he time of the Macedonian conquest. Mithridates IV. had married a
princess of the Greek race, the sister of Seleucus, King of Syria.
His grandfather had conquered Sinope and Paphlagonia, as far as the
Bithynian frontier. His father had helped the Romans in the third
Punic War, had been styled the friend of Rome, and had been rewarded
with the province of Phrygia nominally for his services against
Aristonicus, the pretender to the kingdom of Attalus, but had been
deprived of it afterwards when it was found out that really it had
been put up for auction by Manius Aquillius, who was completing the
subjugation of the adherents of the pretender. The boundaries of
Pontus at his accession cannot be strictly defined. On the east it
stretched towards the Caucasus and the sources of the Euphrates,
Lesser Armenia being dependent on it. On the south and south-west
its frontiers were Cappadocia and Galatia. On the west nominally
Paphlagonia was the frontier, for the grandfather of Mithridates had
been induced by the Romans to promise to evacuate his conquests.
But Sinope was then, and continued to be, the capital of the Pontic
kingdom, and both Paphlagonia and Galatia were virtually dependent.
This was the territory to which Mithridates was heir, and which, true
to the policy of his father and grandfather, he constantly strove by
force or fraud to extend. [Sidenote: Mithridates extends his kingdom.]
To the east of the Black Sea he conquered Colchis on the Phasis,
and converted it into a satrapy. To the north he was hailed as the
deliverer of the Greek towns on that coast and in the region now
known as the Crimea, which from the constant exaction of tribute by
barbarous tribes were, in the absence of any protectorate like that of
Athens, falling into decay. By sea, and perhaps across the Caucasus by
land, Mithridates sent his troops under the Greek generals Neoptolemus
and Diophantus. Neoptolemus won a victory over the Tauric Scythians at
Panticapaeum (Kertch), and the kingdom of Bosporus in the Crimea was
ceded to his master by its grateful king. Diophantus marched westwards
as far as the Tyras (Dneister), and in a great battle almost
annihilated an army of the Roxolani, a nomadic people who roamed
between the Borysthenes (Dneiper) and the Tanais (Don). By these
conquests Mithridates acquired a tribute of 200 talents (48,000_l_.),
and 270,000 bushels of grain, and a rich recruiting ground for his
armies. [Sidenote: His alliance with