THE ARGUMENT

In the year B.C. 67, Aulus Gabinius had obtained the passing of a decree by which Pompey was invested for three years with the supreme command over all the Mediterranean, and over all the coasts of that sea, to a distance of four hundred furlongs from the sea. And in this command he had acted with great vigor and with complete success; destroying all the pirates’ strongholds, and distributing the men themselves as colonists among the inland towns of Asia Minor and Greece. After this achievement he did not return to Rome, but remained in Asia, making various regulations for the towns which he had conquered.

During this period Lucullus had been prosecuting the war against Mithridates, and proceeding gradually in the reduction of Pontus; he had penetrated also into Mesopotamia, but had subsequently been distressed by seditions in his army, excited by Clodius, his brother-in-law; and these seditions had given fresh courage to Mithridates, who had fallen on Caius Triarius, one of his lieutenants, and routed his army with great slaughter. At the time that Pompey commenced his campaign against the pirates, the consul Marcus Aquillius Glabrio was sent to supersede Lucullus in his command; but he was perfectly incompetent to oppose Mithridates, who seemed likely with such an enemy to recover all the power of which Lucullus had deprived him. So in the year B.C. 66, while Glabrio was still in Bithynia, and Pompey in Asia Minor, Caius Manilius, a tribune of the people, brought forward a proposition, that, in addition to the command which Pompey already possessed, he should be invested with unlimited power in Bithynia, Pontus, and Armenia, for the purpose of conducting the war against Mithridates. The measure was strongly opposed by Catulus and by Hortensius, but it was supported by Caesar, and by Cicero; and the proposition was carried.