Mithridates V Euergetes was the seventh king of the Kingdom of Pontus, and over a reign of about thirty years he turned the realm into a power reaching from the Black Sea coast into central Anatolia. He is remembered above all for his murder at Sinope around 120 BC, the work of a plot laid by his own inner circle, and for the son he left behind, Mithridates VI Eupator, who fought Rome in long and bitter wars. In his own day, however, he was one of Rome's most dependable allies. He sent Rome ships and troops, received Greater Phrygia in return for his services, and was known across the Greek world as a generous benefactor. He is bound to the history of Amaseia, present-day Amasya, in several distinct ways: he ruled the royal city of his forebears, one of his officers was the maternal great-grandfather of the Amasya-born geographer Strabo, and Amasya's local historian Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn writes that after his death his body was buried in one of the caves of Amasya. This last statement rests on a single source and is not confirmed by any other record.

The Kingdom of Pontus and Amaseia

The Kingdom of Pontus arose in the northern part of the Cappadocian satrapy, in the interior behind the Pontic Alps, which run parallel to the Black Sea coast. The founder of the dynasty, Mithridates I Ktistes, proclaimed himself king around 281 BC. A Persian noble fleeing the pursuit of Antigonus Monophthalmus, he had taken refuge first at Cimiata in Paphlagonia and then at Amaseia. Amaseia became the chief city of the kingdom's interior, and it was here that the Pontic kings kept their palace and their royal tombs. The Greek cities of the coast came into the kingdom later. Sinope became one of the royal capitals after Mithridates V's father, Pharnaces I, took the port in 182 BC. Pharnaces also seized Cotyora, Pharnacia and Trapezus, bringing most of the northern coast of Anatolia under his control. The son would use this gateway to the sea, won by his father, to open the kingdom to the Greek world.

The culture of Pontus is described in the sources as a synthesis of Iranian, Anatolian and Greek elements. Most kings of the dynasty bore the name Mithridates, meaning "given by Mithra", yet Apollo too had his place in the worship of the court. In the interior Anatolian and Iranian influence prevailed, on the coast Greek influence. The presence of an Iranian-descended nobility around the court can also be traced in inscriptions. In an inscription found at Amasya and dated to the reign of Pharnaces I, an officer named Pharnabazus honours the garrison commander (phrourarchos) Meriones and addresses him as "kyrios", a title thought to carry an Iranian connotation. Mithridates V deliberately pushed this blend in a Greek direction, but the Iranian nobility kept its place at court and became visible again in the events that followed his death.

The Geography and Resources of the Kingdom

The kingdom Mithridates V inherited was made up of two distinct regions. The coastal strip was separated from the interior by the Pontic Alps. The river valleys running parallel to the coast were fertile, supporting herds of cattle, millet, and fruit such as cherries, apples and pears. The coast was in the hands of Greek cities such as Amastris and Sinope and was rich in timber, fish and olives. Iron and silver were mined south of Pharnacia, steel from the Chalybian mountains was famous in Greece, and copper, lead, zinc and arsenic were found as well. Inland, the valleys of the Lycus and the Iris (Yeşilırmak) offered a similar fertility, and outside Amaseia small villages lay scattered across the land. The kingdom was divided into administrative districts called eparchies.

Describing his own homeland, Strabo records the abundance of this interior in detail. The Iris, after crossing the fertile plain of Dazimonitis and winding past Gaziura, an ancient royal residence, flows past "the very wall of Amaseia, my fatherland" and on into Phanaroea. He writes that the plains were always moist and grassy, able to support herds of cattle and horses alike, that millet and sorghum could be sown in quantities all but unlimited, and that grapes, pears, apples and nuts grew of their own accord along the mountainsides. He adds that the land around Sinope was fertile too, its suburbs adorned with market gardens, and that all the tilled country a little above the sea was planted with olive trees. The wealth that paid for Mithridates V's foreign policy and for the mercenary army he maintained came from the way these two regions complemented each other.

