Mithridates II, the third ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus, made his name less through conquest than through a marriage policy that seated his dynasty at the highest tables of the Hellenistic world. During a reign that ran from about 250 BC to 220 BC, or by some reckonings to 210 BC, this young kingdom in the interior of northern Anatolia became kin to the Seleucid house, survived Galatian raids and turned into a party that had to be reckoned with in the balance of power in Anatolia. The king's palace stood in Amaseia, the city known today as Amasya. Like his ancestors, he must have been laid to rest in one of the royal tombs carved into the cliffs of that city; scholars still debate which of those tombs was his.

The surviving information is sparse and rests mostly on scattered remarks by ancient authors such as Polybius, Memnon and Justin. For that reason the dates of the reign are uncertain, the year of his death is unknown, and some details are disputed among scholars. Even so, when these fragments are pieced together, the outline emerges of a cautious ruler who tried to find his way among the great powers surrounding a small mountain kingdom through kinship, gifts and alliances.

The Dynasty's Origins and Amaseia

Mithridates II's grandfather, Mithridates I, came from a family of Persian descent that ruled the city of Cius in Mysia. Around 302 BC the diadoch Antigonus Monophthalmus had Mithridates's father put to death on suspicion of collaborating with Cassander and planned to kill the son as well. Warned by Antigonus's own son Demetrius, the young Mithridates fled to Paphlagonia with a few horsemen and settled in the fortress of Cimiata. With the troops who gathered around him he first established his rule in the region of Pontus, and around 281 BC he took the title of king. The epithet Ktistes, given to him later, means "founder".

The dynasty did not forget this Persian origin; on the contrary, it cultivated it carefully as a source of legitimacy. When Polybius describes the years in which Mithridates II's daughter went as a bride to the Seleucid court, he records a detail: Mithridates claimed descent from one of the seven Persians who had killed the Magus, and said that his family had preserved the kingdom on the Pontus originally granted to them by Darius. The claim rests on the founding legend of the Achaemenids, the story of the seven nobles who brought Darius to the throne. It is not a pedigree that can be verified from documents, but it is one of the early testimonies showing how the kings of Pontus presented themselves to the Hellenistic world, and it is known to have been voiced at the court of Mithridates II.

The centre of this new state in the interior was Amaseia. The inland part of Pontus, separated from the coast by the Pontic Mountains, consisted of the fertile lands of the Iris (Yeşilırmak) and Lycus valleys. On the coast there were Greek cities such as Sinope and Amastris, while inland there were small villages and a few larger settlements, the most important of which was Amaseia. The kings built their palace here and had their tombs carved into the cliffs above the city. Amaseia remained the dynasty's capital for about a century, from roughly 281 to 180 BC. Mithridates, the name most often used in the dynasty, means "given by Mithra" and shows that Persian religious tradition remained alive in this milieu. Pontic culture was a blend in which Persian and Anatolian elements prevailed in the interior and Greek elements more strongly on the coast.

The kingdom's economy also rested on this geography. The river valleys supported herds of cattle, millet, and fruit trees such as cherry, apple and pear. The coastal strip was rich in timber, fish and olives, the mountains in iron and silver; the steel from the mountains of the Chalybes had won fame in Greece. The kingdom was divided into administrative districts called eparchies. Amaseia itself was a walled city leaning against the cliffs above the river. We can speak of it thanks to the detailed descriptions written centuries later by the geographer Strabo, himself a native of the city; Strabo also notes that the monuments of the kings stood in the area of the palace.

Ariobarzanes, son of Mithridates I, had found support among the Galatians, who had only recently crossed into Anatolia together with his father, and had taken Amastris in Paphlagonia. Memnon tells a curious story about this gain: the people of Heraclea Pontica had both fought and offered money to recover Amastris, but Eumenes, who held the city, gave way to anger and preferred to hand it over to Ariobarzanes for nothing rather than sell it to the Heracleots. Ariobarzanes' reign was short. The year of his death is uncertain; the sources give a date somewhere between 258 and 240 BC, while the generally accepted reckoning is that the throne passed to his son around 250 BC.

