The Emptying of the Island

In 88 BC, Mithridates VI Eupator, king of Pontus, went to war with Rome and overran the Roman province of Asia in a matter of months. He then did something that shocked even a Mediterranean world well accustomed to atrocity: he ordered the simultaneous massacre, on a single prearranged day, of every Italian resident in the province, and it was substantially carried out. Contemporary estimates ran to eighty thousand dead. It is remembered as the Asiatic Vespers, and it made reconciliation with Rome impossible for anyone involved.

The Greek cities of Asia Minor mostly went over to Mithridates, some with enthusiasm and some because the alternative was to be next. Chios went over too. But Mithridates did not trust the Chians, and he had reasons. The island's Roman connections were old and deep; a good many Chian fortunes were tangled up with Roman business; and during a naval action a Chian vessel had — accidentally, the Chians insisted, and it may well have been accidental — collided with the king's own ship.

In 86 BC Mithridates sent his general Zenobius to Chios with a fleet, on the announced pretext that he was passing through on his way to Greece. What followed is described by Appian in detail, and it is the fullest surviving account we have of the deliberate, methodical destruction of a Greek city-state.

Zenobius arrived at night. By morning he had occupied the walls and the harbour and posted guards at every gate, and the Chians woke to find their city held. He then summoned the citizens to assembly and told them, courteously, that the king had certain suspicions regarding their loyalty to Rome, and required guarantees: the surrender of all weapons on the island, and the delivery of the children of the leading families as hostages.

The city was already occupied. They complied.

Zenobius sent the weapons and the children off to the king, and then read out to the assembled Chians what Mithridates actually thought of them. They had sided with Rome. They had accepted Roman settlers among them and had not driven them out. Their ship had struck the royal vessel. But the king, in his clemency, would content himself with a fine. The fine was two thousand talents.

It was an enormous sum, and the Chians set about raising it, because there was nothing else to do. They took the ornaments and plate from their temples and brought them in. They melted down what they had at home. The women brought their jewellery and gave it up. When everything on the island that could be weighed had been weighed, the total was assembled and presented.

Zenobius declared it short. And then — this is the detail that gives the episode its particular horror — he declared that the shortfall was itself proof: it demonstrated that the Chians had held back deliberately, and that the king's suspicions had been correct all along.

He then had the entire population of the island driven aboard ships. Men, women and children; and Appian notes that their own slaves were posted over them as guards, which was a piece of deliberate humiliation and also, presumably, practical. The whole Chian people were shipped to Colchis, at the far eastern end of the Black Sea, at the far edge of Mithridates' empire, to be resettled among the Pontic subject peoples where they would never be heard from again.

They were saved by an act of solidarity that reaches back through several centuries of the Black Sea trade described in chapter 9. The Heracleots — the people of Heraclea Pontica, an old Greek city on the southern shore of the Black Sea with long-standing ties to Chios — learned what was passing along their coast, intercepted the convoy, and by force or ransom took off a substantial part of it. In time they brought the survivors home.

The restoration was completed by Sulla, who after breaking Mithridates reorganised the province and confirmed the island's freedom. An inscription from Chios preserves a Roman official's letter confirming the city's rights, and it contains a startling provision: Romans resident on Chios were to be subject to Chian law. In the whole of the Roman east, that is a rare and pointed privilege, and it is best read as an apology.

The parallel with 1822 is close enough to be uncomfortable, and it is not a coincidence but a consequence of geography. Twice, an imperial power that regarded Chios as rich, disloyal, and defenceless emptied it of its people in a matter of weeks. Both times the island came back. Both times it came back different.