page_title: Roman command structure during First Mithridatic War
section_title: Sulla
hierarchical_section_title: Roman command structure during First Mithridatic War / Statue of an envoy to the Romans at Rhodes / Commanders mentioned in the inscription / Sulla
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Museo Archeologico Nazionale.Qualche autore ha ritenuto (senza fondamento secondo Bianchi Bandinelli, Roma. L'arte al centro del potere, p.109) rappresenti il ritratto di Lucio Cornelio Silla.Busto proveniente da Roma This is a photo of a monument which is part of cultural heritage of Italy. This monument participates in the contest Wiki Loves Monuments Italia 2014. See authorisations. (wiki-ID: 0270422856-MIBAC) Further authorizations required by the Italian "Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape" (Codice Urbani), under Legislative Decree No. 42, dated January 22, 2004, and its subsequent amendments, regarding the reuse of the picture.This image reproduces a property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage as entrusted to the Italian government. Such images are regulated by Articles 106 et seq. of the Italian Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape under Legislative Decree No. 42, dated January 22, 2004, and its subsequent amendments. These regulations, unrelated to copyright regulations, establish a system for the protection of Italy’s historic and artistic heritage and its standards of dignity. Among other things, these regulations provide for the payment of a concession fee by those who intend to benefit economically from reproductions of property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage. Reproduction of this image is permitted for personal use or study. A further authorization by the Italian Ministry of Heritage and Culture is required for reproduction for any other purpose, and particularly for commercial use. Such commercial use includes, but is not limited to, use in (a) any form of advertising, and (b) any company name, logo, trademark, image, activity, or product.
context_page_description: Roman command structure during First Mithridatic War refers to the chain of command of the forces sent east by the government of Rome to exercise the Mithridatic War mandate, requiring those forces to defeat Mithridates VI of Pontus, who had evoked the ire of the Senatus Populusque Romanus by slaughtering all the Romans his adherents could find on a single, pre-arranged day, an event now termed the Asiatic Vespers. Previously in Roman history the war and the command structure would have been straightforward: the Senate would declare war, and the mandate to carry it out would be assigned to one of the two consuls elected for the year, with both being assigned if necessary, and ex-consuls being available as generals with the rank of proconsul. For a small war the consul might give the task to an immediate subordinate, a praetor, or if the task was small enough, a legate.
  Beginning in the times of the Mithridatic Wars, the mandates and the chains of command were complicated by a second, parallel series of conflicts, the Roman civil wars. The tension between the Patricians and the Plebeians had produced a system of two parties: the Populares and the Optimates.
context_section_description: Sulla is readily identifiable as the strategos, the "general" in charge, with the rank of proconsul. He had been elected consul for 88 BC and was assigned the Mithridatic War by lot, but his involvement in Sulla's first civil war that year prevented him from assuming command of the eastern front, and the next year he was not consul. He negotiated an arrangement with the consuls for 87 BC using the power acquired from his victory in the civil war (the head of one enemy magistrate decorated the Roman forum while the other went visiting the Africans to avoid losing his). They would keep their heads and have Sulla's good will in exchange for their sending him to the east as proconsul still in possession of the mandate. That course required him to command a province, which one of the sources says was Asia. All he had to do to be installed as governor was to take it back from Mithridates.
caption: Bust of Sulla.
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