Accession and the Galatian Pressure

According to Memnon, the historian of Heraclea Pontica, Ariobarzanes died in the middle of a dispute with the Galatians, and his son Mithridates was still young at the time. The Galatians treated the young king with disdain and ravaged the country. The people fell into severe hardship, and the Heracleots helped Mithridates's subjects feed themselves by sending grain to Amisus. Heraclea paid the price for this help: because it had supported Pontus, the Galatians now marched on Heracleot territory and laid it waste until an embassy was sent. At the head of the embassy was the historian Nymphis. By paying five thousand gold pieces to the Galatian army as a whole and two hundred to each of its leaders, Nymphis persuaded them to withdraw from the country.

This small chain of events shows clearly the conditions under which Mithridates II's reign began. Pontus was too weak to stop the Galatian raids on its own; the closeness it had built with the Greek cities of the coast was put to a real test for the first time, and Heraclea paid in gold for the help it had extended to Pontus. Even as he came to the throne, Mithridates had seen that his kingdom was a small and fragile state.

How young Mithridates really was is a matter of debate. In another passage of the same Memnon, a Mithridates acting on his father's behalf is mentioned at the time Amastris joined Pontus. The date of his accession is also unknown. The nineteenth-century scholar Clinton brought it down as low as 242-240 BC, while Droysen pushed it back nearly to 258 BC. Since he had a daughter of marriageable age in 222 BC, he must have succeeded well before 240 BC. Memnon's story of a child king can only be reconciled with these dates on the assumption that Mithridates came to the throne very young and reigned for many years; the sources give no further detail.

Despite this weakness, Pontus had a few solid supports. The founding ruler, Mithridates I, had made an alliance with Heraclea Pontica and had also enjoyed Galatian backing. The plundering the young king suffered at the outset did not prevent the Galatians from becoming allies of Pontus in later years; indeed, when Mithridates fought on the side of Hierax, he stood in the same line as Galatian contingents.

The Marriage into the Seleucid House

The most important event of the reign was a marriage that took place around the Third Syrian War (the Laodicean War), which broke out in 245 BC. The Seleucid ruler Seleucus II Callinicus, while fighting the Ptolemies of Egypt, wanted to secure his rear in Anatolia and for this purpose offered Mithridates a marriage alliance. The bride was Seleucus's sister, the daughter of Antiochus II Theos and Laodice I. She usually appears in the sources as Laodice, though it is not known whether that was her real name. The marriage is placed somewhere between 245 and 239 BC. Phrygia was handed over to Mithridates as her dowry.

The question of the dowry was still alive in the political memory of Pontus a century and a half later. In a long speech that Justin preserves from Pompeius Trogus, Mithridates VI Eupator, setting out the justice of his war against Rome, says that Greater Phrygia had been wrongfully taken from him. In his account these lands were a country the Romans had granted to his father in return for his help in the war against Aristonicus, and which Seleucus Callinicus had earlier given to his ancestor Mithridates as a dowry with his daughter. There are two snags in this passage. In the other sources the bride is Seleucus's sister, not his daughter. The phrase "great-grandfather" used in the speech also does not quite fit the generations, since Mithridates II was the father of Mithridates VI's great-grandfather. How far Phrygia actually came under Pontic rule cannot be traced in the documents either. That the dowry claim appears most clearly in a text of war propaganda suggests that later generations used this grant of land as the basis of a claim; this is an inference.

To understand what this marriage meant for Pontus, it is enough to look at the difference in weight between the two parties. The Seleucids were the greatest royal house in Asia; Mithridates was the ruler of a mountain kingdom east of Paphlagonia. Because the Seleucid dynasty could not fully control this part of Anatolia, it preferred to bind it through marriage rather than force it into submission by the sword. Through this bond Mithridates, for his part, ceased to be a local dynast and became a recognised power in the Hellenistic world. According to McGing, this marriage was the most important event of his reign and strengthened the pro-Seleucid orientation of Pontic foreign policy.

Pontus in the War of the Brothers

Tensions within the Seleucid family soon came to concern Mithridates as well. The youngest son, Antiochus Hierax, was thirteen when his father died in 246 BC. A year later, most probably under the influence of his mother Laodice I, he demanded the government of Anatolia from his elder brother Seleucus and declared his independence. Busy on the Egyptian front, Seleucus was forced to accept this for a while. When he made peace with Ptolemy around 241 BC, he sought to recover the lands he had lost, and open war broke out between the two brothers.

