His command style received unusually favourable attention from ancient military experts, and his campaigns appear to have been studied as examples of skillful generalship.

[3] Lucullus returned to Rome from the east with so much captured booty that the vast sums of treasure, jewels, priceless works of art, and slaves could not be fully accounted for.

He built the famous horti Lucullani (Palace and gardens of Lucullus) on the Pincian Hill in Rome, and became a cultural innovator in the deployment of imperial wealth.

In ancient sources it is attributed only to his consular colleague Marcus Aurelius Cotta after the latter’s capture and brutal destruction of Heraclea Pontica during the Third Mithridatic War.

[9] When Sulla arrived with the main army, Lucullus served him as a quaestor again; he minted money that was used during the war against Mithridates in southern Greece (87-86 BC).

[10] As the Roman siege of Athens was drawing towards a successful conclusion, Sulla's strategic attention began to focus more widely on subsequent operations against the main Pontic forces, and combating Mithridates' control of the sea lanes.

He sent Lucullus to collect such a fleet as might be possible from Rome's allies along the eastern Mediterranean seaboard, first to the important but currently disturbed states of Cyrene and Ptolemaic Egypt.

[11] Lucullus set out from the Piraeus in mid winter 87-6 BC with three Greek yachts (myoparones) and three light Rhodian biremes, hoping to evade the prevailing sea power of the Pontic fleets and their piratic allies by speed and taking advantage of the worst sailing conditions.

[12] From there he crossed to Cyrene where the famous Hellenic colony in Africa was in dire condition following a vicious and exhausting civil war of nearly seven years' duration.

[13] Lucullus is noted for his magnanimous administration of Asia province; he managed to calm Rome's resentful, near rebellious, Asian subjects and establish a modicum of peace.

When Asia's Roman governor, Lucius Licinius Murena, started and fought the brief, so-called Second Mithridatic War (83-81 BC), Lucullus was not involved.

Lucullus tried to solve the conflict through diplomacy, but eventually he launched an attack on the city state, defeated her militia in a pitched battle in front of her walls and started a siege.

[16] The most obscure part of Lucullus' public career is the year he spent as praetor in Rome, followed by his governorship of Roman Africa, which probably lasted the usual two-year span for this province in the post-Sullan period.

In these respects his early career demonstrates a generous and just nature, but also his political traditionalism in contrast to contemporaries such as Cicero and Pompey, the former of whom was always eager to avoid administrative responsibilities of any sort in the provinces, while Pompey rejected every aspect of a normal career, seeking great military commands at every opportunity which suited him, while refusing to undertake normal duties in peaceful provinces.

In the letter conveyed by Appius, Lucullus addressed Tigranes simply as "king" (basileus), something received as an insult, and probably intended as such in order to provoke the proud Armenian monarch to war.

[31][failed verification] However, this is refuted by Lucullus' conduct during his administration of Africa (c. 77–75 BC), the period of his career most conspicuously missing from the Greek biography by Plutarch.

During the winter of 69–68 BC both sides opened negotiations with the Parthian king, Arsaces XVI, who was presently defending himself against a major onslaught from his rival Phraates III coming from Bactria and the far east.

In the summer of 68 BC Lucullus resumed the war against Tigranes, crossing the Anti-Taurus Range in a long march through very difficult mountain country directed at the old Armenian capital Artaxata.

Lucullus led them back south to the warmer climes of northern Mesopotamia and had no trouble from his troops there despite setting them the difficult task of capturing the great Armenian fortress of Nisibis, which was quickly stormed and made the Roman base for the winter of 68–67 BC.

That winter Lucullus left his army at Nisibis and, taking a small, but apparently highly mobile, escort, journeyed to Syria in an attempt to permanently exclude Tigranes from all his southern possessions.

Though these brothers left Rome empty handed in about 72 BC, their plight was not forgotten and Lucullus now elevated one of them as king of Syria: Antiochus XIII, known as Asiaticus owing to the time he had spent living in Roman Asia province.

However, in his absence his authority over his army at Nisibis was seriously undermined by the youngest and wildest of the Claudian brothers, Publius Clodius Pulcher, apparently acting in the interests of Pompey, who was eager to succeed Lucullus in the Mithridatic War command.

The long campaigning and hardships that Lucullus' troops had endured for years, combined with a perceived lack of reward in the form of plunder, had caused increasing insubordination.

Instigated by Clodius, a series of demonstrations against the commander took place in his absence and by the time of his return he had largely lost control of his army and could not conduct further offensive operations.

In addition Mithridates had returned to Pontus during the same winter, and crushed the garrison force Lucullus had left there under his legates Sornatius Barba and Fabius Hadrianus.

Memmius delivered at least four speeches de triumpho Luculli Asiatico,[36] and the antagonism towards Lucullus aroused by the Pompeians proved so effective that the enabling law (lex curiata) required to hold a triumph was delayed for three years.

He established lifelong friendships with the Greek poet Archias of (Syrian) Antioch, who migrated to Rome around 102 BC, and with one of the leading academic philosophers of the time, Antiochus of Ascalon.

Antiochos and Herakleitos dissected it at length in Lucullus' presence, and in the ensuing weeks while the Roman party continued to await the arrival of the king from the south, Antiochos composed a vigorous polemic against Philo entitled Sosos, which marked his definitive break with Philo's so-called "Sceptical Academy", and the beginning of the separate, more conservative, school eventually called the Old Academy.

Plutarch, however, seems to be somewhat ambivalent as to whether the apparent madness was actually the result of the administration of a purported love potion or other explicable cause, hinting that his alleged precipitous mental decline (and his concomitant withdrawal from public affairs) may have been at least in part conveniently feigned in self-protection against the rise to power of his political opponents, such as the popular party, during a time in which the political stakes were often life and death.

Felix Jacoby FGrH 434 (Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, commenced 1923): Greek text, critical commentary in German - ed.