raught did not take effect quickly
enough, presented his neck for the fatal stroke to a Celtic
mercenary Betuitus. So died in 691 Mithradates Eupator,
in the sixty-eighth year of his life and the fifty-seventh of his reign,
twenty-six years after he had for the first time taken the field
against the Romans. The dead body, which king Pharnaces sent
as a voucher of his merits and of his loyalty to Pompeius, was by order
of the latter laid in the royal sepulchre of Sinope.

The death of Mithradates was looked on by the Romans as equivalent
to a victory: the messengers who reported to the general
the catastrophe appeared crowned with laurel, as if they had a victory
to announce, in the Roman camp before Jericho. In him a great
enemy was borne to the tomb, a greater than had ever yet withstood
the Romans in the indolent east. Instinctively the multitude felt
this: as formerly Scipio had triumphed even more over Hannibal than
over Carthage, so the conquest of the numerous tribes of the east
and of the great-king himself was almost forgotten in the death
of Mithradates; and at the solemn entry of Pompeius nothing attracted
more the eyes of the multitude than the pictures, in which they saw
king Mithradates as a fugitive leading his horse by the rein
and thereafter sinking down in death between the dead bodies of his
daughters. Whatever judgment may be formed as to the idiosyncrasy
of the king, he is a figure of great significance--in the full
sense of the expression--for the history of the world. He was not
a personage of genius, probably not even of rich endowments;
but he possessed the very respectable gift of hating,
and out of this hatred he sustained an unequal conflict
against superior foes throughout half a century, without success
doubtless, but with honour. He became still more significant
through the position in which history had placed him
thanthrough his individual character. As the forerunner
of the national reaction of the Orientals against the Occidentals,
he opened the new conflict of the east against the west;
and the feeling remained with the vanquished as with the victors,
that his death was not so much the end as the beginning.

Pompeius Proceeds to Syria

Meanwhile Pompeius, after his warfare in 689 with the peoples
of the Caucasus, had returned to the kingdom of Pontus,
and there reduced the last castles still offering resistance;
these were razed in order to check the evils of brigandage,
an