captain Seleucus and the royal eunuch Bacchides conducted
the defence, the garrison plundered the houses before it withdrew,
and set on fire the ships which it could not take along with it;
it is said that, although the greater portion of the defenders
were enabled to embark, 8000 corsairs were there put to death
by Lucullus. These sieges of towns lasted for two whole years
and more after the battle of Cabira (682-684); Lucullus prosecuted
them in great part by means of his lieutenants, while he himself
regulated the affairs of the province of Asia, which demanded
and obtained a thorough reform.

Remarkable, in an historical point of view, as was that obstinate
resistance of the Pontic mercantile towns to the victorious Romans,
it was of little immediate use; the cause of Mithradates was none
the less lost. The great-king had evidently, for the present
at least, no intention at all of restoring him to his kingdom.
The Roman emigrants in Asia had lost their best men by the destruction
of the Aegean fleet; of the survivors not a few, such as the active
leaders Lucius Magius and Lucius Fannius, had made their peace
with Lucullus; and with the death of Sertorius, who perished in the year
of the battle of Cabira, the last hope of the emigrants vanished.
Mithradates' own power was totally shattered, and one after another
his remaining supports gave way; his squadrons returning from Crete
and Spain, to the number of seventy sail, were attacked and destroyed
by Triarius at the island of Tenedos; even the governor
of the Bosporan kingdom, the king's own son Machares, deserted him,
and as independent prince of the Tauric Chersonese concluded
on his own behalf peace and friendship with the Romans (684).
The king himself, after a not too glorious resistance, was confined
in a remote Armenian mountain-stronghold, a fugitive from his kingdom
and almost a prisoner of his son-in-law. Although the bands
of corsairs might still hold out in Crete, and such as had escaped
from Amisus and Sinope might make their way along the hardly-
accessible east coast of the Black Sea to the Sanigae and Lazi,
the skilful conduct of the war by Lucullus and his judicious
moderation, which did not disdain to remedy the just grievances
of the provincials and to employ the repentant emigrants as officers
in his army, had at a moderate sacrifice delivered Asia Minor
from the enemy and annihilated the Pontic kingdom, so that it might
be converted from a R