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Select Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, With Notes by J.r. King
Select Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero With Notes by Jr King Author:Marcus Tullius Cicero General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1880 Subjects: History / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select ... more »from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: INTRODUCTION TO THE ORATION CONCERNING THE COMMAND OF GNAEUS POMPEIUS. l. Mithridates VI, surnamed Eupator, succeeded his father on the throne of Pontus in B. c. 120, being then about eleven years of age. His power is but very inadequately expressed by the district in Asia Minor from which he took his title. In the south he inherited also from his father the kingdom of Phrygia, and northwards he reckoned among his subjects the tribes of the Cimmerian Bosporus as far as the Borysthenes, deriving no small portion of his soldiers from the hardy inhabitants of the Caucasus. Restless and ambitious in temperament, he was a general of consummate skill himself, and had secured a staff of experienced Greek and even Roman officers to lead his barbarian troops. 2. The earlier part of his reign was spent in extending and consolidating his power in the East, but he had from his boyhood conceived a grudge against the Romans, who had deprived him of his kingdom of Phrygia, which they themselves had given to his father. He first came into open collision with them in B. c. 93, when a dispute between himself and Nicomedes king of Bithyma, as supporting rival pretenders to the throne of Cappadocia, was referred to Rome for arbitration. The senate decided in favour of neither claimant, but allowed the Cappadocians to choose a ruler for themselves, and Ariobarzanes was elected king. In the same year he was driven from his throne by Tigranes king of Armenia, Mithridates' son-in-law, but was reinstated by Sulla, at that time praetor in Cilicia. 3. At the outbreak of the Social War, in B. c. 9...« less