Remarkably little is known about Ariobarzanes, the second ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus, especially when he is set beside his father and his son. He succeeded the founder, Mithridates I, in 266 BC, reigned until about 250 BC, brought the Paphlagonian port of Amastris into the kingdom, and left the throne to his son Mithridates II, who was still a child. The ancient writers devote scarcely more than a handful of lines to him, and nearly all of them come from the work of Memnon, the historian of the city of Heracleia Pontica, which itself survives only through the summary made by the Byzantine scholar Photius. Yet those few lines mark the first step in Pontus's transformation from a mountain state of the interior valleys into a kingdom open to the Black Sea. And the fact that one of the Tombs of the Kings in Amasya is attributed to him ties this shadowy ruler directly to the rock of the city itself.

Name, Lineage and the Problem of Numbering

Ariobarzanes is the Greek form of an Old Iranian personal name. The Encyclopaedia Iranica reconstructs it as *Ārya-bṛzāna- and suggests that it perhaps meant "exalting the Aryans"; the Old Persian form is reflected in the Elamite spelling Har-ri-pir-tan. Pauly's great encyclopaedia of classical antiquity likewise gives the name as Old Persian *Ariyavarzâna. The name plainly carries the Iranian origins of the Pontic dynasty: although the family ruled in a Greek-speaking world, it kept Iranian names such as Mithridates, Ariobarzanes and Pharnaces across the generations.

The name appears in several different dynasties in the Hellenistic history of Anatolia, and this often causes confusion over which ruler is meant. The Pontic dynasty descends from a family of Persian origin that governed the city of Cius (Kios) in Mysia. The first known member of the family is Mithridates of Cius; his son Ariobarzanes took over the satrapy of Dascylium, that is, the government of Hellespontine Phrygia, in 387 BC, formed a close relationship with Athens, was granted Athenian citizenship together with his sons, rebelled against the Persian king Artaxerxes II, and was finally betrayed by his own son Mithridates and put to death. The founder of the kingdom of Pontus was the son of this Mithridates II of Cius. The Pontic king Ariobarzanes was therefore, within the family, the great-grandson of that rebellious satrap and bore his name.

Numbering varies from source to source. Some works call the Pontic king simply "Ariobarzanes of Pontus", others "Ariobarzanes I"; a general account of the Kingdom of Pontus, meanwhile, gives the satrap of Phrygia the number "Ariobarzanes II". William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, published in 1870 and still used as a work of reference, lists under the heading "three kings or satraps of Pontus" the satrap as I and II and the Pontic king as Ariobarzanes III; in the same dictionary his father is called Mithridates III and his son Mithridates IV. The dictionary also places Ariobarzanes's death around 240 BC, unlike today's general consensus. In addition, the three rulers named Ariobarzanes who governed Cappadocia in the 1st century BC (Ariobarzanes I Philoromaios and his successors) belong to an entirely different royal line. The only connection between the second king of Pontus and the Cappadocian kings or the satrap of Cius is the name they share.

In Amasya's local historiography the confusion takes another form. In the second volume of his Amasya Tarihi, Hüsameddin gives the name "Ariyu Bazrân" to governors of Pontus in the Persian period: he regards the first Ariyu Bazrân as the true founder of Pontic rule, and relates that the second Ariyu Bazrân rebelled against the Persian shah late in life and was handed over to the shah's men by his son, the second Mihridâd, in return for a large sum of money, and was crucified. This second figure evidently corresponds to Ariobarzanes, the satrap of Phrygia, of the modern sources. Hüsameddin's list of kings, however, contains no Ariobarzanes as the second king of Pontus; this gap is taken up again below.

The Kingdom Inherited from His Father

To understand Ariobarzanes's accession one has to look at his father's founding story. Mithridates II of Cius was killed in 302 BC by Antigonus Monophthalmus on suspicion of collaborating with Cassander. Antigonus also wanted to do away with the dead satrap's son; but Demetrius Poliorcetes warned the young man in time, and the son, Mithridates, set out with a few horsemen and took refuge in the fortress of Cimiata in Paphlagonia. The sources relate that he later settled in the region of Amasya. Soldiers gathered around him from various quarters, his territory gradually expanded, and around 281 BC (280 by some reckonings) he assumed the title of basileus, or king. This is why later ages remembered him by the epithet Ktistes, "the Founder".

