of 667).

So commanding was the position of Mithradates, particularly by sea, that an embassy of Italian insurgents could invite him to make an attempt to land in Italy; but their cause was already by that time lost, and the king rejected the suggestion.
Position of the Romans The position of the Roman government began to be critical.

Asia Minor and Hellas were wholly, Macedonia to a considerable extent, in the enemy's hands; by sea the Pontic flag ruled without a rival.
Then there was the Italian insurrection, which, though baffled on the whole, still held the undisputed command of wide districts of Italy; the barely hushed revolution, which threatened every moment to break out afresh and more formidably; and, lastly, the alarming commercial and monetary crisis( 13) occasioned by the internal troubles of Italy and the enormous losses of the Asiatic capitalists, and the want of trustworthy troops.

The government would have required three armies, to keep down the revolution in Rome, to crush completely the insurrection in Italy, and to wage war in Asia; it had but one, that of Sulla; for the northern army was, under the untrustworthy Gnaeus Strabo, simply an additional embarrassment.

Sulla had to choose which of these three tasks he would undertake; he decided, as we have seen, for the Asiatic war.
It was no trifling matter--we should perhaps say, it was a great act of patriotism--that in this conflict between the general interest of his country and the special interest of his party the former retained the ascendency; and that Sulla, in spite of the dangers which his removal from Italy involved for his constitution and his party, landed in the spring of 667 on the coast of Epirus.
Sulla's Landing Greece Occupied But he came not, as Roman commanders-in-chief had been wont to make their appearance in the East.