Parentage and Accession

Mithridates Euergetes came of a family of Greek-Macedonian and Persian descent. His father was Pharnaces I and his mother Queen Nysa; his sister, known as Nysa of Cappadocia, was a child of the same couple. His mother is thought to have died giving birth either to him or to his sister. Pharnaces' brother, Mithridates IV Philopator Philadelphus, had ruled Pontus with his wife Laodice from roughly 170 to 150 BC. Mithridates V came to the throne after this couple, that is, after his aunt and uncle. How the transfer came about is not explained in the sources. Even his father's identity is not beyond question: Fritz Geyer, who wrote the entry on him in the German classical encyclopaedia Pauly-Wissowa, describes him as "probably the son of Mithridates IV". Most modern sources, however, make him the son of Pharnaces I. The dates of the reign are not certain either: some compilations place its beginning in 152/151 BC, other accounts say around 150 BC. Its end is usually given as 120 BC, in some sources as 121/120.

Euergetes is an epithet meaning "doer of good, benefactor". Hellenistic kings had such epithets conferred on themselves and had them stamped on coins and inscribed on honorific dedications. For Mithridates V, the title points to an identity he would fill out in later years through his gifts to Delos. Hüsameddin, in his Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya), interprets the same epithet in a different way. He says that the histories gave this ruler the epithet "Ürket", that the Greeks wrote it as "Overket" and claimed it as Greek, while he himself links the word to the language of the Turanian peoples living in Pontus and reads it as "Üreket". This is the author's own etymology and finds no support in modern scholarship. That the epithet is the Greek word "euergetes" is plain from coins and inscriptions.

The Alliance with Rome

The friendship between Pontus and Rome began before Mithridates V. In 155 BC Mithridates IV sent aid to Attalus II Philadelphus of Pergamon against Prusias II of Bithynia, thereby following a peaceable, pro-Roman line. A bilingual inscription in Latin and Greek found on the Capitol in Rome is one of the documents of this friendship. King Mithridates Philopator and Philadelphus dedicates a statue representing the Roman people "on account of the friendship and alliance which exists between himself and the Romans", and his envoys are Naemanes son of Naemanes and Mahes son of Mahes. Some accounts attribute the inscription to Mithridates V, but the titles "Philopator and Philadelphus" belong to Mithridates IV, and it is now dated to around 150 BC. Euergetes carried further the relationship he inherited from his uncle.

Appian introduces him as the first of the Pontic kings to be inscribed as a "friend of the Roman people". During the Third Punic War, which began in 149 BC, he sent Rome a few ships and a small auxiliary force. The contribution was modest in military terms, but it carried a political meaning: this kingdom south of the Black Sea had shown at an early date that it stood beside the rising power of the Mediterranean. In Geyer's words, Euergetes fulfilled conscientiously the obligations he had taken on as Rome's friend and ally. He reaped the reward of this loyalty in the decades that followed, when Rome needed the kings of the region to fill the gaps in its Anatolian order.

Cappadocia and Paphlagonia

The closeness to Rome also laid the ground for the expansion of Pontus. Leaning on the Roman alliance, the king spread the power of his kingdom from the Black Sea coast towards central Anatolia. The first target in this direction was Cappadocia to the south. Appian writes that Euergetes invaded Cappadocia "as though it were a foreign country". The phrase is a historian's comment set against the next generation's view of Cappadocia as ancestral Pontic land. According to the ancient testimony collected by Geyer, the king took advantage of disturbances in Cappadocia to occupy the country, and by marrying his eldest daughter Laodice to King Ariarathes VI Epiphanes he gained a decisive influence at his neighbour's court. Relations with Cappadocia therefore followed a tangled course: a campaign on one side, kinship on the other. The dates and details of the war are unknown.

In the west he persuaded the Paphlagonian ruler Pylaemenes to bequeath his kingdom to Pontus. This was an important step in the westward growth of Pontus, and its details are unclear in the sources. We learn of the bequest from the rights his son Mithridates VI asserted against Rome years later. In a speech reported by Justin, Eupator says that Paphlagonia had come to his father not by conquest or force of arms but "by adoption in a will, and as an inheritance on the death of its own sovereigns". In his reply to the Roman envoys he likewise declared that the kingdom had belonged to his father by inheritance, and that he wondered why a dispute never raised against his father should be raised against himself. According to a view going back to the historian Eduard Meyer, Phrygia had value for Pontus only together with Paphlagonia and Galatia, since these lands formed the bridge that joined Pontus to Phrygia.

