XXXIX. Wherefore, remarking that he would leave behind him for Mithridates an enemy stronger than himself, famine, he set vessels to keep a guard on the merchants who sailed to the Bosporus; and death was the penalty for those who were caught. Taking the great bulk of his army he advanced on his march, and falling in with the bodies still unburied of those who with Triarius[286] had fought unsuccessfully against Mithridates and fallen in battle, he buried all with splendid ceremonial and due honours. It was the neglect of this which is considered to have been the chief cause of the hatred to Lucullus. After subduing by his legate Afranius the Arabs in the neighbourhood of the Amanus,[287] he descended into Syria, which he made a province and a possession of the Roman people on the ground that it had no legitimate kings; and he subdued Judæa[288] and took King Aristobulus prisoner. He built some cities, and he gave others their liberty and punished the tyrants in them. But he spent most time in judicial business, settling the disputes of cities and kings, and in those cases for which he had no leisure, sending his friends; as for instance to the Armenians and Parthians, who referred to him the decision as to the country[289] in dispute between them, he sent three judges and conciliators. For great was the fame of his power, and no less was the fame of his virtue and mildness; by reason of which he was enabled to veil most of the faults of his friends and intimates, for he did not possess the art of checking or punishing evil doers, but he so behaved towards those who had anything to do with him, that they patiently endured both the extortion and oppression of the others.