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  Lucullus

  Lucullus

  The Life and Campaigns of a Roman Conqueror

  Lee Fratantuono

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

  Pen & Sword Military

  An imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

  S70 2AS

  Copyright © Lee Fratantuono, 2017

  ISBN 978 1 47388 361 1

  eISBN: 978 1 47388 363 5

  Mobi ISBN: 978 1 47388 362 8

  The right of Lee Fratantuono to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  For Katie,

  with respect and appreciation

  Contents

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1: From the Dawn of an Optimate Life

  Chapter 2: The First Mithridatic War

  Chapter 3: The Aftermath of War

  Chapter 4: The Third Mithridatic War

  Chapter 5: Armenia

  Chapter 6: Early Retirement?

  Chapter 7: Twilight Time

  Endnotes

  Selected Bibliography

  Preface and Acknowledgements

  The present volume is one of a relatively small number of books devoted to the Roman republican military and political figure Lucius Licinius Lucullus. Among these titles, the most extensive scholarly treatment of Lucullus is that of Arthur Peter Keaveney, Lucullus, a Life, which was originally published in 1992 by Routledge. A second edition from Gorgias Press in 2009 offered a new postscript that takes account of the Lucullan scholarship that appeared in the seventeen years since the original printing (this second edition reprints the main body of the 1992 work without edit).

  Keaveney’s book is a masterful treatment of a complicated time and a difficult life. It is aimed at a scholarly audience, with extensive documentation of sources both primary and secondary. Keaveney’s work assumes a certain familiarity with the history of the Roman Republic, in particular the political and domestic challenges of the first half of the first century BC. It seeks to offer solutions to several seemingly intractable problems in the timeline and investigation of Lucullus’ career, and to disentangle the thornier knots posed by contradictory sources. It is a valuable, indeed indispensable companion to any study of its subject, as the number of references to it in this work attests. Keaveney’s work has largely eclipsed the most comprehensive biography available before it, van Ooteghem’s French language Lucius Licinius Lucullus (Brussels: 1959), which still retains its usefulness on a number of points. Manuel Tröster’s Themes, Character and Politics in Plutarch’s Life of Lucullus: The Construction of a Roman Aristocrat (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008) is mostly concerned with Plutarch’s biographical treatment of Lucullus. Neither van Ooteghem nor Tröster offer the degree of coverage of all aspects of Lucullus’ life that Keaveney provides. It might also be useful to note that Keaveney, van Ooteghem and Tröster are not always easily obtainable, especially by students (let alone the general reader).

  From the start, I should make clear that my work on Lucullus does not in any way seek to replace, or even to supplement Keaveney’s. Rather, it seeks to make Lucullus more accessible to a wider audience of readers, in particular to students and devotees of military history and Roman military science. Certainly it seeks to offer fresh appraisals of the same problems that Keaveney and other scholars have researched and appraised. But scholars will want to turn first to Keaveney. The present book seeks to focus more closely on Lucullus’ military career than his political, in keeping with the nature of the series of Roman military biographies in which it appears. At the same time, it also endeavours to present relevant commentary on that career from Lucullus’ literary and artistic pursuits, in particular with respect to the question of Lucullus as a Roman Alexander, and of Lucullus’ relationship to Epicureanism. Throughout, it does not so much aspire to say something new about its subject, as it hopes to make a major figure of republican Rome better known to a wider audience.

  But why Lucullus? First and foremost, because among the figures of the military and political world of the late Republic, he is among the most underappreciated. Both personal achievements and the benefit of historical hindsight have made Caesar, Pompey and even Crassus appreciably more famous and familiar to later generations. Lucullus is all but forgotten, even among those with at least a passing interest in Roman republican history. This relative obscurity does not accord with the accomplishments of the man, both in the forum and the field; this almost studied neglect does not reflect the résumé of a man for whom, we shall see, the title ‘Last of the Republicans’ is not inappropriate (Keaveney would confer the label on Lucullus’ spiritual father Sulla). In the life of Lucullus, we may well find a microcosm of many of the problems that confronted Rome, both domestically and internationally; Lucullus’ life is emblematic of his age, and both his successes and failures attest to the particular realities of Roman republican life to a remarkably transparent degree.

  Another reason for a new consideration of Lucullus is that even after Keaveney, many passing mentions of Lucullus in works on Roman history, in biographies of his great antagonist Mithridates of Pontus and in volumes on republican military science refer to Lucullus as essentially a failure in his military and political quests in Asia, and, ultimately, a synonym for hedonist and decadent pleasure-seeker. This crude appraisal of the man remains all too common in otherwise praiseworthy treatments of the period. Lucullus’ enemies, one might almost think, performed exceedingly well in their enterprise of discrediting the man. Keaveney’s work was groundbreaking in its reconsideration of an old stereotype that may well never die out entirely; the present volume seeks to expand on that re-evaluation of a man whose last years were a testament not so much to decadence as to acceptance of a fate that was undeserved and unmerited (Keaveney, we should note, has also done great work in treating the somewhat similar problems posed by the life of Sulla).