The sources give Mithridates a reign of thirty-six years; he died in 266 BC. He is said to have extended the kingdom westward as far as the Sangarius (Sakarya) river. Memnon records that after the death of Lysimachus in 281 BC the Heracleians, threatened by Seleucus, sought allies among their other preparations and sent envoys to the cities of Byzantium and Chalcedon and to "Mithridates the king of Pontus". This early closeness between Heracleia and Pontus forms the background to the events of Ariobarzanes's reign. Mithridates's royal tomb is reported to have been near Amaseia, then the centre of the kingdom, and later Pontic kings were buried in the same necropolis. On the lineage, Appian counts Mithridates as the eighth generation after the first satrap of Pontus appointed by Darius the Great, while Plutarch writes that the dynasty produced eight generations of kings down to the Roman conquest. The two accounts do not fit together exactly, and the count remains disputed.

Ariobarzanes was the second generation, building on this work of foundation. The state he inherited was still young. Bithynia lay to the west, the Seleucid state to the south, and right alongside were the Galatians, newly settled in Anatolia; most of the Greek cities of the coast still lay outside the kingdom. In such surroundings simply holding on to the throne was a considerable achievement.

The City of Amastris and the Legacy of Lysimachus

Ariobarzanes's name is remembered today chiefly for one event: the surrender to him of the city of Amastris on the Paphlagonian coast. The city itself was the product of a Hellenistic union of settlements, and it took its name from the queen who founded it. According to Memnon, Amastris was the daughter of Oxathres, brother of the Persian king Darius III; when Alexander married Darius's daughter Stateira, he gave Amastris, the cousin with whom Stateira had grown up, to his close friend Craterus. When Craterus later turned to Phila, daughter of Antipater, Amastris married Dionysius, tyrant of Heracleia, and after her husband's death took over the government of the city on behalf of their children. She then married Lysimachus; but when Lysimachus turned to Arsinoe, daughter of Ptolemy, she left him, returned to Heracleia and founded the new city that bore her name. According to Strabo, Amastris came into being through the union of four small settlements, Sesamus, Cytorus, Cromna and Tius; Tius soon broke away from this union, while Sesamus became the city's acropolis. The surrounding area was famous for the boxwood that grew on the slopes of Mount Cytorus.

When Queen Amastris was murdered by her sons, Lysimachus came to Heracleia and punished the killers. Memnon relates that on returning to his court the king praised Amastris's rule, Heracleia, Tius and the city of Amastris so warmly that Arsinoe wanted to become mistress of these places and, by persistent pleading, obtained them. Thus Amastris, together with Heracleia, passed for a time under the rule of Arsinoe's men. In 281 BC Lysimachus was killed fighting against Seleucus, struck by a spear thrown by a soldier from Heracleia; Heracleia regained its independence, but the cities taken from it in the time of Lysimachus had fallen piecemeal into other hands. The surrender of Amastris to Ariobarzanes was one of the last links in this dispersal.

Amastris Passes to Pontus

The only ancient text that describes the city's passing to Pontus is Memnon's. In Photius's summary the episode comes immediately after the account of how Patrocles, general of Antiochus I son of Seleucus, sent an army to this side of the Taurus, how the Bithynians ambushed and killed its commander Hermogenes, and how Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, made an alliance with Heracleia. According to Memnon, the Heracleians at this time spent large sums of money to recover Cierus, Tius and the Thynian territory; but Amastris, which had been taken from them along with the other cities, they could not win back, although they tried hard both by war and by offering money. Eumenes, who held Amastris, "was swayed by an unreasonable anger", in Memnon's words, and preferred to hand the city over for nothing to Ariobarzanes the son of Mithridates rather than accept payment for it from the Heracleians.

