Plutarch, a Greek writer living under the Roman Empire, wrote Parallel Lives: paired biographies of famous Greeks and Romans. This is the life of Lucius Licinius Lucullus, a Roman general in the last decades of the Republic — Rome run by a senate and elected officials, not a king. Plutarch pairs him with Cimon, an earlier Athenian commander.

Lucullus drove King Mithridates of Pontus, a Black Sea kingdom in what is now northern Turkey, into Armenia, and beat King Tigranes at Tigranocerta. He never quite finished the war. At Nisibis, in winter, his own legions — Roman army units — tired of his discipline and missing the gifts Pompey handed out, sat down and would not march. Recalled to Rome, he built gardens, brought the cherry from Cerasus on the Black Sea, and dined as if the East were a pantry. Pompey took the command and the credit. You walk into Eastern victories, open-handedness, and a city that moved on.