Appius Claudius Pulcher (consul 54 BC) - Early Career, 76-67 BC

Early Career, 76-67 BC

His father's death left him head of his powerful family aged 20 or 21, but encumbered with two younger brothers, two unmarried sisters and little funds. This was only a relative poverty, but it proves the integrity of his father, who obviously did not profit much, if at all, from the proscription period when less scrupulous characters, most notoriously Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gaius Curio pater, made enormous fortunes from the confiscated properties of Sulla's Marian victims.
Appius found generous help from Lucius Lucullus, who upon returning from his African command in 75 BC agreed to marry the youngest sister without a dowry. He also handed over a significant legacy to Appius, who in later life marked his household's return to opulent circumstances from this gift.

Appius quickly returned the favour in political life. A promising young orator, the same year he agreed to collusively prosecute A. Terentius Varro (praetor 77), recently returned from his Asian command. Varro was a close friend and relative of Lucullus and of the chief advocate of his defense Quintus Hortensius, Rome's leading orator at the time. But Varro was apparently so guilty that Hortensius resorted to dirty tricks which involved marking the ballots of the judges he had bribed, and caused a public scandal.
Appius' good relations with Varro's family endured. Varro's homonymous son (born ca.80 BC) was later one of his closest friends, serving as quaestor in the year of Appius' death, and later one of the most contentious and interesting characters of the early Augustan regime in modern scholarship: A. Terentius Varro Murena, who died in the early weeks (or days) of his consulate in 23 BC.

He served on the staff of his brother-in-law Lucullus, Roman commander in chief during the Third Mithridatic War. Most likely Appius went out with Lucullus from the beginning in early 73 BC, although he is not directly attested in the east until the autumn of 71 following the occupation of eastern Kappadokia Pontike, when Lucullus sent him to the Armenian king Tigranes to demand the surrender of Mithridates VI.
His manner and speech offended Tigranes, the self-styled King of Kings, who for more than twenty years had been accustomed to grovelling oriental court ceremony. This was not just every day Roman frankness, but Claudian arrogance and appietas. The failure of this mission precipitated Rome's first war with Armenia, which Lucullus began in summer 69.
Lucullus perhaps sent young Appius with deliberate purpose, knowing full well that his manner was likely to be ill received at the court of the King of Kings. He might have sent L. Fannius or L. Magius, both of whom had experience at the Pontic court, and his letter to Tigranes addressing him simply as King, rather than King of Kings, was almost certainly a deliberate insult of the more refined diplomatic sort. Tigranes certainly regarded it as such.