The identity of Eumenes is itself uncertain. Smith's dictionary describes him as a local dynast or ruler of the city, contemporary with Antiochus I Soter. The German historian Droysen proposed identifying this Eumenes with Eumenes I, later king of Pergamon and nephew of Philetaerus; Smith, however, sees no sufficient grounds for the identification. We have no text that tells us the reason for Eumenes's anger, the terms agreed with Ariobarzanes or the exact year of the handover. What is certain is that the city was not taken by the sword but handed over by its own ruler. The Dutch historian Jona Lendering concludes from this fragment that Ariobarzanes continued his father's policy of cooperation with the Greek cities of the Black Sea coast.

The political significance of this acquisition was considerable. Until then Pontus had been a state of interior valleys, grain plains and steep fortresses; Amastris became the kingdom's first important Black Sea port. That Heracleia was prepared even to go to war to regain its former city shows how much the place was worth on that coast. Control of the whole coastline would come only much later, with the capture of Sinope under Pharnaces I (183-182 BC). Once in Pontic hands, Amastris remained in the kingdom for a long time, until around 70 BC, when it passed to Rome during Lucullus's war against Mithridates Eupator. In the Roman period Pliny the Younger, as governor of Bithynia and Pontus, describes Amastris in a letter to the emperor Trajan as a fine city and asks permission to cover over the stream running through its centre, which had in reality become an open sewer. The city is today Amasra, a district of the province of Bartın.

The Question of Date: 279 BC or 265-260 BC

The date at which Amastris passed to Pontus is the clearest contradiction among the sources. General accounts of the Kingdom of Pontus place the event in 279 BC and say that the son of Mithridates took the city while his father was still alive. Entries on the city of Amastris, on the other hand, state that the tyrant Eumenes left the city to Ariobarzanes at some point between about 265 and 260 BC. The second date fits the years in which Ariobarzanes reigned as king (after 266 BC); according to the first, Ariobarzanes was not yet on the throne and the city would have been acquired on his father's account.

Memnon's text offers two clues to this debate. First, Memnon refers to Ariobarzanes not as king but as "the son of Mithridates". Second, the summary narrates the episode among events of the years following Seleucus's death and before the crossing of the Galatians into Asia (278-277 BC). One might consider that these two clues support the earlier date, and that Ariobarzanes may have received the city as crown prince while his father was still alive; but this is an inference. Photius's summary does not always follow a strict chronological order, moving on with loose links such as "at about the same time", and Memnon's work survives only through this summary and fragments. It is therefore right to give both dates together and treat neither as certain. What is certain is that Amastris passed to Pontus in Ariobarzanes's name, and that the city was not taken by siege but handed over by the choice of its ruler.

The Galatians and the Egyptian Force

Another episode linked with Ariobarzanes and his father is the repulse of a force from Egypt with the help of the Galatians. The Galatians were peoples of Celtic origin who crossed into Anatolia around 278-277 BC. According to Memnon, these bands, which had been ravaging the territory of Byzantium, were brought over into Asia by Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, under a treaty that obliged them always to support him and his children. They had seventeen leaders, of whom the most famous were Leonnorius and Lutarius. The Galatians first plundered Bithynia on Nicomedes's behalf, then chose for themselves the region now called Galatia and, dividing into three tribes, settled around Ancyra, Tavium and Pessinus. Smith's dictionary states that the Galatians came into Asia twelve years before the death of Mithridates.

The report of the Egyptian force does not appear in Memnon's summary; it is preserved in the geographical dictionary of Stephanus of Byzantium, in the entry "Ancyra", in an account resting on a historian named Apollonius. According to Smith's dictionary, Ariobarzanes and his father Mithridates sought the help of the Galatians to drive out the Egyptians sent by Ptolemy. Which Ptolemy is meant is disputed. The biography of Ariobarzanes attributes the force to Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The general account of the Kingdom of Pontus, by contrast, describes Ptolemy's policy of expansion, which began with the First Syrian War in the mid-270s, and his alliance with Heracleia, the enemy of Pontus, and assigns the episode to Ptolemy I. The difference is not merely a question of names; it also affects the chronology. Since Ptolemy I died in 283-282 BC, it is difficult to attribute to him an intervention that came after the arrival of the Galatians, and the reading that points to Ptolemy II is more reasonable. That the report survives in the entry on Ancyra suggests that the episode was preserved within a story connected with this Galatian city; its details are known only through these indirect transmissions.

