of this imposing power, the development of
which occupies perhaps a period of twenty years. It was passive,
while one of its dependent states became developed into a great
military power, having at command more than a hundred thousand
armed men; while the ruler of that state entered into the closest
connection with the new great-king of the east, who was placed partly
by his aid at the head of the states in the interior of Asia; while
he annexed the neighbouring Asiatic kingdoms and principalities under
pretexts which sounded almost like a mockery of the ill-informed
and far-distant protecting power; while, in fine, he even
established himself in Europe and ruled as king over the Tauric
peninsula, and as lord-protector almost to the Macedono-Thracian
frontier. These circumstances indeed formed the subject of
discussion in the senate; but when the illustrious corporation
consoled itself in the affair of the Paphlagonian succession with
the fact that Nicomedes appealed to his pseudo-Pylaemenes, it was
evidently not so much deceived as grateful for any pretext which
spared it from serious interference. Meanwhile the complaints
became daily more numerous and more urgent. The princes of the
Tauric Scythians, whom Mithradates had driven from the Crimea,
turned for help to Rome; those of the senators who at all reflected
on the traditional maxims of Roman policy could not but recollect
that formerly, under circumstances so wholly different, the crossing
of king Antiochus to Europe and the occupation of the Thracian
Chersonese by his troops had become the signal for the Asiatic
war,(11) and could not but see that the occupation of the Tauric
Chersonese by the Pontic king ought still less to be tolerated now.
The scale was at last turned by the practical reunion of the kingdom
of Cappadocia, respecting which, moreover, Nicomedes of Bithynia--
who on his part had hoped to gain possession of Cappadocia by
another pseudo-Ariarathes, and now saw that the Pontic pretender
excluded his own--would hardly fail to urge the Roman government to
intervention. The senate resolved that Mithradates should reinstate
the Scythian princes--so far were they driven out of the track of
right policy by their negligent style of government, that instead of
supporting the Hellenes against the barbarians they had now on the
contrary to support the Scythians against those who were half their
countrymen. Paphlagonia was declared independent, and the