In this war Mithridates sided with Hierax, the younger of his wife's two brothers, and fought against Seleucus. With Hierax stood Ariarathes III, king of Cappadocia, the Bithynians and a large number of Galatians. This broad Anatolian coalition defeated Seleucus's army in a battle fought at Ancyra (Ankara). The sources date the battle differently: accounts concerning Mithridates give 235 BC, those concerning Hierax about 239 BC. According to the account based on the Armenian version of Eusebius's chronicle, Seleucus lost some twenty thousand men and barely escaped with his life. After the victory Hierax became master of Anatolia and struck coins in his own name.

Mithridates's decision may seem to contradict the loyalty that the marriage implied. Yet Hierax too was the queen's brother, and the weakening of Seleucus widened Pontus's room for manoeuvre in Anatolia. Some scholars think that the queen's wish to weaken the Seleucid state may also have played a part in this choice; this view rests on interpretation and is not a fact supported by documents. In any case Mithridates did not break his ties with Seleucus. The marriage of his daughters to Seleucid princes shows that contact continued even in the years of conflict.

A trace of the closeness between the Pontic court and Hierax is also preserved in an easily overlooked note of Polybius. Logbasis, one of the leading men of the city of Selge in Pisidia, had according to Polybius long been a friend and host of the Antiochus who died in Thrace, that is, of Hierax. The Laodice who later became the wife of Achaeus had been placed in his care as a child, and Logbasis brought the girl up as his own daughter. That one of Mithridates's daughters was raised in the household of a Pisidian notable in Hierax's circle suggests that the relationship between the two courts rested on a trust that went beyond a wartime alliance. The source does not say when or why this arrangement was made, so the connection remains an inference.

Hierax came to a bad end. Attalus I of Pergamon defeated the Galatians and Hierax in several battles; Hierax was routed once more near Sardis in the spring of 228 BC and then beaten in Caria. He was finally killed in Thrace in 226 BC. The sources do not record that Mithridates suffered from these defeats. By keeping out of the conflicts in the west, Pontus was able to preserve its borders and to continue its marriage policy in the years that followed.

The Marriages of His Daughters

Around 222 BC Mithridates sent two of his daughters into the Seleucid family. According to Polybius, one of them, a girl named Laodice like her mother, married Antiochus III, who had just come to the throne. Polybius also describes the bride's journey: Diognetus, the admiral from Cappadocia Pontica, brought the young girl, the king's betrothed, to Seleucia at the crossing of the Euphrates, that is, to Zeugma. Antiochus received the bride with great ceremony and celebrated the wedding there and then with royal magnificence. After the wedding he went down to Antioch, proclaimed Laodice queen and devoted himself to preparations for the coming war. Antiochus, the ruler later known as Antiochus the Great, was the bride's first cousin. Scholars regard the fact that the girl was given a name in keeping with Seleucid court tradition as a sign that this marriage had been planned from her birth.

In the same years a second daughter, also named Laodice, married Achaeus, Antiochus's cousin. Achaeus was one of the powerful commanders of the Seleucid state in Anatolia. Polybius introduces him as the son of Andromachus, brother of Laodice the wife of Seleucus, and as the husband of Laodice, daughter of King Mithridates. Through his daughters, Mithridates thus formed ties both with the reigning branch of the Seleucid dynasty and with the commander closest to it.

This second marriage ended bitterly. While Antiochus was occupied with affairs in the east, Achaeus assumed the diadem at Laodicea in Phrygia, proclaimed himself king and came to rule over Asia on this side of the Taurus. Antiochus eventually besieged Achaeus in the citadel of Sardis. As Polybius relates at length, Achaeus trusted the Cretan Bolis, who promised to rescue him, and slipped out of the citadel one night; he revealed his plan to his wife Laodice only at the last moment, and she was so shaken that she almost lost her wits. Bolis, however, handed him over to Antiochus. Achaeus's extremities were cut off, his head was cut off and sewn into an ass's skin, and his body was crucified. Laodice, left in the citadel, guessed her husband's fate from the uproar in the camp. When the herald came, at first nothing but lamentation was heard from the citadel; after some hesitation the defenders split into two groups, one under Aribazus and the other under Laodice, and because they did not trust each other they soon surrendered. The sources say nothing about Laodice's life after this.