A Death amid Conflict with the Galatians

The relationship with the Galatians soon turned into a danger for Pontus. Memnon writes that Ariobarzanes departed this life while he was in the middle of a dispute with the Galatians. His son Mithridates was still young; the Galatians treated the boy with contempt and plundered the kingdom. According to Memnon, Mithridates's subjects suffered great hardship and were rescued by the Heracleians: Heracleia sent grain to Amisus, present-day Samsun, so that the people could feed themselves and meet their basic needs. The nature of the help given to Pontus is thus clearly stated in the summary itself.

This help came at a price for Heracleia as well. In response the Galatians marched against Heracleian territory and laid the country waste. The Heracleians sent an embassy to them, headed by the historian Nymphis. By paying 5,000 gold pieces to the Galatian army as a whole and 200 gold pieces to each of their leaders, Nymphis persuaded them to withdraw from the country. Nymphis was also a writer who had composed a history of Alexander and his successors in twenty-four books and a history of his own city in thirteen; he was both a witness to and an actor in the crisis that followed Ariobarzanes's death. Reckonings based on Smith's dictionary, which place Ariobarzanes's death around 240 BC, date this embassy to the same year; today's general consensus, however, places the death around 250 BC, and the date of the embassy accordingly remains uncertain.

Memnon's brief record also sheds light on the end of Ariobarzanes's reign. The Galatians, whose help he and his father had once called upon against the Egyptians, had by his final years become the kingdom's neighbours and rivals. The kingdom's survival, meanwhile, owed a great deal to its relationship with the Greek city on the coast, that is, to the closeness that Ariobarzanes and his father had maintained with Heracleia.

Amaseia and the Interior of Pontus

During Ariobarzanes's reign the centre of the kingdom was Amaseia, on the banks of the Yeşilırmak (the ancient Iris). The city was the chief town of the interior of Pontus and its first capital; the royal palace and the royal tombs were here. Strabo describes his native city as a place that both providence and nature seem to have designed together, able to serve at once as city and fortress: a high, sheer rock dropping steeply to the river, enclosed on one side by a wall drawn along the riverbank and on the other by walls climbing to the summits. The two peaks of the rock are joined by a natural neck, and within this circuit stand both the palaces and the monuments of the kings. Two tube-like passages cut into the rock lead to water reservoirs that would never leave the city without water, and the river is spanned by two bridges.

Strabo's description belongs to a time some two centuries after Ariobarzanes, the late 1st century BC and early 1st century AD, and so cannot count as direct testimony about the city in his day. It does, however, explain why such a site was chosen as the seat of a dynasty. The interior of Pontus consists of fertile valleys separated from the coast by the Pontic Mountains; Strabo writes that herds of cattle and horses were raised in these valleys, that millet and sorghum were sown, and that the forests held wild grapes, pears, apples and nuts. On the coastal side timber, fishing and olives were prominent, and iron, silver, copper and lead were mined in the coastal mountains. The acquisition of Amastris must have given these products of the interior, for the first time, an outlet to the sea through a port under the kingdom's own control; this is an inference not stated explicitly in the sources.

The Tombs of the Kings and the Tomb Attributed to Ariobarzanes

The Tombs of the Kings in Amasya are the largest visible trace of this dynasty today. Five great royal tombs stand on the southern slope of Mount Harşena, in the area known as the Kızlar Sarayı (Maidens' Palace); nine more rock tombs lie within the fortress walls, and the total number of rock tombs around the city reaches twenty-one. Together with Mount Harşena, the site was placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2014. Local and international records assign the five tombs at Kızlar Sarayı to Mithridates I, Ariobarzanes, Mithridates II, Mithridates III and Pharnaces I. No tomb bears an inscription naming the king buried in it; the attributions rest on the architectural sequence and the list of kings.