  The abiding conviction that undergirds this book is that Lucullus deserves wider fame and appreciation for his deeds. A student of mine once commented that all she knew of Lucullus was the mention of him in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus. I could not criticize her for the inaccurate observation; Kubrick’s film was the first time I too had heard of Lucullus. And, like her, I did not realize at the time that the film referenced his brother, Marcus Lucullus, and not the more accomplished Lucius. In hindsight, the inadvertent ‘error’ of both my student and myself is instructive and worthy of reflection. Lucullus has been largely forgotten in comparison to his more storied rivals and colleagues. It is my conviction after spending many months with his life and story that he deserves wider fame. Both he and his brother achieved much in a difficult age; they
became the glories of their family and were a credit to the Republic that nurtured and inspired them. Lucullus and his brother also stand forth as almost lonely examples of fame from their family; before them, their lineage could boast a scattered sampling of noteworthy figures – and after them, there is almost nothing to report.

  Lucullus, too, offers a case study in the particular circumstances and the political and philosophical underpinnings of the collapse of the republican system in which he was so invested. To study Lucullus is to appreciate better why the Republic collapsed, and also to investigate closely how and why Rome expanded its power so dramatically toward the East. It is a story of incalculable significance for the later history of Turkey, Armenia, Syria and Greece; it is an adventure that is both eminently Roman and hauntingly Alexandrian. The relationship between Rome’s eastern expansion and the eventual transformation of the Roman political system from a predominately republican to a predominately imperial experience is at the heart of understanding the career of Lucullus. He was one of the most inveterate defenders of the ‘old’ republican system, of the traditional structures of Roman government and societal management. In investigating his life closely, we may discover along the way that his work in eastern realms contributed to the metamorphosis of that ancient system into what would eventually become the ‘Roman Empire’ of post-Caesarian, post-Augustan realities. In some circles it is popular to speak of ‘liminal’ figures. In the case of Lucullus, the trendy adjective is appropriate. Lucullus bridges the Republic and the Empire. He is a tragic figure in that he helped to bring about a world in which he would not have felt at ease. He also bridges the worlds of Sulla and Caesar, the one man his mentor and political and military father, the other an upcoming, rising star on the Roman stage who represented so much of what Sulla and Lucullus opposed. To understand better the life and motivations of both Sulla and Caesar, one may turn to Lucullus, the almost forgotten intermediary figure between the horrors of the Sullan Age and the no less transformative (and oftentimes violent) experience of the Caesarian.

  Lucullus was inextricably connected to the literary and philosophical worlds of his day. Cicero was certainly his acquaintance and, at times at least, friend; the poet Lucretius was likely among his associates as well. Given how today Lucullus is better known as the source of a recherché adjective (‘lucullan’) connoting luxury and decadence, it is profitable to consider his life in terms of his contemporary Roman experience of Epicureanism, a philosophical school that has often suffered the same imprecise, ultimately unfair characterization that has besmirched Lucullus’ own reputation. The study of Lucullus’ life and work offers the chance to see firsthand the delicate and sometimes tense interplay between political and military exigencies on the one hand, and the clarion call of poetry and philosophy on the other. Lucullus was a man of letters as much as he was a man of battle, sieges and financial administration. Somewhere along the path of exploring his life, we may hope to achieve a better understanding of the place of literature and the arts in the late Republic, and we may see in Lucullus a man who found it difficult to compartmentalize conveniently these seemingly disparate aspects of his life. The Lucullus that emerges will be a man of profound conviction – especially in the area of loyalty to family and friends, the exercise of the Roman virtue of pietas – and also a man who may well have been singularly unsuited to the demands of power and prestige in his age. His failure, such as it is, is the failure of his class and the system it had forged in the course of centuries of Roman political life. Beyond all this, Lucullus’ work and catalogue of accomplishments merit more than an advanced vocabulary item that references luxurious dinners and potent palatables – even if we shall see that the result of this caricature of the man is an abidingly happy memory among the descendants of the Greeks in particular, whose lands and people he so loved. The phihellene Lucullus remains a popular figure in the Greek world, even if only in circles gastronomical – and given the trajectory of his life, it is possible that he would have been content with this positive memory.

