peius had totally subdued the two mighty kings
of Pontus and Armenia. At the beginning of 688 there was not a Roman
soldier beyond the frontier of the old Roman possessions; at its
close king Mithradates was wandering as an exile and without
an army in the ravines of the Caucasus, and king Tigranes sat
on the Armenian throne no longer as king of kings, but as a vassal
of Rome. The whole domain of Asia Minor to the west of the Euphrates
unconditionally obeyed the Romans; the victorious army took up
its winter-quarters to the east of that stream on Armenian soil,
in the country from the upper Euphrates to the river Kur,
from which the Italians then for the first time watered their horses.

The Tribes of the Caucasus
Iberians
Albanians

But the new field, on which the Romans here set foot, raised up
for them new conflicts. The brave peoples of the middle and eastern
Caucasus saw with indignation the remote Occidentals encamping
on their territory. There--in the fertile and well-watered tableland
of the modern Georgia--dwelt the Iberians, a brave, well-organized,
agricultural nation, whose clan-cantons under their patriarchs
cultivated the soil according to the system of common possession,
without any separate ownership of the individual cultivators. Army
and people were one; the people were headed partly by the ruler-
clans--out of which the eldest always presided over the whole
Iberian nation as king, and the next eldest as judge and leader
of the army--partly by special families of priests, on whom chiefly
devolved the duty of preserving a knowledge of the treaties
concluded with other peoples and of watching over their observance.
The mass of the non-freemen were regarded as serfs of the king.
Their eastern neighbours, the Albanians or Alans, who were settled
on the lower Kur as far as the Caspian Sea, were in a far lower
stage of culture. Chiefly a pastoral people they tended, on foot
or on horseback, their numerous herds in the luxuriant meadows
of the modern Shirvan; their few tilled fields were still cultivated
with the old wooden plough without iron share. Coined money
was unknown, and they did not count beyond a hundred. Each of their
tribes, twenty-six in all, had its own chief and spoke its distinct
dialect. Far superior in number to the Iberians, the Albanians
could not at all cope with them in bravery. The mode of fighting
was on the whole the same with both nations; they fought chiefly
with arr