The most detailed argument for this sequence was put forward by the German archaeologist Robert Fleischer, who measured and documented the tombs in 2002 together with the architect Falko Ahrendt-Flemming and the archaeologist Nicole Birkle. Fleischer labels the tombs A to E, starting from the right. Tombs A, B and C lie to the east, close to the well-preserved Hellenistic walls of the palace; D and E lie to the west. According to Fleischer, the three eastern tombs were cut not in the order A, B, C but A, C, B: the shape of the corridors and certain details of workmanship show that Tomb B was made last and squeezed in between A and C with considerable effort. On this basis Tomb A belongs to Mithridates I, Tomb C to Ariobarzanes, Tomb B to Mithridates II, Tomb D to Mithridates III and Tomb E to Pharnaces I. In the dossier submitted to UNESCO the same tombs are numbered I to V, and the tomb attributed to Ariobarzanes appears there as number III.

Tomb C differs markedly from Tomb A, which preceded it. Whereas the facade of Tomb A, attributed to Mithridates I, has a six-columned portico with a pediment, Tomb C has no columns and ends at the top in a rounded arch. Fleischer stresses that the series does not follow a straight line of development but alternates between a form inspired by Greek temple architecture and a columnless form with a rounded top; the same columnless, arched form reappears at the end in Pharnaces's Tomb E and becomes a new standard in Pontus. At one point in Fleischer's article the tomb that anticipated the form of Pharnaces's tomb is called "Ariobarzanes' Tomb B"; yet the sequence table and the description of forms in the same article show that this round-topped tomb is C, so one may suppose that the letter here is a slip of the pen.

The features shared by all five tombs apply to Ariobarzanes's tomb as well. It was planned to surround the tombs with corridors so that they would give the impression of free-standing buildings in the rock, but these corridors could be completed only around Tombs B, C and D; the photographs published by Fleischer clearly show the corridors behind Tomb C, attributed to Ariobarzanes, and the neighbouring Tomb B. The entrances to the burial chambers are set high and can be reached only by a ladder. Fleischer thinks that this height was very probably chosen in accordance with Iranian rules of purity, and compares it with the high entrances of the Achaemenid royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam and Persepolis. The chambers are small; with or without benches along their sides, these cells are sized for a single body or a very limited number of burials. Some parts of the tombs, such as the steps in front of the facades, the thresholds and the door lintels, were made separately and fixed to the rock with clamps and dowels. Fleischer's comprehensive book on the rock tombs of the kings of Pontus in Amasya was published in 2017.

The Place of Ariobarzanes in Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi

Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's Amasya Tarihi recounts the Pontic kings under the name "Mihridâds" and with a numbering of its own. The author gives his dates as years before the Hijra; counted back from 622, the year of the Hijra, these dates correspond roughly to years BC. The founder, Mithridates Ktistes, is in his account the "Third Mihridâd", who becomes ruler of Amasya 913 years before the Hijra. The king who follows is the "Fourth Mihridâd", and Hüsameddin writes that he became ruler of Amasya 888 years before the Hijra, that is, in 266 BC. This year corresponds exactly to the year modern sources give for Ariobarzanes's accession. In other words, in Hüsameddin's list Ariobarzanes's place is held by a ruler with a different name.

Hüsameddin attributes a wide range of activity to this Fourth Mihridâd. According to him, the king built a fortress with a town in front of it east of Amasya, where the Yeşilırmak meets the Kelkit river, to guard the city's eastern gorge, and named it "Baturya, Paturya", the place later being known as "Opaturya"; the author notes in a footnote that this town no longer exists. Hüsameddin says the king was known by the epithet "Filapatur" given him by the Greeks, and tries to explain the epithet through the Turkish word "batur" (hero). Again according to his account, the king subdued by war the peoples around Canik, Sinop and Trabzon, built a fleet to protect the coasts, reigned for forty-four years and died 844 years before the Hijra, that is, in 222 BC.

This account cannot be reconciled with the modern sources. In today's numbering the epithet Philopator belongs to Mithridates IV Philopator Philadelphos among the Pontic kings, and Sinope was joined to Pontus only under Pharnaces I. Hüsameddin's forty-four-year reign seems to merge the reigns of Ariobarzanes and his son Mithridates II into a single person; this is an inference, and it is not clear which source the author drew on. The acquisition of Amastris does not appear in Hüsameddin's account either; he mentions Amasra as a fortress that the much later "Seventh Mihridâd", that is, Eupator, "built" near Karadeniz Ereğlisi. This gap in the local historiography is one more reflection of how faint a figure Ariobarzanes remains in the ancient sources as well.

