The family of L. Licinius Lucullus was one of the oldest in Rome and one of those not too numerous ones which maintained not only the pride of ancient race but the idea that good birth carried duties with it. He was poor but excessively proud, and belonged to that small Conservative group from which Rutilius Rufus and Livius Drusus came. His mind was clear and highly educated, cultivated in the full sense. As a soldier he was extremely able. The way in which the ordinary politician made money and bought votes disgusted him. In the main he stood sternly aloof from the scramble for office and wealth. After Sulla’s death--he had been one of Sulla’s most capable officers--he retired to private life and watched with cold scorn the way in which the affairs of the State were mismanaged both at home and abroad; the long struggle with Sertorius, the rise of Pompeius, by good luck rather than, he thought, by merit. He had strong feelings and a good deal of the ambition that moves in almost every mind that is aware of its own powers, but he detested intrigue and had no aptitude for it. He was unpopular, because of his habit of saying what he thought, both in public and in private, about the corrupt politicians and vulgar scrambling money-makers whom other politicians abused in private but dared not offend in public. He had no party. Until he was fifty he had held no command or office of the first rank. But when the question of the campaign against Mithridates came up Lucullus felt that he had a claim to it and was prepared, despite his ordinary aloofness, to push that claim through. Nicomedes, the old King of Bithynia, had just died (74) and left his rich territory--a buffer state between the Roman provinces in Asia Minor and Mithridates’ kingdom of Pontus--to the Roman people. This the able and wily King of Pontus was not going to allow. He declared war, made an alliance with Sertorius, and marched into Bithynia. This was a serious menace. When Mithridates invaded Cilicia (73) people remembered the massacre of fifteen years ago and trembled. Pompeius wanted the command, but he was still busy in Spain; in the end Lucullus was appointed.