At the beginning of 688 there was not a Roman soldier beyond the frontier of the old Roman possessions; at its close king Mithradates was wandering as an exile and without an army in the ravines of the Caucasus, and king Tigranes sat on the Armenian throne no longer as king of kings, but as a vassal of Rome.

The whole domain of Asia Minor to the west of the Euphrates unconditionally obeyed the Romans; the victorious army took up its winter-quarters to the east of that stream on Armenian soil, in the country from the upper Euphrates to the river Kur, from which the Italians then for the first time watered their horses.
The Tribes of the Caucasus Iberians Albanians But the new field, on which the Romans here set foot, raised up for them new conflicts.

The brave peoples of the middle and eastern Caucasus saw with indignation the remote Occidentals encamping on their territory.

There--in the fertile and well-watered tableland of the modern Georgia--dwelt the Iberians, a brave, well-organized, agricultural nation, whose clan-cantons under their patriarchs cultivated the soil according to the system of common possession, without any separate ownership of the individual cultivators.

Army and people were one; the people were headed partly by the ruler- clans--out of which the eldest always presided over the whole Iberian nation as king, and the next eldest as judge and leader of the army--partly by special families of priests, on whom chiefly devolved the duty of preserving a knowledge of the treaties concluded with other peoples and of watching over their observance.
The mass of the non-freemen were regarded as serfs of the king.
Their eastern neighbours, the Albanians or Alans, who were settled on the lower Kur as far as the Caspian Sea, were in a far lower stage of culture.