The later life of Laodice III, by contrast, shows how lasting the results of this policy were. She bore Antiochus eight children, among them Seleucus IV Philopator, Cleopatra I Syra, and the son born Mithridates who would later take the throne as Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Around 210 BC, when her son Antiochus was proclaimed co-ruler during her husband's eastern campaign, she most probably acted as regent. Inscriptions from cities such as Sardis, Teos and Iasos show that she was known as a benefactor. At Iasos in 196 BC, for example, she donated ten thousand medimnoi of wheat for the dowries of girls about to marry. The daughter of the king of Pontus thus did not remain merely a diplomatic tie but took her own share in the government of the Seleucid state.

In inscriptions Laodice is often called Antiochus's sister and sister-queen, although the two were first cousins. This language conveyed an image of mutual loyalty and partnership and also served to present the queen as a full member of the dynasty. Their first child, Antiochus, was born while his father was on campaign against the revolt of Molon. In 195 BC the couple married two of their own children, Antiochus and Laodice, to each other, continuing the tradition of sibling marriage. When Antiochus took a second wife, Euboea of Chalcis, in 192 BC, Laodice was pushed to the margins of court life.

Aid to Rhodes and the Campaign against Sinope

Mithridates's foreign policy was not confined to marriages. When the city of Rhodes was destroyed by a great earthquake in 227 BC, he too joined the contest among the kings of the age to help it. Polybius lists this aid at length. Ptolemy had promised three hundred talents of silver, a million artabae of grain and timber enough for ten quinqueremes and ten triremes; Antigonus had sent thousands of beams, iron and pitch; Seleucus had donated ten fully equipped quinqueremes and two hundred thousand medimnoi of grain. After these great gifts Polybius adds that similar donations were made by Prusias of Bithynia, by Mithridates and by the other minor Asiatic rulers of the time. No itemised list of what Mithridates sent is given; the mention of his name alongside Prusias suggests that Pontus wished to be counted among the kings of standing in the Aegean world.

That same Rhodes would, a few years later, come to the aid of the city that Mithridates attacked. In 220 BC Mithridates went to war against Sinope, the rich and powerful city on the Black Sea coast. Polybius calls this war the beginning and first occasion of the misfortunes that eventually befell the city. The Sinopeans sent envoys to Rhodes to ask for help. The Rhodians decided to appoint three commissioners and to place 140,000 drachmae in their hands, with which they were to meet the needs of Sinope. The list of supplies prepared also shows what kind of war was expected: ten thousand jars of wine, three hundred talents of prepared hair, a hundred talents of prepared bowstring, a thousand complete suits of armour, three thousand gold pieces and four catapults together with their crews.

The Sinopeans feared that Mithridates would besiege the city by land and sea at once. Polybius describes the site of the city to explain this fear. Sinope lay on the southern shore of the Black Sea, on a peninsula running out into the open sea. The neck connecting the peninsula with Asia was no more than two stades wide, and the city closed it off entirely. The rest of the peninsula was flat and offered an easy approach to the town, but its sea face was steep, difficult to anchor off and had very few landing places. The Sinopeans feared that Mithridates, while raising siege works on the landward side, would land troops on the opposite side and occupy the flat ground overlooking the city. They therefore fortified the whole sea-washed part of the peninsula, blocked the approaches from the sea with stakes and stockades, and placed soldiers and stores of missiles at suitable points.

Sinope did not turn to Rhodes alone. An inscription found in the Asclepieion of Kos (İstanköy) records that the people of Sinope honoured Dionnos son of Polytion, whom the Koans had sent as an envoy during the war. According to the decree, Dionnos had shirked neither toil nor danger and had helped both the people and the citizens who turned to him; the people of Sinope rewarded him with a golden crown and decided that the award should be proclaimed both at the games in Sinope and at the Dionysia and the great Asclepieia contests on Kos. The inscription is dated to about 220 BC, and its editors connect it, most probably, with this war against Mithridates. The text does not name the king, so the link remains a strong probability.

