Lucullus had stayed in Asia after a…

Lucullus had stayed in Asia after a peace had been agreed between Rome and Pontus, and collected the financial penalty Sulla had imposed upon the province for its revolt; however, he had tried to lessen the burden that these impositions created.

Returning to Rome in 80 BCE, he had been elected curule aedile for 79, along with his brother Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus, and gave splendid games.

The most obscure part of Lucullus' public career is the year he spent as Praetor in Rome, followed by his command of Roman Africa, which probably lasted the usual two-year span for this province in the post-Sullan period.

Plutarch's biography entirely ignores this period, 78 BCE to 75 BCE, jumping from Sulla's death to Lucullus' consulate.

However Cicero briefly mentions his praetorship followed by the African command, while the surviving Latin biography, far briefer but more even as biography than Plutarch, comments that he "ruled Africa with the highest degree of justice".

This command is significant in showing Lucullus performing the regular, less glamorous, administrative duties of a public career in the customary sequence and, given his renown as a Philhellene, for the regard he showed for subject peoples who were not Greek.