ced soldier, Quintus Metellus Pius, who was invested in
Sulla's stead with the proconsular commandership-in-chief over Lower
Italy; gave the conduct of the siege of Nola to the propraetor Appius
Claudius; and in the beginning of 667 embarked with his legions for
the Hellenic East.

Chapter VIII

The East and King Mithradates

State of the East

The state of breathless excitement, in which the revolution kept
the Roman government by perpetually renewing the alarm of fire and
the cry to quench it, made them lose sight of provincial matters
generally; and that most of all in the case of the Asiatic lands,
whose remote and unwarlike nations did not thrust themselves so
directly on the attention of the government as Africa, Spain, and
its Transalpine neighbours. After the annexation of the kingdom of
Attalus, which took place contemporaneously with the outbreak of
the revolution, for a whole generation there is hardly any evidence
of Rome taking a serious part in Oriental affairs--with the exception
of the establishment of the province of Cilicia in 652,(1) to which
the Romans were driven by the boundless audacity of the Cilician
pirates, and which was in reality nothing more than the institution
of a permanent station for a small division of the Roman army and
fleet in the eastern waters. It was not till the downfall of Marius
in 654 had in some measure consolidated the government of the
restoration, that the Roman authorities began anew to bestow
some attention on the events in the east

Cyrene Romans

In many respects matters still stood as they had done thirty years
ago. The kingdom of Egypt with its two appendages of Cyrene and
Cyprus was broken up, partly de jure, partly de facto, on the death
of Euergetes II (637). Cyrene went to his natural son, Ptolemaeus
Apion, and was for ever separated from Egypt. The sovereignty of
the latter formed a subject of contention between the widow of
the last king Cleopatra (665), and his two sons Soter II Lathyrus
(673) and Alexander I (666); which gave occasion to Cyprus also to
separate itself for a considerable period from Egypt. The Romans
did not interfere in these complications; in fact, when the
Cyrenaean kingdom fell to them in 658 by the testament of the
childless king Apion, while not directly rejecting the acquisition,
they left the country in substance to itself by declaring the Greek
towns of the kingdom, Cyrene, Ptolemais, and Berenice, free cities