enemy. In the meanwhile, Lucullus came to Asia. He was a staunch partisan of Sylla, and of melancholy importance in Roman history: more than any other Roman, he transplanted the luxury of Asia to Rome. He was distinguished as a general, and as Cicero thinks so highly of him, he must certainly have had some estimable qualities; but he cannot have gotten his great wealth by fair means. Whilst Mithridates was besieging Cyzicus, Lucullus took a very advantageous position in Phrygia, on the Æsepus; and there, by cutting off his supplies, he put Mithridates to such straits that he was forced to raise the siege, after which he was no longer able to keep his ground any where. Mithridates indeed carried on the siege of Cyzicus too long; yet he ought not to be blamed too harshly for it, since the same thing has happened with generals of higher name. All great generals have made blunders in their turn, with perhaps the solitary exception of the Duke of Wellington. But the king now at once retreats, vanishes entirely from our sight, and is in the heart of Pontus whither Lucullus follows him. Here also Mithridates does not know how to defend himself at all, or to make any sort of stand; nor even how to impede the enemy when it was besieging the towns which, like Amisus, Sinope, and others, bravely held out; nor yet how to relieve a place; but he lets himself be driven out of his country, and throws him self into the arms of Tigranes with whom he was allied by marriage. All his great armaments, his hundreds of thousands of hoplites were dispersed; all the most important towns of Western Pontus, the truly favoured part of the land, were conquered. Lucullus now followed him across the mountains into Armenia, and besieged Tigranocerta in the Arzanene, in the district of Erzerum. The Armenian army was in the first battle scattered like chaff before the wind, and Tigranocerta also was taken after a somewhat better conducted siege, which, however, did not last long. Tigranes fell back before Lucullus. Gibbon very justly remarks, that under circumstances which seem unfavourable, the character of a people will sometimes strikingly change; but that sometimes it will only change in some of its features, and not in others. The Armenians behaved on this occasion, just as cowardly as the troops of Xerxes had done against the Greeks, and they had shown themselves the same at the retreat of the ten thousand; but they afterwards improved so much, that in the times of the Eastern Roman Empire, until late in the middle ages, the Armenian soldiers were among the very bravest, and formed the flower of the Byzantine army. Armenia is a very cold country, so that we can still less account for the former cowardice of the nation, as Gibbon likewise remarks: the Highlands of Armenia are much colder than Germany; in the neighbourhood of Erzerum snow often falls as early as towards the end of September, and quite commonly in October. Yet it seems that other