For all these preparations, Mithridates was unable to weaken the city. Sinope passed into the hands of the Pontic kings only in 183 BC, under Pharnaces I. This failure shows how difficult the kingdom's effort to reach the sea coast was. The capture of Sinope was left to the next generation, and the city later became the capital of the kingdom.

His Place among the Royal Tombs

In the cliffs at the foot of Harşena Mountain in Amasya, just above the palace area, are five great royal tombs. These tombs are the most impressive remains of the Kingdom of Pontus and almost the only ones still standing. In the century when Amaseia was the capital, Mithridates I, Ariobarzanes, Mithridates II and III and Pharnaces I reigned here. None of the tombs bears an inscription naming its owner. For that reason, which tomb belonged to which king can only be determined through reasoning based on architectural details and the order of construction.

In 2002 the German archaeologist Robert Fleischer, together with the architect Falko Ahrendt-Flemming and the archaeologist Nicole Birkle, measured and drew the tombs and labelled them A to E from right to left. A, B and C lie in the east, near the remains of the palace; D and E lie in the west. According to Fleischer, the order of construction of the three eastern tombs was not A, B, C but A, C, B. Tomb B was built last and squeezed in between A and C with considerable effort; because no space was left in the cliffs above the walled palace area, the next two tombs had to be cut far away, to the west. On the basis of this sequence Fleischer assigns Tomb A to Mithridates I, C to Ariobarzanes, B to Mithridates II, D to Mithridates III and E to Pharnaces I.

If this proposal is correct, the tomb of Mithridates II is Tomb B, whose façade carries a four-columned portico and a triangular pediment. On the inner face of the tomb's right anta, traces of an Attic column base survive, which shows that the four columns had bases of the same shape and Ionic capitals. B is one of the three tombs whose surrounding corridor was fully executed. The plan had been to cut corridors around the tombs so that they would look like free-standing buildings within the rock; examples of this arrangement are found in fourth-century BC Caria, at Caunus and Telmessus. As in all the royal tombs, the entrance to B's burial chamber lies high up, reachable only by ladder. Fleischer explains these high entrances by Iranian rules of purity and cites as parallels the Achaemenid royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam and Persepolis. The chamber is small and was designed to hold only one or a very few burials.

It should be kept in mind that this attribution is a proposal. That at one point in Fleischer's own text Tomb B is referred to as the tomb of Ariobarzanes shows that the sequence did not sit perfectly even in its published form. Even so, this interpretation, based on the order of the tombs, offers a more concrete framework than the general local tradition that ties all the cliffs to a single royal family. The match between Mithridates II's court, which stressed its Persian descent, and a tomb that recalls a Greek temple façade yet places its entrance high in the Iranian manner may be read as the expression in stone of the dual character of Pontic culture; this last assessment is an interpretation.

The Question of Coinage

Older accounts claim that the kingdom's first coinage began in the reign of Mithridates II. Some summary works write that the first Pontic coins of this period may have been issues imitating the portrait coins of Alexander the Great. Numismatic studies, however, look for the first royal coinage of Pontus in the period from Mithridates III to Mithridates V and identify Mithridates III as the first Pontic ruler to put his own portrait on a coin. For this reason, the idea that Mithridates II struck coins in his own name is not supported by evidence and cannot be presented as a firm fact; that the Alexander-type imitations belong to his reign remains a possibility.

Mithridates II in Local Historiography

Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, the great local historian of Amasya, discusses the kings of Pontus at length in the second volume of his Amasya Tarihi under the heading of the "Mihridâds". His numbering does not match the modern one: because he also counts the Mithridateses of the Persian satrapal period, he calls the founder known today as Mithridates I Ktistes the "Third Mihridâd". The ruler Hüsâmeddîn calls the "Fourth Mihridâd" became ruler of Amasya 888 years before the Hijra, reigned for forty-four years and died 844 years before the Hijra. Converting these dates to solar years places the reign roughly between 240 and 197 BC; this conversion is our own calculation, and it brings Hüsâmeddîn's ruler into the period of the modern Mithridates II.

