Lucullus in Wikipedia

Lucius Licinius Lucullus (c.118-57 B.C.), was an optimas 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 became 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 BC, and at the battle of Tigranocerta in Armenian Arzanene, 69 BC. His command style received unusually favourable attention from ancient military experts, and his campaigns appear to have been studied as exemplary of skillful generalship.[1] Lucullus returned to Rome from the east with so much captured booty that the whole could not be fully accounted, and poured enormous sums into private building, husbandry and even aquaculture projects which shocked and amazed his contemporaries by their magnitude. He also patronized the arts and sciences lavishly, transforming his hereditary estate in the Tusculan highlands into a hotel-and-library complex for scholars and philosophers. He built the horti Lucullani on the Pincian Hill in Rome, the famous gardens of Lucullus, and in general became a cultural revolutionary in the deployment of imperial wealth. He died during the winter of 57-56 B.C.[2] and was buried at the family estate near Tusculum. The sober and witty philosopher-historian, Lucius Aelius Tubero the Stoic, labelled him "Xerxes in a toga".[3] After his great personal foe Pompey heard this, he came up with what he considered a very clever joke of his own, calling Lucullus "Xerxes in a dress"...