ared in
favor of Mithridates. Such was the position of affairs when Sulla landed
in Epirus in B.C. 87. He immediately marched southward, and laid siege
to Athens and the Piraeus. But for many months these towns resisted all
his attacks. Athens was first taken in the spring of the following year;
and Archelaus, despairing of defending the Piraeus any longer, withdrew
into Boeotia, where he received some powerful re-enforcements from
Mithridates. Piraeus now fell into the hands of Sulla, and both this
place and Athens were treated with the utmost barbarity. The soldiers
were indulged in indiscriminate slaughter and plunder. Having thus
wreaked his vengeance upon the unfortunate Athenians, Sulla directed his
arms against Archelaus in Boeotia, and defeated him with enormous loss
at Chaeronea. Out of the 110,000 men of which the Pontic army consisted,
Archelaus assembled only 10,000 at Chalcis, in Euboea, where he had
taken refuge. Mithridates, on receiving news of this great disaster,
immediately set about raising fresh troops, and was soon able to send
another army of 80,000 men to Euboea. But he now found himself
threatened with danger from a new and unexpected quarter. While Sulla
was still occupied in Greece, the party of Marius at Rome had sent a
fresh army to Asia under the Consul L. Valerius Flaccus to carry on the
war at once against their foreign and domestic enemies. Flaccus was
murdered by his troops at the instigation of Fimbria, who now assumed
the command, and gained several victories over Mithridates and his
generals in Asia (B.C. 85). About the same time the new army, which the
king had sent to Archelaus in Greece, was defeated by Sulla in the
neighborhood of Orchomenus. These repeated disasters made Mithridates
anxious for peace, but it was not granted by Sulla till the following
year (B.C. 84), when he had crossed the Hellespont in order to carry on
the war in Asia. The terms of peace were definitely settled at an
interview which the Roman general and the Pontic king had at Dardanus,
in the Troad. Mithridates consented to abandon all his conquests in
Asia, to restrict himself to the dominions which he held before the
commencement of the war, or pay a sum of 5000 talents, and surrender to
the Romans a fleet of seventy ships fully equipped. Thus terminated the
First Mithridatic War.

Sulla was now at liberty to turn his aims against Fimbria, who was with
his army at Thyatira. The name of Sulla carried victor