Bithynia and Pontus (Latin: Provincia Bithynia et Pontus, Ancient Greek Ancient Greek: Επαρχία Βιθυνίας και Πόντου, romanized: Eparkhía Bithynías kai Póntou) was the name of a province of the Roman Empire on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey).

Due to the influence of Julius Caesar, then a young man and a guest-friend of Nicomedes, and an impassioned speech by the deceased king's sister Nysa before the Senate, the gift was accepted.

The guest-friendship had been offered to Caesar, a popular, to save his life by keeping him from Rome during a proscription (a kind of witch-hunt) by Sulla, an optimate in power.

Forever after Caesar had to endure scurrilous optimate slander about his relationship to Nicomedes, but Bithynia became a favored project of the populares.

In 66 BC Rome passed the Lex Manilia appointing Pompey, a popular, as Summus Imperator, a term that would find more use after the Civil War.

The last popular standing, Octavian Caesar, assumed the title imperator on a permanent basis and was granted another by the Senate, Augustus.

The Roman province of Bithynia et Pontus (et is Latin "and") comprised a coastal strip of hilly country containing tracts of intensely fertile, arable land, in a mild and moist climate, on the southern shore of the Black Sea from the Bosphorus to approximately the city of Trabzon.

Just to the south of the coastal strip was an east-west striking range, the Pontic Mountains, isolating the coast from the Central Anatolia Region, a temperate plateau of grasslands and low forests.

As for the eastern half of Pontus ("Lesser Armenia"), Pompey added its territory to that of the Kingdom of Galatia under the Roman client king Deiotarus as a reward for his loyalty to Rome.

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in 49 BC and started his civil war, many of members of the Roman Senate under the leadership of Pompey fled to the East.

The Galatian client king Deiotarus, ruler of the rump state of eastern Pontus (Lesser Armenia), sided with his old patron Pompey against Caesar.

With the Caesar in Egypt, Pharnaces II, the Roman client king of the Bosporan Kingdom and the youngest son of Mithridates VI, seized the opportunity and conquered Colchis and Lesser Armenia.

The rulers of Cappadocia and Galatia, Ariobarzanes III and Deiotarus respectively, appealed to Calvinus for protection and soon the Roman forces sought battle with Pharnaces II.

They met at the Battle of Nicopolis in eastern Anatolia in 48 BC, where Pharnaces II soundly defeated the Roman army and overran much of Cappadocia, Pontus, and Bithynia.

After defeating the Ptolemaic forces at the Battle of the Nile, Caesar left Egypt in 47 BC and travelled through Syria, Cilicia, and Cappadocia to face Pharnaces II.

Caesar met Pharnaces II at the Battle of Zela, decisively defeating the Pontic king and reassessing Roman dominance over Asia Minor.

In 45 BC, Caesar, now dictator of Rome, appointed Quintus Marcius Crispus as governor of Bithynia and Pontus.

Years later, in 16 BC, Polemon I, at the request of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and with the approval of Roman Emperor Augustus, married Queen Dynamis of the Bosporan Kingdom, becoming ruler of that realm in addition to Pontus and Cilicia.

[2] According to Cassius Dio, around AD 134 the Senate ceded control of Bithynia and Pontus to the Emperor in return for Lycia et Pamphylia.