Lesser Armenia in 218 B.C.

Lesser Armenia — Spring 218 BC · A Highland Marchland.

Armenia Minor — the snowbound highland country west of the Euphrates, where the Pontic Alps and the Anti-Taurus pile up between the river and the Black Sea. It is less a kingdom than a country of mountains: a thin scatter of fortresses and upland valleys held by Armenian dynasts and the fierce native tribes of the heights — Chaldians, Chalybes and Mossynoeci, the iron-working peoples through whom Xenophon’s Ten Thousand once fought their way to the sea. In 218 BC it is a marcher no-man’s-land, claimed in principle by greater powers but in truth ruled by the rock and the clan.

Armenia Minor lies along the upper Euphrates and the Lycus, a wall of mountains — the Paryadres and the Anti-Taurus — dividing the Anatolian plateau from the Pontic coast. It has no metropolis and no single throne in 218 BC: it is a loose, weakly-held country of local lords and tribal highlanders, lying in the seam between the Seleucid claim to all the lands of Alexander, the kings of Greater Armenia beyond the river, and the rising house of Pontus to the west. Its wealth is its iron, its strength is its passes, and its security is the sheer difficulty of the ground — the same snowbound heights that nearly destroyed the Ten Thousand on their march down to the sea.