  If there is anything remotely novel in the treatment of Lucullus in these pages, it is perhaps to be found in the reappraisal of this consummate Roman politician and general as a man of letters and perhaps even a devotee of Epicurean philosophy, and as a man deeply invested in certain aspects of the Alexander myth. The Alexander image may serve, in the end, to unify certain seemingly contradictory facets and aspects of Lucullus’ life. We shall see how both Lucullus’ engagement with the Alexander legend, and his study of different Greek philosophical schools and the lessons of Epicureanism in particular, were recast in a republican reality that was not necessarily well suited to their lessons. Put another way, to the degree to which Lucullus was devoted to the maintenance of the Roman Republic, he was also stymied in his de facto attempts to emulate Alexander and to pursue the teachings of Epicurus. Lucullus was enamoured of and loyal to a system that did not permit the free exercise of both his military and philosophical passions. His failure was in part the attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. It was perhaps mostly in his sense of pietas that he found himself unable to make the compromises that in several important regards characterized the work of Pompey and Caesar.

  In an important sense, the present work is an adventure story of the old-fashioned, perennially popular sort. It begins in an Italy that was convulsed by the ravages of civil strife in the so-called Social War, and continues in the mythic lands of Athens and the Greek islands, though not without sojourns in North Africa, Egypt and Cyprus. From there it proceeds to the Asian continent, to the site of the ruined city of Troy and beyond into Cappadocia and distant Armenia. It ends where it began, in Italy – in a Roman Republic that was irrevocably changed from the political and social reality whence Lucullus first set out. Like the work of Plutarch on which we rely for so much of our knowledge about our subject, it is a biography that seeks to understand better the motivations and accomplishments of one figure within a system that was both at its height of glory and in peril of lasting ruin.

  For the military historian, Lucullus’ life offers the chance to explore certain aspects of Roman military practice, both on land and sea. Lucullus was among the few Roman military commanders with a credible, indeed impressive record for victories achieved in both naval and ground combat. Indeed, his career falls within a period in which Roman naval power was increasingly needed to surmount the continuing plague of piracy in the Mediterranean. In ground operations, Lucullus was skilled in both infantry and cavalry management, and in the prosecution of siege warfare. To study Lucullus’ campaigns is to receive an education in the complete range of tactical military operations. The greatness of our subject is confirmed when we consider that his military successes were wedded to a keen eye for financial administration and diplomatic engagement. And the backdrop of Lucullus’ own wars is a canvas of battle: the Sertorian War in Spain; the Spartacus War in Italy; the aforementioned struggle against the pirates of Cilicia. The story of Lucullus’ life is the story of a Republic that had outgrown Italy before it could say it had fully mastered even that peninsula.

  Lucullus was undeniably a literary man, a man deeply invested in the romantic tradition of Greek epic as well as history and philosophy. He was well aware of the mythical adventures of Achilles and Alexander alike, of the lore of Homer and the Macedonian monarch. The world of Achilles and Alexander alike could not have been more removed from that of Lucullus’ Roman Republic. To appreciate the tension between two diametrically opposed world views is to begin to understand something of the enigma of Lucullus.

  This book is the result of the happy process of collaboration and consultation with a wide range of colleagues and friends. As ever, Philip Sidnell is a remarkable editor and wise counsellor, and to him I owe a continuing debt of gratitude. My first exposure to Roman history came at The College of the Holy Cross, where Professor Blaise Nagy remains a constant source of assistance and advice on all matters historical. Work on Lucullus has been an exercise in rememb
ering the teaching and example of Professor Gerard Lavery, himself a scholar of Lucullus and Roman military and political history. I have also benefited from the historical writings of my former teacher Thomas R. Martin. Shadi Bartsch has been a source of encouragement and inspiration in my ongoing scholarly endeavours; so also Alden Smith, Michael Putnam and Richard Thomas.

  Every other spring, I have the great pleasure to offer a lecture course on the history of the Roman Republic. The forty to fifty undergraduates who enroll in that class, and in its sister course on the Empire, are a constant source of encouragement and challenge on all manner of topics in the study of the history, literature and thought of the ancient Romans. To those many classes I owe a special debt. So also to Sarah Foster, major in Classics and chair of our student board for Classics, who has provided help and valuable advice in the course of both writing and lecturing on Lucullus, and who has never failed to remind me of the value of the study of the Classics for a better appreciation of our contemporary world and its political challenges. I am also grateful to my students Annie Roth and Emily Blaner for their assistance and help in the fall semester of 2016 in particular. So also to Elise Baer.

  The greatest debt I have is to my talented and tireless photographer, Katie McGarr. Katie studied Roman history and Classics with me at Ohio Wesleyan University, as part of her work for a degree in Humanities and History. She has travelled extensively in the territories (both mainland and insular) of the Roman Empire (by airplane, train, bus, car, ferry, hot air balloon – and of course on foot). In modern Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, she followed the steps of Lucullus and visited a wide range of sites connected to his life and work, especially in the Greek islands and Cappadocia. She has also had the opportunity to dine at and visit with the owners and managers of several of the restaurants in the eastern Mediterranean that are dedicated to the memory of Rome’s famous epicure.