The Pergamene Inheritance and Phrygia

The most important event of Mithridates V's reign took place during the dissolution of the Kingdom of Pergamon. When Attalus III of Pergamon died in 133 BC, he left his kingdom to Rome. The will stated that Pergamon and the other Greek cities were to be exempt from this transfer, but Rome paid it little heed. Tiberius Gracchus wanted to use the wealth that came with the bequest to finance his land reform, which brought him into conflict with the Senate. Because of this turmoil Rome was slow to take possession of the inheritance. The gap was exploited by Aristonicus, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Eumenes II by the daughter of a harp player from Ephesus. Taking the name Eumenes III, he claimed the throne, gathered strength in the cities of the western Anatolian coast, and killed the Roman consul Publius Licinius Crassus Dives Mucianus. Justin writes that Crassus was more eager to plunder the treasures of Attalus than to distinguish himself in the field, and paid for his avarice with his life. Inland, Aristonicus tried to win over slaves and serfs with the promise of freedom, and the Stoic philosopher Blossius stood at his side.

Among the kings who stood with Rome against this rising was Mithridates V. On the same side were Ariarathes V of Cappadocia, Nicomedes II of Bithynia and Pylaemenes of Paphlagonia, all of them hoping to win Rome's favour. The part played by Pontic troops in putting down the revolt is recorded by Strabo, Justin, Eutropius and Orosius. When Marcus Perperna took command in 130 BC, the end of the rising came. Aristonicus, besieged, was forced by hunger to surrender, taken alive to Rome, paraded in the triumph, and then strangled in the Tullianum prison. Blossius took his own life. Perperna's successor, the consul Manius Aquillius, settled the region in 129 BC. Part of the Pergamene lands became the Roman province of Asia, Lycaonia and Cilicia were given to the sons of Ariarathes, who had fallen in the war, and Pontus received Greater Phrygia. Justin presents this division plainly as rewards bestowed on the princes who had given aid against Aristonicus.

Who should have Phrygia was not easily settled. According to Geyer's summary, both Mithridates V and Nicomedes II of Bithynia laid claim to Greater Phrygia. Mithridates argued that the land had once been granted to his ancestor by the Seleucid king Seleucus II Callinicus. In the words later attributed to his son, Phrygia was a country Seleucus Callinicus had given to the Pontic king Mithridates as a dowry with his daughter. Aquillius awarded the land, in Geyer's phrase, "to the highest bidder", that is, to Mithridates. The same affair is told from two sides. In Appian, Eupator's envoy Pelopidas admits that Phrygia was given to his king by the Roman general as a reward for the victory over Aristonicus, yet that the king nevertheless paid a large sum of money to that same general for it. The Bithynian envoys, for their part, say that Mithridates had bought the same land "by a corrupt bargain" from one of the Roman generals.

Phrygia did not border Pontus directly. It is therefore thought that Pontus may also have exercised some degree of control over Galatia at the time. The award was regarded in Rome as a dubious business. A fragment of a speech by Gaius Gracchus, preserved through Aulus Gellius, hints that money changed hands when the decision on the transfer of the Pergamene kingdom was taken. According to Gracchus, some senators took money from the King of Pontus, some from the King of Bithynia, and the most cunning from both. The date of the speech is disputed. Luis Ballesteros-Pastor of the University of Seville suggests that the speech, often placed in 121 BC, may have been delivered around 123/122, when Gracchus was at the height of his influence. Aquillius too was prosecuted for his administration of the province, but he was acquitted by bribing the judges and in 126 BC won the right to celebrate a triumph. The Roman Senate later annulled the consul's arrangements on grounds of bribery.

Even so, it appears that Mithridates V kept effective control of Phrygia until his death. Geyer thinks the king may have occupied the region without waiting for the Senate's final decision. Rome took it from Pontus only after the king's death. The date of this too is uncertain. A senatorial decree concerning the status of Phrygia was long dated to 116 BC; today it is debated between 119 and 116, and some scholars place the decision earlier still. This headed the list of wrongs Eupator recited when he went to war with Rome: according to Justin, the Romans had taken from him, while he was still a minor, the Greater Phrygia they had granted his father as a reward for his help in the war against Aristonicus.

