Chaeronea
About
Lucius Cornelius Sulla, badly outnumbered, routed the army of Mithridates VI of Pontus on the same plain where Philip II had beaten the Greeks two and a half centuries earlier. Roman sources claimed only a few dozen Roman dead against tens of thousands of Pontic casualties. The win broke Mithridates's grip on mainland Greece during the First Mithridatic War. Sulla marched the victory straight into his own bid for dictatorship back in Rome.
What happened here
A Roman army fights the way it camps: in lines, by drill, on ground chosen if possible. The legions form up in cohorts with gaps that let ranks rotate, throw a volley of heavy javelins at close range, and then close with the short sword, pushing behind the shield. Auxiliaries hold the flanks and do most of the cavalry work and most of the skirmishing. Battles are short and decided by whether one line breaks, and the killing happens in the pursuit rather than the fighting. The camp is dug and palisaded every night regardless. Afterwards the dead are stripped and the field is looted for days; the ground is remembered locally long after the campaign is a paragraph in someone's history.
In ancient writing
- Plutarch, Sulla 16–19
A local's own ground: Plutarch names the hills, has Sulla's men take the heights above the Pontic camp, and describes the scythed chariots failing on the level.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →