weaker
of their barbarian neighbours, the Scythians, sought, in order
to shelter themselves from the pressure of the more savage Celts,
to obtain possession of the walled town, so that numerous
citizens were leaving it and the inhabitants already contemplated
its entire surrender.

Mithradates Master of the Bosphoran Kingdom

Such was the state in which Mithradates found matters, when his
Macedonian phalanx crossing the ridge of the Caucasus descended into
the valleys of the Kuban and Terek and his fleet at the same time
appeared in the Crimean waters. No wonder that here too, as had
already been the case in Dioscurias, the Hellenes everywhere received
the king of Pontus with open arms and regarded the half-Hellene and
his Cappadocians armed in Greek fashion as their deliverers. What
Rome had here neglected, became apparent. The demands on the rulers
of Panticapaeum for tribute had just then been raised to an exorbitant
height; the town of Chersonesus found itself hard pressed by Scilurus
king of the Scythians dwelling in the peninsula and his fifty sons;
the former were glad to surrender their hereditary lordship, and
the latter their long-preserved freedom, in order to save their
last possession, their Hellenism. It was not in vain. Mithradates'
brave generals, Diophantus and Neoptolemus, and his disciplined troops
easily got the better of the peoples of the steppes. Neoptolemus
defeated them at the straits of Panticapaeum partly by water, partly
in winter on the ice; Chersonesus was delivered, the strongholds of
the Taurians were broken, and the possession of the peninsula was
secured by judiciously constructed fortresses. Diophantus marched
against the Reuxinales or, as they were afterwards called, the Roxolani
(between the Dnieper and Don) who came forward to the aid of the Taurians;
50,000 of them fled before his 6000 phalangites, and the Pontic arms
penetrated as far as the Dnieper.(7) Thus Mithradates acquired here
a second kingdom combined with that of Pontus and, like the latter,
mainly based on a number of Greek commercial towns. It was called
the kingdom of the Bosporus; it embraced the modern Crimea with the
opposite Asiatic promontory, and annually furnished to the royal
chests and magazines 200 talents (48,000 pounds) and 270,000 bushels
of grain. The tribes of the steppe themselves from the north slope
of the Caucasus to the mouth of the Danube entered, at least in great
part, into relation