The Mercenary Army and Dorylaus

Mithridates V's military policy is intertwined with the family history of Amasya's most famous son, Strabo. Describing Cnossus in Crete, Strabo turns to his own ancestors. Dorylaus, surnamed the Tactician, was an expert in military affairs and one of the friends of Mithridates Euergetes, that is, one of the inner circle of the court. The king had charged him with enlisting mercenaries. To this end Dorylaus often travelled to Greece and Thrace, and went after the mercenaries of Crete as well, before the Romans had taken the island. Strabo notes that there were many mercenaries on the island at the time and that the pirate bands were recruited from among them. On this testimony Geyer writes that the king sought to build a capable mercenary army.

While Dorylaus was at Cnossus, war broke out between the Cnossians and the Gortynians. The Cnossians made him their general; he brought the war to a successful end and quickly won the highest honours. Shortly afterwards, learning that Euergetes had been treacherously slain at Sinope in a plot laid by his closest associates, and that the government had passed to his widow and young children, he gave up hope of the situation there and stayed on at Cnossus. There he married a Macedonian woman named Sterope and had two sons, Lagetas and Stratarchas, and a daughter. Strabo says he saw Stratarchas with his own eyes when the man was very old. A son of Dorylaus' brother Philetaerus, a young man also named Dorylaus, had been brought up together with Euergetes' son Eupator. When Eupator reached manhood he heaped honours on this foster brother and summoned home his kinsmen who had stayed at Cnossus. Strabo's maternal grandmother was the sister of Lagetas. So the officer Euergetes sent to the Aegean to recruit mercenaries was the maternal great-grandfather of the geographer from Amasya.

The make-up of the Pontic army grew still more complex under this policy. The standing forces were drawn from a wide range of peoples, among them Armenians, Bithynians, Cappadocians, Galatians, Phrygians, Scythians, Sarmatians and Thracians. The Greeks, by contrast, fought not in the standing army but as citizens of their own cities. The Pontic army had adopted the Macedonian phalanx. Euergetes was the first Pontic king to recruit Greek mercenaries from the Aegean on a large scale, and the journeys of Dorylaus are the only detailed testimony showing how that business worked.

Patron of Greek Culture

Mithridates V's cultural policy shaped the identity of Pontus as much as his foreign policy did. The king presented himself to the Hellenic world as the protector of Greek civilisation in Anatolia. His gifts to Athens and Delos are known from surviving honorific inscriptions and from coins. Geyer writes that the king proved his philhellenic disposition above all through the offerings he sent to Delos, and cites the inscriptions recording them. Another inscription from Delos records an honour paid to one of the king's "honoured friends". He is said to have held Apollo in great reverence and to have had himself portrayed as Apollo on his coins. The language, ceremonies and army of the court thus took on an increasingly Hellenic appearance. This orientation continued until, under his son Mithridates VI, Greek became the official language of the kingdom.

This orientation had a geographical side as well. Strabo writes that Eupator was both born and reared at Sinope, that he accorded the city special honour and treated it as the metropolis of his kingdom. The French historian Théodore Reinach inferred from this that Euergetes must have moved his residence to Sinope, and Geyer judged the inference sound: the king had settled in this port city, closer to Greek culture than Amaseia. Sinope, as Strabo describes it, stood on the neck of a peninsula with harbours on either side, beautifully walled and adorned with a gymnasium, a market-place and colonnades. Hüsameddin reaches the same conclusion by an independent route: according to him the ruler, towards the end of his reign, moved from Amasya to Sinop, made it the seat of government, and left his son as governor in Amasya. That the king died at Sinope is consistent with this move.

The coastal cities of Pontus were Greek, and the kingdom's sea trade depended on them. Being visible at Delos helped the kingdom to be recognised in the Hellenistic world as a champion of Greek civilisation. This view is an interpretation drawn from the common direction of the gifts and inscriptions rather than a goal stated outright in the sources. The Hellenisation of the court did not do away with the Iranian nobility. Ballesteros-Pastor stresses that the dynastic quarrels at the Pontic court turned not on how Hellenised the claimants were but simply on a struggle for power. The support of Greek cities and families was an added element in these disputes, not the factor that set them off.

