Lucius Licinius Lucullus (c. 117 BCE–57/56 BCE), is an optimate politician of the late Roman Republic, closely connected with Sulla Felix.

In the culmination of over twenty years of almost continuous military and government service, he becomes the main conqueror of the eastern kingdoms in the course of the Third Mithridatic War, exhibiting extraordinary generalship abilities in diverse situations, most famously during the siege of Cyzicus, 73-2 BCE, and at the Battle of Tigranocerta in Armenian Arzanene, 69 BCE.

His command style receives unusually favorable attention from ancient military experts, and his campaigns appear to have been studied as exemplary of skillful generalship.

His rival Pompey half-jokingly calls him "Xerxes in a toga."

Lucullus returns to Rome from the east with so much captured booty that the whole could not be fully accounted, and pours enormous sums into private building, husbandry and even aquaculture projects which shock and amaze his contemporaries by their magnitude.

He also patronizes the arts and sciences lavishly, transforming his hereditary estate in the highlands of Tusculum into a hotel-and-library complex for scholars and philosophers.

He builds the famous Horti Lucullani, the famous Gardens of Lucullus, on the Pincian Hill in Rome, and in general becomes a cultural revolutionary in the deployment of imperial wealth.

He dies during the winter of 57-56 BCE and is buried at the family estate near Tusculum.