Hüsâmeddîn credits this ruler with two important works. According to him, the Fourth Mihridâd built a fortress with a town in front of it where the Yeşilırmak meets the Kelkit River, to guard the eastern gorge of Amasya, and named it "Baturya, Paturya"; the place was later known as "Opaturya". The author explains the epithet "Filapatur" that the Greeks gave this king by the Turkish word "batur", meaning hero, and notes that the town of Opaturya no longer existed in his own day. He also writes that this ruler subdued by war the peoples around Canik, Sinop and Trabzon, built a fleet and placed the coasts under protection. In a passage quoted from Ahmed Midhat Efendi, Hüsâmeddîn further states that Amasya was the centre of the kings of Pontus and that the caves carved into the rocks around the city were known as the tombs of those kings.

This account conflicts with the ancient sources at several points. The epithet Philopator is today attached not to Mithridates II but to Mithridates IV Philopator Philadelphus, who reigned in the middle of the second century BC. No ancient source showing that a fortress or town was founded at the confluence of the Yeşilırmak and the Kelkit in the time of Mithridates II is found among the sources examined. It is also known from Polybius that Sinope could not be taken under Mithridates II and passed to Pontus only in 183 BC; Hüsâmeddîn's account of the coasts being subdued therefore does not fit the period of Mithridates II. The author's etymological explanations are likewise his own interpretations and could not be confirmed in other sources. Nevertheless, Hüsâmeddîn's work is a valuable document showing how the kings of Pontus were remembered in Amasya at the beginning of the twentieth century and how the city linked its own past to this dynasty.

Death and Legacy

The date of Mithridates II's death is unknown. Various years have been proposed for the end of his reign, such as 220 BC, 210 BC and even 189 BC; Clinton conjecturally placed his death around 190 BC. He was succeeded by his son by Laodice, Mithridates III. In the following years Pontus almost vanishes from the sources. Even the existence of Mithridates III is questioned by some scholars, but since Appian counts Mithridates Eupator as the eighth king of the dynasty, this ruler must be taken into account. Some older dictionaries, on the other hand, state that Mithridates II was succeeded directly by his son Pharnaces; this must be a consequence of Mithridates III's faintness in the sources.

Mithridates's real legacy is the transformation of Pontus into a dynasty accepted among the Hellenistic kingdoms. His grandson Pharnaces I seized the Greek cities of the coast, while his descendant Mithridates VI Eupator fought three wars against Rome, and among the rights he asserted against Rome was the Phrygian dowry that had come with Mithridates II's marriage. The name Mithridates had also entered the Seleucid court: the son of his daughter Laodice III, the prince born Mithridates who later took the throne as Antiochus IV Epiphanes, bore his grandfather's name. The rock tombs of Amaseia are the most visible trace that survives from this dynasty's first century in the interior; one of them, most probably Tomb B, is thought to belong to Mithridates II.

Chronology

281 BC: Mithridates I Ktistes takes the title of king; the Kingdom of Pontus is founded.

266 BC: Ariobarzanes comes to the throne.

c. 250 BC: Mithridates II comes to the throne; the year is uncertain.

c. 249 BC: The Galatians ravage Pontus; Heraclea sends grain to Amisus and then pays the Galatians off through the embassy of Nymphis.

245 BC: The Third Syrian War begins; the marriage alliance between Seleucus II and Mithridates is placed between 245 and 239 BC.

c. 239-235 BC: Antiochus Hierax and his allies defeat Seleucus II at Ancyra; the sources differ on the date.

228 BC: Hierax is defeated by Attalus near Sardis.

227 BC: After the earthquake that destroys Rhodes, Mithridates too sends gifts.

226 BC: Hierax is killed in Thrace.

c. 222 BC: His daughter Laodice marries Antiochus III at Zeugma and is proclaimed queen at Antioch; another daughter marries Achaeus.

220 BC: Mithridates goes to war against Sinope; Rhodes sends the city money, wine, armour and catapults. Mithridates fails to take the city.

Between 220 and 210 BC: Mithridates II dies and is succeeded by Mithridates III. The date is uncertain.

183 BC: Sinope passes into Pontic hands under Pharnaces I.

2002: Robert Fleischer and his team document the royal tombs of Amasya; Tomb B is attributed to Mithridates II.

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