Mithridates VI Eupator was the longest-lived and most stubborn enemy the Roman Republic had in the East. From 120 to 63 BC he ruled the Kingdom of Pontus, built a wide-ranging state around the Black Sea, fought three wars against Rome and met, in turn, Sulla, Lucullus and Pompey, the most famous commanders of his age. His name is remembered above all for poison. His father died of poison at a banquet, and the son is said to have feared it for the rest of his life, turned that fear into a medical pursuit, accustomed his body to toxins and prepared a remedy against every one of them. How much of this story is true and how much was added later by ancient writers is still debated. Mithridates was born in Sinope, but Amaseia, modern Amasya, was the ancestral home of the Pontic kings and for a long time their capital, and the royal palaces and rock-cut tombs stand on the Harşena rock above that city. The political course of the wars and their military detail belong to other articles; here the focus is the king's character, his life story, the tradition of poison and antidote, and his bond with Amaseia.

Ancestry and Name

The name Mithridates is the Greek form of the Old Iranian Mihrdāt and means "given by Mithra". Mithra was the ancient Iranian god of the sun and of covenants, and since most Pontic kings bore the name, the dynasty is also called the Mithridatic dynasty. The Greek epithet Eupator means "of a noble father" and was used by many Hellenistic rulers. The king usually had his name written Mithradates on his own coins and in Greek inscriptions, while the spelling Mithridates, established by Latin texts, remains the common one in modern usage.

The dynasty rested on a mixed Persian and Greek descent. Mithridates claimed to come from the family of Cyrus the Great and Darius, and he also asserted a line running back to Alexander's generals Antigonus Monophthalmus and Seleucus Nicator and to the Macedonian regent Antipater. His father, Mithridates V Euergetes (150-120 BC), was a grandson of Pharnaces I of Pontus. His mother, Laodice VI, was a Seleucid, a daughter of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The young prince thus grew up at a court where East and West met. He made deliberate use of this double identity throughout his life, posing as a defender of Hellenic culture before the Greek cities and as an heir of the Iranian kings before the peoples of inner Anatolia. The two-faced propaganda of the dynasty suited a kingdom whose population was a mixture of Greek coastal cities and interior regions with Anatolian and Iranian traditions.

Childhood and Accession

Mithridates was born around 135 BC in Sinope, the first son of his father. About 120 BC Mithridates V was poisoned at a great banquet he was giving in Sinope, by persons unknown. Some accounts see the palace circle behind the murder, others the queen; there is no firm evidence. The king had left the kingdom to his wife Laodice and to their two sons, Mithridates and his younger brother Mithridates Chrestus. Both sons were too young to rule, so power passed to Laodice. During her regency she favoured the younger son, and the regency lasted until 116 BC, by some reckonings until 113 BC.

In these years the young Mithridates fled the palace and went into hiding to escape his mother's plots. He is said to have lived seven years in the wilderness, hunting and enduring every hardship until his body was hardened. This part of the story rests on a tradition that had already become legend, and how much of it is historical is not known. Later sources add that in these years he travelled through Anatolia and learned the languages of the peoples he would one day rule. Between 116 and 113 BC he returned to Pontus and was acclaimed king. He deposed his mother and brother and imprisoned them. Laodice apparently died in prison of natural causes; Chrestus either died there as well or was tried for treason and executed. Mithridates gave both a royal funeral. Soon afterwards, between 115 and 113 BC, he married his sister Laodice. Preserving the purity of the bloodline, strengthening his claim to the throne and securing the inheritance of his legitimate children are counted among the reasons for this marriage.

Character

Ancient sources describe Mithridates as a large man of extraordinary strength, energetic and determined. He was gifted in politics, organisation and strategy; the same sources show him as merciful and generous, but also, when needed, ruthless and harsh. These contradictions are the common ground of the criticism and the praise directed at him. He is said to have punished some of his sons on mere suspicion, to have distrusted his commanders and entourage, and to have carried a nervousness verging on paranoia. Fear of poisoning is the most conspicuous mark of this character. The sources also mention that he was fond of eating and drinking contests and claimed that no one in his kingdom could out-drink him.

His cultural side matters as well. Pliny the Elder writes that he administered the laws of the twenty-two nations under his rule each in its own language and never addressed any of them through an interpreter. The figure may be exaggerated, but the ruler of a multilingual empire was expected to command several languages. This reputation proved so lasting that in 1555 Conrad Gessner gave the king's name to his book on the comparison of languages, and in 1806-1817 Adelung and Vater gave it to their four-volume survey of the world's languages. His court welcomed Greeks, Romans and Asians together. On Delos, in 102/101 BC, an Athenian priest of Poseidon dedicated a heroon, a hero shrine, to the king; another dedication, of 94/93 BC, was made on behalf of the Athenians, the Romans and "King Mithridates Eupator Dionysus". On the official coinage Greek style mixes with Iranian elements, and heroes such as Perseus, who link East and West, are favoured.

The bloodiest page of his anti-Roman policy was the order of 88 BC to kill the Roman and Italian settlers in Anatolia. In cities such as Pergamon and Tralles at least 80,000 people are said to have died, and much higher figures, going back to Plutarch, are also in circulation. The event is known as the Asiatic Vespers. The order tore down every bridge between Mithridates and Rome and made war unavoidable.

Wars and the End

The political course of Mithridates' reign is the subject of other articles, so only a frame can be given here. He first brought Colchis and the Bosporan Kingdom in the Crimea under his rule, divided Paphlagonia with King Nicomedes III of Bithynia, and then came face to face with Rome over Cappadocia. In 89 BC he answered the attack of Nicomedes IV and quickly overran Rome's province of Asia. In the First War (88-84 BC) Sulla drove him out of Greece, and because of the political struggle in Rome a lenient peace was made. The Second War (83-81 BC) was brief, and Mithridates came out of it well, having defeated Murena at the Halys. The Third and last war (73-63 BC) began when Bithynia was bequeathed to Rome. Lucullus defeated him at Cabira and forced him to take refuge in Armenia with his son-in-law Tigranes. In 67 BC the king defeated the Romans at Zela and recovered Pontus, but in 66 BC he lost the Battle of the Lycus to Pompey.

After the defeat he withdrew to Colchis and then over the Caucasus to the Crimea. In the Bosporus he found that his son Machares was unwilling to help him, had him killed and took over the government. From there, as the accounts of Cassius Dio and Appian show, he planned to attack Italy by way of the Danube or through Thrace and Macedonia. The burden of the preparations fell heavily on local nobles and people, and the army grew restless. In 63 BC his son Pharnaces II rose in revolt; with the support of the soldiers and of Roman deserters he had himself proclaimed king. Mithridates retreated to the citadel of Panticapaeum, modern Kerch.

Poison and Mithridatism

The story of Mithridates' relationship with poison grows out of his father's death. According to later sources, the young prince noticed his mother's plots against him, suspected that something in his food was making his stomach ache, and after leaving the palace began to take non-lethal doses of poisons regularly. The aim was for the body to build up resistance to these substances over time. Today the practice is called mithridatism. He is said to have worked especially to develop immunity to arsenic, the poison that had killed his father.

After he became king he continued this work. He studied poisons and antidotes together with the physicians and root-gatherers of his court, and is said to have tested their effects on condemned prisoners. Attalus III of Pergamon (died 133 BC) is also known to have done similar research. As was usual in the medicine of the age, Mithridates' antidote routines had a religious component: the Agari, Scythian shamans, never left him and supervised the procedures. Whether the Greek physician Crateuas worked directly in his service or only corresponded with him is uncertain. The king is also said to have received medicinal samples from Zopyrus of Alexandria and medical treatises from Asclepiades. Pliny the Elder mentions the blood of Pontic ducks; because these ducks fed on poisonous plants such as hemlock and hellebore, their blood was thought to act as a kind of serum.

In time the idea of a "universal antidote" emerged: a mixture that Mithridates was said to take every day with cold spring water, and that protected him against all known poisons. It became known as mithridatum or mithridate, a name derived from the king's. The original formula is entirely lost. Pliny also writes that Pompey found among the king's notes a plain recipe made of two dried walnuts, two figs, twenty rue leaves and a pinch of salt, to be taken by a person who had fasted for at least a day. Elsewhere the same author mocks the Mithridatic remedy as it later appeared, a compound of fifty-four ingredients, no two of them of equal weight. He asks which god fixed these proportions, says that no human mind could have worked them out, and calls the whole thing a showy parade of the art.

After Mithridates' death the king's library and plant collection were taken to Rome, where Pompey's freedman Lenaeus translated them into Latin. In this way Mithridates' antidote became a medicine of Roman physicians. Celsus, writing his De Medicina around AD 30, gives a compound of more than thirty ingredients attributed to the king. The ingredients were pounded and worked into honey, and in cases of poisoning a piece the size of an almond was taken in wine. Nero's physician Andromachus improved the formula by adding viper flesh and opium, and the resulting compound was called theriac (theriaca); Galen increased the amount of opium still further. After Rome the remedy kept its place in Eastern and Western medicine for centuries. Medieval compounds show lists of up to 184 ingredients. In Venice and elsewhere the preparation of the remedy was bound to strict rules and even had to be carried out in public view, a practice closely tied to the development of the regulation of medicines. In London physicians went on prescribing mithridate until 1786. Averroes warned that the remedy might be useful in some cases but that regular use by healthy people could turn human nature into a kind of poison. William Heberden's Antitheriaca of 1745 was decisive in the loss of its standing in England.

Modern scholars regard the whole story with suspicion. Mithridatism works, and only in part, against complex poisons of biological origin to which the immune system can respond; against some substances the body gains a metabolic tolerance, though this can cause other damage. For many substances, such as heavy metals, no habituation is possible, and small doses can accumulate to a lethal result. One view therefore holds that the king's habit of taking poison was largely propaganda, a way of appearing untouchable to assassins and discouraging attempts on his life. Mithridates was never killed by poison, which suggests the strategy worked. The opposing view stresses that the king did accumulate real knowledge of some poisons and antidotes, but that the claim of a remedy "against everything" was exaggerated. It is also told that the king always kept a deadly dose of poison beside his sword; that a man immune to every poison should carry such a thing is one of the grounds of the criticism.

His Death

Helpless in the face of Pharnaces' revolt, the king decided to take his own life. According to Appian, as he prepared the poison he carried beside his sword, two of his young daughters, Mithridatis and Nysa, who were betrothed to kings, insisted on drinking first, and they drank; the poison took effect at once. Mithridates himself, although he walked about quickly to hasten it, was not affected, because he had long accustomed himself to various poisons. He then called to Bituitus, one of his Gallic officers, and asked him to kill him with his sword so that he would be spared being paraded in a Roman triumph. Appian reports that the king remarked that he had guarded himself against the poisons of others, but had made no provision against the poison most dangerous to kings, the domestic one, the treachery of army, children and friends. Bituitus carried out the request.

Cassius Dio's account is different. According to him, Mithridates first killed his wives and remaining children with poison and then swallowed what was left, but neither poison nor sword served him: the poison did not affect him, and the weakness of his hand, caused by old age and misfortune, softened the sword blow. In the end the men he had sent against his son fell upon him and hastened his death with swords and spears. Dio says that the king died both by his own hand and by the hand of his enemies, and that he wished to die and could not kill himself. The two accounts agree that the poison did not kill the king, but differ in detail. That a single dose should have killed two small girls but not a large man could also be explained by difference in body weight rather than by immunity; this reading belongs to scholars who doubt the king's immunity.

The fate of the body is also uncertain. According to some accounts the corpse was embalmed, and when Pompey came to see it the face had decayed and was unrecognisable. By Pompey's order the body is reported to have been buried beside his ancestors. Some scholars take these to be the rock-cut tombs at Sinope, others think he may have been laid in the royal tombs at Amaseia. Mount Mithridat in Kerch and the town of Yevpatoria in the Crimea still preserve the king's name. Part of his family remaining in Pontus, his sisters, wives, concubines and children, were put to death by Pompey. Plutarch writes that one of his sisters and five of his children walked in Pompey's triumph at Rome in 61 BC. Pharnaces, regarded as a friend and ally of Rome, remained king in the Bosporus; he would later try to recover Pontus and would be defeated by Julius Caesar at Zela in 47 BC.

Wives and Children

Mithridates had several wives and concubines. His marriage to his first wife, his sister Laodice, lasted until about 90 BC; it produced the sons Mithridates, Arcathius, Machares and Pharnaces and the daughters Cleopatra and Drypetina. Drypetina is remembered as the king's most devoted daughter; her baby teeth never fell out, so that she is said to have had a double row of teeth. His second wife, the Macedonian noblewoman Monime, was at his side from 89/88 to 72/71 BC; their daughter Athenais married King Ariobarzanes II of Cappadocia. His later wives were Berenice of Chios, Stratonice of Pontus and, as sixth, Hypsicratea; Stratonice bore him a son, Xiphares. From his relationship with the Galatian princess Adobogiona came Mithridates I of the Bosporus and the younger Adobogiona. To the sons born of his concubines he gave the names of Iranian kings, such as Cyrus, Xerxes, Darius and Artaphernes. His daughter Cleopatra married King Tigranes the Great of Armenia, and so strengthened the alliance between Pontus and Armenia. Nysa and Mithridatis were betrothed to the Egyptian king Ptolemy XII Auletes and to his brother Ptolemy of Cyprus.

His Bond with Amaseia

Although Mithridates was born in Sinope, the oldest centre of the dynasty was Amaseia in inland Pontus. The independent Kingdom of Pontus was established with Amaseia as its centre at the end of the 4th century BC, in the wake of Alexander's conquests; according to some accounts the city was the capital of the kingdom from 333 to 26 BC. The dynasty later moved its capital to the Greek coastal city of Sinope. Amaseia nevertheless remained a place associated with the royal palaces and tombs.

The geographer Strabo, a native of Amasya, describes his home town in detail in the Geographika, written a generation after Mithridates. According to him the city lies in a large, deep valley through which the Iris, the Yeşilırmak, flows, and nature as much as human foresight has equipped it to serve at once as city and fortress. It stands on a high, sheer rock that drops straight to the river; the rock has two peaks joined naturally to one another, and towers rise upon them. Strabo writes that within this circuit stood both the palaces and the monuments of the kings. Two channels cut inside the rock supplied water even under siege, and two bridges crossed the river. Today the rock-cut royal tombs lined up on the slope of the Harşena rock are the archaeological counterpart of this description. Strabo also says that the territory of Amaseia contained many strongholds demolished and much land deserted because of the Mithridatic War. When Pompey organised Pontus, Amaseia was for a time left to kings and later added to the province.

Strabo also supplies the other important centres of Mithridates in inland Pontus. At Cabira stood the king's palace, water mills, a zoological garden, hunting grounds and mines; the fortress of Kainon Chorion, where the king's most precious treasures were kept, was near by, and those treasures were later dedicated by Pompey in the Capitolium at Rome. Kings swore the oath "by the Fortune of the king and by Mên of Pharnaces", an oath that carries the mark of the religious world of the Pontic dynasty. Amaseia was retaken from Armenia in 70 BC by Roman forces under Lucullus; the city was soon declared a free city by Pompey and became one of the administrative centres of the province of Bithynia and Pontus. Strabo's own childhood was passed within this Roman order.

His Memory in Later Centuries

Mithridates went on living in European culture after his death. Jean Racine's play Mithridate of 1673 deals with the king's last days, and Mozart's Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770), written at the age of fourteen, is one of the 18th-century operas that grew out of that dramatic tradition. Alessandro Scarlatti composed Mitridate Eupatore in 1707. A poem in A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad of 1896 tells of the king's life on poison and ends with the line "Mithridates, he died old". Alexandre Dumas mentions mithridate in The Count of Monte Cristo as an instrument both of defence and of attack. In this way the king of Pontus and Amaseia entered very different fields as a symbol of resistance to poison.

Chronology

c. 135 BC: Mithridates VI is born in Sinope.

120 BC: His father, Mithridates V, is poisoned at a banquet; Laodice becomes regent.

116-113 BC: Mithridates returns from hiding and deposes his mother and brother.

108-107 BC: Paphlagonia is divided with Nicomedes III.

88 BC: Massacre of Roman and Italian settlers in Anatolia (the Asiatic Vespers).

88-84 BC: First Mithridatic War; peace with Sulla.

83-81 BC: Second Mithridatic War; Murena is defeated at the Halys.

73-63 BC: Third Mithridatic War.

67 BC: Battle of Zela; Pontus is recovered.

66 BC: Pompey defeats Mithridates at the Battle of the Lycus.

63 BC: His son Pharnaces II revolts; Mithridates dies at Panticapaeum.

61 BC: One of Mithridates' sisters and five of his children are paraded in Pompey's triumph at Rome.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Strabo, Geographika, Book XII (the Pontus and Amaseia sections).

Books

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

Other sources

  • Appian, Mithridatic Wars; Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book XXXVII; Pliny the Elder, Natural History (VII, XXIII, XXV, XXIX); Aulus Cornelius Celsus, De Medicina.
  • Brian McGing, The Foreign Policy of Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus, Brill, 1986.
  • Marc Hyden, "Mithridates' Poison Elixir: Fact or Fiction?", World History Encyclopedia, 2016. worldhistory.org
  • Wikipedia: Mithridates VI Eupator, Mithridate, Mithridatism, Kingdom of Pontus, Pharnaces II of Pontus, Amasya. en.wikipedia.org

Online sources