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Asiatic Vespers

Asiatic Vespers proper noun: an incident in 88 BCE, in which a coordinated massacre of Roman citizens in various towns in Anatolia was undertaken at the behest of King Mithridates VI of Pontus, which served as casus belli for Rome to instigate the First Mithridatic War.

Proper noun

Asiatic Vespers

  1. (historical) An incident in 88 BCE, in which a coordinated massacre of Roman citizens in various towns in Anatolia was undertaken at the behest of King Mithridates VI of Pontus, which served as casus belli for Rome to instigate the First Mithridatic War.
    • Long before that year the Romans had had dealings with Mithridates²⁷ but they firmly held to the view that the first of their wars with the king was actually that inaugurated with the Asiatic Vespers and it was to that that they gave the title of First Mithridatic War.1995, Historia, Franz Steiner Verlag, page 34

Forms of Asiatic Vespers

alternative formAsian Vespers
alternative formEphesian Vespers
alternative formVespers of 88 BC

Origin of Asiatic Vespers

Alternative version of a calque of French Vèpres éphésiennes (“Ephesian Vespers”), coined 1890 by historian Théodore Reinach by analogy with Sicilian Vespers. Ephesus was one of the towns where the massacre occurred.

Questions about Asiatic Vespers

What does Asiatic Vespers mean?
Asiatic Vespers means an incident in 88 BCE, in which a coordinated massacre of Roman citizens in various towns in Anatolia was undertaken at the behest of King Mithridates VI of Pontus, which served as casus belli for Rome to instigate the First Mithridatic War.
What part of speech is Asiatic Vespers?
Asiatic Vespers is a proper noun.

Words near Asiatic Vespers in the dictionary

  1. Asiatic peafowl
  2. Asiatic peafowls
  3. Asiatic pennywort
  4. Asiatic pennyworts
  5. Asiatic Sarmatia
  6. Asiatic Vespers
  7. Asiatic wild ass
  8. Asiatic wild asses
  9. Asiatic wildcat
  10. Asiatic wildcats
  11. Asiatical

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Asiatic Vespers (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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