Wife and Children

Mithridates V married the Seleucid princess Laodice VI. Laodice was the daughter of Antiochus IV Epiphanes and Laodice IV, and the marriage made Pontus kin to the Seleucid dynasty. The couple's children are listed as Laodice of Cappadocia, Mithridates VI Eupator, Mithridates Chrestus, another Laodice, Nysa, Roxana and Statira. The sources differ on the number of children: some lists speak of seven, others of eight. The fate of his children ran together with the fate of the kingdom. In 71 BC, when the Romans won at Cabeira, Eupator sent the eunuch Bacchides to Pharnacia to make sure the women of the court did not fall into enemy hands. Roxana and Statira died there by drinking poison. According to Plutarch, Roxana cursed her brother before she died, while Statira thanked him for not neglecting them and for giving them the chance to die free and without shame. Nysa was taken prisoner by the Romans and paraded in the triumphs of two Roman commanders.

The parentage of Roxana and Statira is itself a matter of debate. Plutarch writes that the princesses were "about forty years old" in 71 BC. Since Euergetes died in 120 BC at the latest, this age would mean that the girls were born years after their father's death. Most scholars have assumed that Plutarch gave a rounded figure or was mistaken. Ballesteros-Pastor, however, argues that the age may be correct. In his view Roxana and Statira were daughters of Queen Laodice, but were born after the death of Euergetes, and their father was not the king. He explains Eupator's decision never to marry these sisters by his fear that they might turn the influence a marriage would bring them against him. The choice of names is also striking. Roxana and Stateira were the names of Alexander the Great's Iranian wives, and no royal woman had borne them since Alexander's time. Ballesteros-Pastor sees in this choice the influence of the Iranian nobles around the regent queen. This view is an interpretation, and it conflicts with the lists that name the girls as children of Euergetes.

The Banquet at Sinope and His Death

The reign of Mithridates V came to an end at Sinope around 120 BC. In the common account, he was poisoned by unknown persons at a great banquet he was giving. The ancient testimonies differ in detail. Strabo writes that the king was treacherously slain at Sinope as the result of a plot "by his closest associates". Justin says only that he was "cut off by sudden death". This phrase too may point to an assassination. The date is likewise given approximately as 121/120 BC. Some scholars connect the death with the comet that Justin says blazed in the sky for seventy days in the year Eupator began to reign, that is, the comet seen in 120 BC. How old Eupator was at the time is also disputed: Strabo gives eleven years, Eutropius twelve.

Who stood behind the murder is unknown. Geyer writes that the king was killed by his friends, "probably at the instigation of his wife". Older scholarship also proposed that Laodice served Rome's interests. Ballesteros-Pastor finds this second view without evidence: nothing suggests that Rome saw the Pontic king as a threat to be removed at once. In his view everything points to a quarrel within the court at Sinope, and Dorylaus' choice to live in exile in Crete for years shows how dangerous the situation at court was. Who the parties to this quarrel were, and from whose hand the poison came, are not recorded in the documents.

After his death, in accordance with the king's will, the kingdom was left to the joint rule of his widow Laodice VI and his two sons. A trace of this partnership survives on Delos. According to an inscription dated to around 115/114 BC, Dionysius of Athens, son of Neon, a former gymnasiarch, dedicated statues of King Mithridates Eupator and of his brother Mithridates Chrestus. The sons were still children, so real power lay with Laodice. The regency lasted from 120 to 116 BC, perhaps even until 113, and Laodice favoured her younger son Chrestus. Justin relates that in Eupator's boyhood his guardians tried to kill him by mounting him on a restive horse and making him hurl the javelin, and when that failed, by poison; that the prince protected himself with antidotes; and that for seven years he never went under a roof but roamed the forests and mountains. This account is discussed at length in Adrienne Mayor's book The Poison King, and the line between historical fact and legend cannot be drawn with certainty. Ballesteros-Pastor notes that the motifs of the horse and of hiding in the mountains have been linked to the Iranian tradition of education, but that a real dynastic struggle at court may have given these stories a historical basis. Some modern accounts add that the poison that killed his father was arsenic and that the young Mithridates tested himself against this substance in particular. This detail has not been verified.

Eupator returned to Pontus between 116 and 113 BC, was proclaimed king, and imprisoned his mother and his brother. Laodice died in prison, and the fate of Chrestus is uncertain. The notes accompanying the Delos inscription state that Eupator killed his brother around 112 BC and became sole king. Mithridates gave both of them funerals befitting royalty.

