus in all of this is difficult; the sources rarely give us the kind of clear information we'd like and many of the numbers they give are implausible. Still, what we see looks to be a late Hellenistic army along recognizable lines. The core of the Pontic army was evidently a Hellenistic style phalanx, perhaps mobilized from the kingdom's Greek populace; Plutarch terms them chalkaspides (Plut. Sulla 16.7; note also App. Mith. 17-18).

Plutarch also reports that, at least by the time he is fighting Lucullus, Mithridates has troops - Plutarch says 120,000, which seems unlikely - equipped with "Roman swords and heavy thureoi (read: scuta) [...] made up in a Roman-style phalanx" (Plut. Luc. 7.4). Here we should understand φάλαγξ ('phalanx') probably to just mean generally a close-order heavy infantry formation, so εἰς φάλαγγα Ῥωμαϊκήν, "in a Roman phalanx" would really mean, "in the form of a Roman legion." Plutarch is often imprecise in his military terminology in this way. Hellenistic states attempting to imitate Roman tactics was hardly new; in 166 at a military review in Daphne the Seleucid Army featured some 5,000 soldiers armored in mail and organized as a Roman legion (Polyb. 30.25), though further 'Romanizing' Hellenistic military reform is contested.

In any case, it clearly doesn't work. On the one hand, Mithridates VI puts up a better fight than most against the Romans, but on the other hand, while he is able to take advantage of Roman in-fighting to isolate and defeat small Roman armies, every time he is faced by a major Roman expeditionary force, he is quite soundly defeated. Mithridates thus represents the last real attempt by a state with the Hellenistic military system to stand up to Rome in earnest, though if Plutarch is correct, Mithridates himself seems to have abandoned his traditional Hellenistic army in favor of an imitation Roman one in the hopes of matching Lucullus, to no avail.

Final Consolidation (63 and After)

Part of the reason Pompey was so slow to finish off Mithridates is that after he had defeated (but not captured) Mithridates, Pompey opted to make a general settlement of Roman affairs in the East. We are, at this point, well into the chaos of the first century BC, full of freelancing Roman generals, of which Pompey is the freelancer par excellence. The decaying Seleucid Empire had created a power vacuum, initially filled by Tigranes, king of Armenia (and ally of Mithridates), but which would now be filled by Rome.

Pompey opted to create - under his own authority, for the Senate had authorized no such thing - three new Roman provinces. Bithynia and most of Pontus were merged into Bythnia et Pontus, while southern coastal Anatolia became the province of Cilicia and the rump remains of the Seleucid kingdom were formed into the province of Syria, while the province of Asia was also expanded. Pompey also recognized allied client kingdoms in Galatia, Cappadocia, Commagene, Osroene, Armenia, Palmyra and Judaea (this is the Hasmonean kingdom), creating a buffer between Rome and the growing Parthian Empire to the East. Pontus' northern holdings along the Sea of Azov, the Bosphoran Kingdom, went to Pharnaces II, Mithridates' rebellious son, as a reward for having finally murdered his father.

Via Wikipedia, a map - and actually a pretty good one - of Pompey's settlements in the East.

The reorganization, eventually confirmed legislatively in Rome in 59 (amidst a great deal of political shenanigans) formalized Roman control in the East, although by this point Roman military dominance in the region had been quite clear for almost a century. The sole remaining major Hellenistic power, Ptolemaic Egypt, was increasingly weak and had essentially existed as a Roman vassal-stage since it had needed to rely on the senatus consultum for its continued existence in 168. It is certainly possible to imagine that an effective ruler might have turned the Ptolemaic Kingdom back into a major player, but the Ptolemaic dynasty instead produced a succession of weak and ineffective rulers (intermixed with revolt and dynastic civil war), culminating in Cleopatra VII, who was not weak, but also not effective. In 58 BC, the kingdom of Cyprus (which had its own Ptolemaic dynasty) was abolished and annexed into the province of Cilicia.

In the decades that followed, Roman rule in the region expanded in fits and starts, but there was no longer any meaningful military contest. Nor do we see any further efforts to use clearly Hellenistic-style armies to fight off Roman ones. Instead, the fighting that will matter will be Rome's civil wars, with Roman armies (albeit some of them funded out of the pockets of Ptolemaic Egypt) fighting each other and the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean left to endure the results, whatever they might be.

The next wave of expanding Roman power came after the Battle of Actium (31), which left Octavian (soon to be Augustus) as sole ruler of the Roman world. Many of the client states of the east had supported either Marcus Antonius (or worse yet, Brutus and Cassius) and so now saw their independence curtailed. Cleopatra's Egypt was annexed into the new Roman province of Alexandrea et Aegyptus, to be governed by a prefect under Augustus. The Galatian kingdom, on the death of its last king Amyntas (r. 36-25) was annexed as well, being made into the new Roman province of Galatia. The drift of Judaea, by this point ruled by the Herodian dynasty which had replaced the Hasmonean one, into direct Roman rule is complicated to say the least, but we may simply note that the autonomy of the kingdom (later four tetrarchies) was steadily reduced (including the imposition of a Roman governor in 6 AD), with direct Roman control permanently established in the 90s, AD. Commagene and Cappadocia were annexed into Roman provinces by the second emperor, Tiberius, in 17 AD.

Via the Ancient World Mapping Center, the extent of the Roman Empire under Augustus.

Of course that wasn't the end of the Hellenistic legacy. At least some of the trappings of Hellenistic kingship, while initially rejected - quite explicitly - by Augustus, would eventually become assimilated in part into the new imperial Roman monarchy, while of course by the late Republic, Hellenistic philosophy, literature and art were already mainstays of the Roman elite. Most of the militaria and tactics of the Hellenistic military system were abandoned - the Romans will make no use of sarisae - but Hellenistic military theory survived in military manuals, continuing into Byzantine military literature (like the Emperor Maurice's (r. 582-602) Strategikon or Leo VI's (r. 886-912) Tactika).

But the political and military order created by Alexander and the chaos after his death was gone, replaced by the world Rome had conquered and the legions it had used to do it.