However, Mithridates fled ever further before him, to Panticapaeum in Crimea, and Pompey ceased his pursuit at the mouth of the River Phasis, sending on a portion of his fleet under Servilius to keep up the search, but turning himself and his army back south into Armenia.

The obstacle of the fast-flowing River Cyrus (or Cyrnus) was surmounted by having the horses and pack animals cross upstream of the main army, in order to "break the violence of the current with their bodies", as Dio says, so that the bulk of Pompey's force could then ford the shallows further downstream, without being swept off their feet.

Hoping to encourage the Albanians to indeed offer a pitched battle and emerge from the surrounding woodland, Pompey was anxious not to reveal his superiority in numbers, and so concealed much of his infantry behind a screen of cavalry; the legionaries kneeling motionless behind their shields.

Pompey had placed his cavalry in a thin screen ahead of his hidden infantry, and when the Albanians charged out of the woods the Roman horsemen turned and pretended to flee, in order to draw the enemy in.

A large part of the Albanian force was thus assailed on all sides and caught by Pompey in a perfect encirclement almost as complete, and achieved in a similar way, as that effected by Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae.

[7] Plutarch writes that this attack of the Albanians was led by a brother of Oroeses named Cosis who, when the fighting was thus raging at close quarters, "rushed upon Pompey himself and smote him with a javelin on the fold of his breastplate.

[5] Those Albanians who had managed to escape the encirclement, or who had not charged full ahead, now sought to melt back into the surrounding trees and flee, presumably including in their number Oroeses himself, who survived.