With the death of Mithridates V, the relationship between Pontus and Rome also changed course. During the regency Rome took Phrygia from Pontus. The alliance Euergetes had maintained turned, in his son's time, into the Mithridatic Wars against Rome. When Eupator's envoy Pelopidas reminded the Roman generals of his king's "own and his father's friendship and alliance", he was complaining that Phrygia and Cappadocia had been wrested from him. These wars ended with the fall of Pontus in 63 BC.

Mithridates VI extended his kingdom to include Colchis and the Greek cities around the Crimea. In 88 BC he ordered the massacre of Romans and Italians in the Roman province of Asia, an event known as the "Asiatic Vespers", in which at least 80,000 people are said to have died. After three wars he was defeated by Pompey and died in 63 BC at Panticapaeum in the Crimea. The friendship begun with the ships and soldiers his father had sent to Rome was thus turned completely on its head within two generations. The powerful, Hellenised state that Mithridates V left behind formed the material and political foundation that allowed his son to sustain his war against Rome, but the sources do not draw this connection directly; it is an inference.

Euergetes in Hüsameddin's History of Amasya

Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's Amasya Tarihi tells of the Pontic kings in Ottoman Turkish, drawing on the sources available to him, among them Théodore Reinach's history of Pontus. The author's numbering of the kings does not match the modern one. As the epithet "Ürket, Overket" he gives to Euergetes makes clear, the ruler he calls "the Sixth Mihridâd" corresponds to our Mithridates V. His son Eupator is, for him, "the Seventh Mihridâd". Yet Hüsameddin introduces this Sixth Mihridâd as "the brother of Pharnaces II". That is the position of Mithridates IV, known today as the brother of Pharnaces I. It can be suggested that the author's narrative merges information about two kings; this is an inference.

According to Hüsameddin, the Sixth Mihridâd became ruler of Pontus at Amasya on his brother's death, 779 years before the Hijra, which by the author's own reckoning is around 157 BC. He fought repeatedly with Cappadocia, which had defeated his brother, sometimes winning and sometimes losing, and strove to preserve the land his brother had left him. Ariarathes VI of Cappadocia allied himself with the Armenian lord Agırşak. The author maintains that Rome, extending its influence towards Anatolia, set the small states against one another, uniting Ariarathes and Agırşak and using them against the powerful Pontic state. In his account, 745 years before the Hijra these allies attacked Pontus from the south, and the Galatians and Paphlagonians from the west and north. The Sixth Mihridâd was defeated and shut himself up in the citadel of Amasya; the allies overran part of the country as far as Pharnacia; the suffering these events caused shook the ruler deeply, and he died in the thirty-fourth year of his reign.

This narrative overlaps very little with the Euergetes known from the ancient sources. In the ancient testimony Euergetes is Rome's loyal ally, successful against Cappadocia and influential at its court, and he dies by assassination at Sinope. Hüsameddin's ruler, defeated by a coalition raised at Rome's instigation and taking refuge in the citadel of Amasya, does not fit this picture. Which events the author's sources combined in this way has not been determined. On the other hand, two of Hüsameddin's statements agree with modern scholarship or add a new local dimension to it: the ruler's move to Sinop towards the end of his reign and his leaving his son at Amasya. The author further writes that the attacks of neighbouring peoples brought the ruler back to his old seat, and that when he died his body was buried in one of the caves of Amasya. Hüsameddin cites no source for this last statement.

The Question of His Tomb

The rock tombs on the southern slope of Mount Harşena in Amasya are monumental royal tombs carved while Amaseia was the capital of the kingdom, and they have been placed on UNESCO's Tentative List of World Heritage; the year of inclusion is given in some records as 2014 and in others as 2015. The five great tombs in the Maidens' Palace area are attributed to the first five kings of Pontus, from the founder Mithridates I Ktistes to Pharnaces I. The largest of them belongs to Pharnaces, and the inscription above it records that the castle commander Metrodorus dedicated an altar and a flower bed to the gods for King Pharnaces. There are nine more rock tombs inside the fortress on the slope of Harşena, and the total number of royal rock tombs around the city reaches twenty-one.