Death and Legacy

The date of Ariobarzanes's death is uncertain. The general consensus is around 250 BC, but a range between 258 and 240 BC is also given, and older reference works prefer 240 BC. That his son Mithridates II was a child at his father's death is known from Memnon. The son's accession cannot be dated precisely, but since he had a daughter of marriageable age in 222 BC, it is thought that he must have come to the throne well before 240 BC.

Once he came of age, Mithridates II forged ties with the Seleucid dynasty. He married Laodice, sister of Seleucus II Callinicus and Antiochus Hierax, and is said to have received Phrygia as her dowry. In the war between the brothers he sided with Hierax and, according to the sources, inflicted a heavy defeat on Seleucus at Ancyra in 235 BC. In 222 BC he married his daughter Laodice to Antiochus III, and another daughter to Antiochus's cousin Achaeus. In 220 BC he made war on the wealthy city of Sinope but failed to take it; Sinope was joined to Pontus only under Pharnaces I, in 183-182 BC, and after its conquest became the capital of the kingdom. According to Fleischer, the building of the royal tombs at Amaseia was also cut short by this move: when Pharnaces wished to be buried in his new capital, the corridor of Tomb E was left unfinished.

The reign of his son also shows how sound a legacy Ariobarzanes had left. After the earthquake that devastated Rhodes in 227 BC, Mithridates II, together with the other kings of the Hellenistic world, sent magnificent gifts to the island. No event in this picture belongs directly to Ariobarzanes; but that a king who came to the throne as a child, in a reign that began with Galatian plundering, should within a few decades form a marriage alliance with the Seleucid house, send gifts to a trading city such as Rhodes and grow strong enough to attack Sinope shows that the kingdom had not been driven to collapse under Ariobarzanes. A port on the coast, a friendship with Heracleia that had stood the test, and a tomb cut into the rock of Amaseia beside his father's are what he left behind.

A distinction needs to be kept in mind concerning the capital. General accounts present Amaseia as the kingdom's first capital and Sinope as the city made capital after its capture. Fleischer, too, writes that Amaseia was the capital of the Mithridatid dynasty for about a century, between roughly 281 and 180 BC, and that Mithridates I, Ariobarzanes, Mithridates II and III and Pharnaces I all ruled there. Ariobarzanes's entire reign falls within this century of Amaseia.

Chronology

387 BC: Ariobarzanes, son of Mithridates of Cius, takes over the satrapy of Dascylium.

302 BC: Mithridates II of Cius is killed by Antigonus; his son Mithridates (later Ktistes) flees to the fortress of Cimiata in Paphlagonia.

281 BC (or 280): Mithridates assumes the title of basileus; foundation of the Kingdom of Pontus. In the same year Lysimachus dies and Heracleia regains its independence.

279 BC: The date given in some accounts for the acquisition of Amastris by Ariobarzanes.

278-277 BC: The Galatians cross into Asia under a treaty with Nicomedes, king of Bithynia.

266 BC: Mithridates I dies; Ariobarzanes comes to the throne.

265-260 BC: The date given in other sources for the tyrant Eumenes's handing over of Amastris to Ariobarzanes.

Around 250 BC (between 258 and 240): Ariobarzanes dies in the midst of a dispute with the Galatians; Mithridates II succeeds as a child, the Galatians plunder the kingdom, and Heracleia sends grain to Amisus.

235 BC: Mithridates II defeats Seleucus II at Ancyra.

222 BC: The daughter of Mithridates II marries Antiochus III.

220 BC: Mithridates II's campaign against Sinope fails.

183-182 BC: Pharnaces I captures Sinope; construction of the royal tombs at Amaseia comes to an end.

2002: Robert Fleischer and his team document the five royal tombs in Amasya.

2014: Mount Harşena and the Rock Tombs of the Pontic Kings are placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources