Late Cappadocia

  General Description   The Cappaodican kingdom began and ended in the hands of other more powerful polities in Asia Minor. The kingdom grew out of suzerainty to the Achaemenid Empire when Alexander the Great toppled the Achaemenids and largely bypassed Cappadocia ^[1] , but the kingdom eventually returned to being a province under the next greatest power, Rome, in the early first century CE. Even during the peak reign of Cappadocian kings, the polity was fought over and used by the kings of its neighbouring polities to strengthen their positions of power or to buffer their state against the ambitions of another. This happened to such an extent that Mithridates VI Eupator, king of Pontus, placed both his nephew and son on the Cappadocian throne, only to kill the first to reinforce the claim of the latter, much to the antagonism of Nicomedes III, king of Bithynia at the time, who claimed his own right to a puppet on the Cappadocian throne. The incident resulted in the intervention of Rome who declared the ‘freedom’ of Cappadocia from monarchs (in theory) so that neither the kingdoms of Pontus or Bithynia could use Cappadocia for their own gains. The kingdom was then ruled by kings favoured by the Roman Senate until the death of Archelaus who was the last king of Cappadocia, places there by Antony.
As a result of Cappadocia’s relatively minor position during this time, very little textual (or other) direct evidence from the kingdom has survived. Numismatic evidence does give some detailed information about the chronology of kings, but even this is debated ^{[2] [3]} . Instead, much of what is known about the kingdom of Cappadocia comes from accounts of the foreign policy of its neighbours, particularly Rome at the time. The main historian who discussed Cappadocia was Strabo, and his accounts lack the detailed information on Cappadocia which other polities have ^[4] .

[1]: (Ansen 1988, 471) E M Ansen. 1988. Antigonus, the Satrap of Phrygia. Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 37, H. 4 (4th Qtr.), pp. 471-477.

[2]: (Simonetta 1977) B Simonetta. 1977. The Coins of the Cappadocian Kings. Fribourg: Office du Livre.

[3]: (Dimitriev 2006, 286) S Dmitriev. 2006. Cappadocian Dynastic Rearrangements on the Eve of the First Mithridatic War. Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 55, H. 3, pp. 285-297.

[4]: (Rostovtzeff 1941, 838) M Rostovtzeff. 1941. The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Volume 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.