The tomb of Mithridates V has not been securely linked to any of these monuments. No tombs have been assigned to the kings of the dynasty after Pharnaces. Given that the king died at Sinope, whether his body was brought back to lie beside his ancestors cannot be traced in the documents either. In this respect the statement that Euergetes was buried at Amasya rests on Hüsameddin's record of "one of the caves". It can be suggested that one of the tombs inside the fortress may be his, but this is an inference, unsupported by any inscription or excavation finding.

Sources and Uncertainties

What is known of Mithridates V is limited. His relations with Rome rest on Appian's account of the Mithridatic Wars and on Justin's epitome of Pompeius Trogus. The award of Phrygia is known from the brief notices of Justin, Appian, Orosius and Eutropius, and Gracchus' speech from Aulus Gellius. The liveliest testimony about the circle of the court comes from Strabo, telling the story of his own family. The offerings and honorific inscriptions on Delos show the king's face towards the Greek world. There is no direct record of the king's own court, administration or daily life. For this reason the beginning and end dates of the reign, the identity of his father, the circumstances of his accession, the course of the Cappadocian war, the identity of his murderer, the year Phrygia was taken from Pontus and the father of Roxana and Statira are all disputed or unknown. The report that his tomb lies among the royal tombs of Amasya is one of these uncertainties as well.

Chronology

c. 281 BC: Mithridates I Ktistes founds the Kingdom of Pontus.

182 BC: Pharnaces I takes Sinope.

155 BC: Mithridates IV sends aid to Pergamon against Prusias II.

c. 150 BC: Mithridates IV sets up the bilingual dedicatory inscription on the Capitol in Rome.

152/151 to c. 150 BC: Mithridates V Euergetes comes to the throne (the date varies in the sources).

149 BC: During the Third Punic War he sends ships and an auxiliary force to Rome.

133 BC: Attalus III dies and bequeaths Pergamon to Rome.

131-129 BC: Revolt of Aristonicus (Eumenes III). Mithridates V supports Rome.

129 BC: Manius Aquillius settles the region; Pontus receives Greater Phrygia.

126 BC: Aquillius is acquitted of bribery and celebrates a triumph.

c. 120 BC (also given as 121/120): Mithridates V is murdered at Sinope. The kingdom passes to Laodice and her two sons.

119 or 116 BC: The Roman Senate decrees on the status of Phrygia. The region is taken from Pontus.

c. 115/114 BC: Statues of Mithridates Eupator and his brother Chrestus are dedicated on Delos.

116-113 BC: Mithridates VI returns to Pontus and removes his mother from power.

71 BC: Roxana and Statira die by poison at Pharnacia.

63 BC: The Kingdom of Pontus falls to Rome.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Books

  • Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, Princeton University Press, 2009

Other sources

  • Appian, The Mithridatic Wars 10-13 (trans. H. White; Perseus/Perseids) fgh.perseids.org
  • Justin, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, XXXVI.4, XXXVII.1-2, XXXVIII.5-7 (trans. J. S. Watson, 1886; tertullian.org) tertullian.org
  • Fritz Geyer, "Mithridates 11", Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, XV,2 (1932), cols. 2162-2163 (Wikisource) de.wikisource.org
  • Luis Ballesteros-Pastor, "Eupator's Unmarried Sisters: An Approach to the Dynastic Struggle in Pontus after the Death of Mithridates V Euergetes", Anabasis. Studia Classica et Orientalia 4 (2013), pp. 61-72
  • OGIS 375 (bilingual dedication at Rome, Mithridates IV), OGIS 369 (Delos, statues of Eupator and Chrestus), OGIS 436 (Senate decree concerning Phrygia), translations at attalus.org
  • Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, "Kral Kaya Mezarları" amasya.bel.tr
  • Wikipedia, "Tombs of the kings of Pontus"
  • Livius.org, "Mithridates V Euergetes" and "Mithridatic Dynasty"
  • Wikipedia, "Mithridates V Euergetes" (citing Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1867; Erciyas 2006 and Mayor 2009)
  • World History Edu, "Mithridates V Euergetes" (21 January 2025)
  • Wikipedia, "Kingdom of Pontus"
  • Wikipedia, "Eumenes III" (Aristonicus) and "Manius Aquillius (consul 129 BC)"
  • Wikipedia, "Mithridates VI Eupator"

Online sources