Varro was apparently so guilty that Hortensius resorted to dirty tricks which involved marking the ballots of the judges he had bribed, which caused a public scandal. Appius' good relations with Varro's family endured. Varro's homonymous son (born c. 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, commander-in-chief of the Roman armies in Asia during the first half of the Third Mithridatic War. Most likely Appius went 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 (Pontus), 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 69 BC. 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. Propraetor of Sardinia, 56-55 BC After his praetorship in 57 BC Appius was allotted Sardinia as his propraetorial province. Appius' propraetorship in Sardinia was uneventful, and he was succeeded there in 55 by Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. On the other hand, he was politically engaged before and after, attending the packed conferences at Ravenna and Lucca in spring 56 when Julius Caesar patched up the tattered coalition with Crassus and Pompey, and in about summer 55 marrying his younger daughter to Pompeius' homonymous eldest son Gnaeus Pompeius (born c.79 BC), thus ensuring his election to the consulate for the