Hostilities between the Seleucids and Ptolemies have meanwhile enabled the Nabataeans to extend their kingdom northward and to increase their prosperity based on the caravan trade with Arabia and Syria.

The Nabataeans occupy the Hawran, and ...

…shortly after 85 BCE, their king Aretas III rules Damascus and …

…Coele Syria (Lebanon).

Nicomedes IV, who had fled once again to Rome in the first year of the Mithridatic War, is restored to his throne in Bithynia in 84 BCE.

Fimbria, his troops having defected to Sulla (originally the troops of Flaccus, against whom Fimbria had led a revolt), commits suicide.

Sulla is able to wrap up his affairs in Greece and Asia Minor, and return to Italy.

Cinna, still consul in Rome as the year 84 BCE begins, is faced with minor disturbances among Illyrian tribes.

Perhaps in an attempt to gain experience for an army to act as a counter to Sulla's forces, or to show Sulla that the Senate also has some strength of its own, Cinna raises an army to deal with this Illyrian problem.

Conveniently, the source of the disturbance is located directly between Sulla and another march on Rome.

Cinna had been working to transport his troops across the Adriatic in order to meet Sulla on foreign soil.

The troops are not relishing the upcoming fight, which promises no booty.

Their dissatisfaction is increased when they hear that the second convoy of troops who had been in transport had been shipwrecked in a storm.

Those that survived had returned to their homes.

Cinna orders an assembly in order to terrorize the troops back into obedience and is stoned to death by his own soldiers in a mutiny, his murder not due to his politics, but as more of a brief flare up of the mob spirit within his troops.

Sulla, hearing of Cinna's death, and the ensuing power gap in Rome, gathers his forces in Asia and and prepares for a second march on the capital.

The Syrians, weary of dynastic struggles after a bloody struggle for the Seleucid  throne, decide in 83 BCE to choose Tigranes as the protector of their kingdom and offer him the crown of Syria.

Magadates is appointed as his governor in Antioch.

Tigranes now conquers Cilicia and …

…Phoenicia, effectively putting an end to the last remnants of the Seleucid Empire.

The southern border of his domain reaches as far as Ptolemais (modern Akko).

Tigranes sends many of the inhabitants of conquered cities to his new metropolis of Tigranakert (Latin name, Tigranocerta).