Pompey

At first he was disposed to finish his exercise, but at their shouts and entreaties he dismounted from his horse, took the dispatches, and led the way into camp. There was no regular tribunals nor had there been time to erect the military substitute, which the soldiers make with their own hands by digging up large clods of earth and heaping them one upon another; but in the eager haste of the moment they piled up the pack-saddles of the beasts of burden and made an eminence of them.

Pompey ascended this and announced to his soldiers that Mithridates was dead, having made away with himself because his son Pharnaces had revolted from him, and that Pharnaces had come into possession of all the power there, acting, as he wrote, in behalf of himself and the Romans.[*](This was in 63 B.C.)

Upon this the army, filled with joy, as was natural, gave itself up to sacrifices and entertainments, feeling that in the person of Mithridates ten thousand enemies had died. Then Pompey, having brought his achievements and expeditions to such an unexpectedly easy completion, straightway withdrew from Arabia,

and passing rapidly through the intervening provinces, came to Amisus. Here he found many gifts that had been brought from Pharnaces, and many dead bodies of the royal family, and the corpse of Mithridates himself, which was not easy to recognize by the face (for the embalmers had neglected to remove the brain), but those who cared to see the body recognized it by the scars.