Rome began the war with two footholds in Asia Minor and emerged with an empire reaching from Crimea to the Red Sea, across Asia Minor to the Caucasus and Euphrates valley. What began as another clash with Pontus drew in Armenia, the Seleucid and Parthian empires, Judea, and peoples of the Caucasus and Arabia. The outcome extinguished or subordinated several Hellenistic powers and prepared the ground for Rome's later rivalry with Parthia. Sampson therefore presents a decade of interlocking campaigns rather than the final round of a bilateral contest. The usual label, Third Mithridatic War, hides the conflict's geographic reach and its reshaping of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.
Chapter · 3:28-7:20
Why this was more than a Roman-Pontic war
The book's opening presents the conflict as a region-wide eastern war whose scale exceeded the final Roman struggle with Pontus.