The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy

by Adrienne Mayor

  73–63 BC Third Mithradatic War

  73–70 BC Lucullus is sent to destroy Mithradates. Meteorite interrupts battle in Bithynia; Mithradates besieges Cyzicus but Lucullus is victorious; Kabeira falls. Mithradates flees to Tigranes’ Armenia, rebuilds army

  69–68 BC Lucullus crosses Euphrates, wins major victory over Tigranes and Mithradates, who escape. Lucullus loses control of his mutinous army

  67 BC Mithradates marches on Pontus, recovers his kingdom in major battle; meanwhile Pompey clears pirates from Mediterranean

  66 BC Pompey arrives in Pontus to replace Lucullus, deals Mithradates crushing blow in surprise moonlight battle, but Mithradates escapes with fugitive army into Colchis

  65/64 BC Mithradates evades Pompey, escaping over Caucasus Mountains to his Bosporan Kingdom, plans to invade Italy by land

  63 BC Earthquake jolts Bosporus. Mithradates’ son Pharnaces stages coup. Mithradates commits suicide. Pompey declares victory, ending Mithradatic Wars

  47 BC Pharnaces tries to recover father’s lost kingdom, invades Pontus. Crushed in short, brutal battle by Julius Caesar, who boasts Veni Vidi Vici

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I AM INDEBTED to my excellent editor at Princeton University Press, Rob Tempio, and the anonymous readers who offered valuable suggestions for improving the manuscript. I’m grateful for the early encouragement from Sam Elworthy, Kirsten Manges, Sam Popkin, Susan Shirk, and the LPG writers group of Princeton. Heartfelt gratitude goes to my agent Sandy Dijkstra and everyone at the agency. Valuable insights were offered at various stages by Murat Arslan, Glen Bowersock, David Braund, Deniz Burcu Erciyas, Tom Habinek, Toni Hayes, Bruce Hitchner, Jakob Munk Høtje, Henryk Jaronowski, Robert Keohane, John Ma, Brian McGing, Robert Proctor, John Ramsey, Walter Scheidel, John Strisino, Mehmet Tezcan, and Philip Wexler. I thank Jeffrey Bauman for helping to create the time line and dramatis personae, and Luca Grillo for help with translations. I’m grateful for Lauren Lepow’s fine editorial guidance, Dimitri Karetnikov’s eye for illustrations, Frank Mahood’s pleasing text design and layout, and the proofreading wizardry of Barbara Mayor.

  In 2008, a group dedicated to “our king” Mithradates, “the second Aleksandros of the World,” was established on the Internet networking site Facebook, by Greek and Turkish people of Pontus. Mithradates has a growing presence on Facebook; as of this writing the group has more than four hundred international members. I thank the many friends of Mithradates Eupator on Facebook for unique perspectives and support.

  Special thanks go to Peter van Alfen and Elena Stolyarik of the American Numismatic Society, and Dr. George Keremediev of the American Computer Museum, Bozeman, Montana. Artist Rubik Kocharian contributed his evocative painting of Mithradates and Tigranes the Great. Jakob Munk Høtje and Dick Osseman allowed me to use their photographs of Mithradatic archaeology in Turkey. My talented sister Michele Angel created the maps and two imaginative illustrations. Over the years, Christopher Duffin has provided photographs and literary evidence for Mithridatium and theriacs in medieval and early modern times. Hans Heiner Buhr of Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, shared his photographs, paintings, and personal knowledge of the Caucasus Mountains. I’m grateful for thoughtful comments on early drafts by Ted Champlin, Ian Morris, Severo Perez, and Elaine Wise. I’ve profited from conversations with Kris Ellingsen, Deborah Gordon, and Barry Strauss, and from on-line research by N. S. Gill, K. Kris Hirst, David Meadows, and Tim Spalding. This book is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Gerald Charles Olson. A man of bold intelligence, curiosity, and resilience, he would have enjoyed Mithradates’ amazing tale. To three friends who read the entire manuscript and offered wise comments, my deep gratitude: Michelle Maskiell, Josh Ober, and Marcia Ober.

  For research support, thanks go to Stephen Macedo and the Princeton University Center for Human Values; Denis Feeney and the Princeton Classics Department; and Anthony Grafton and the Princeton Humanities Council Old Dominion Fellows of 2005–6. Richard Martin and the Stanford Classics Department, and the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Program, Stanford, have given me my first academic home. It was Ted Champlin of Princeton who first welcomed me as an independent scholar; I’m grateful for his friendship. I want to express my gratitude to Montana State University for the gift of an honorary doctorate in May 2007.

  For Josiah, O Best Beloved, words are not enough—but a nomad’s saying about friendship captures what I want to say: “Because he shared my burden when it threatened to slow my pace and kept by my side when we traveled lightly.”

  THE

  POISON KING

  INTRODUCTION

  Long ago and far away, in a little kingdom by the sea, a dazzling comet in the East foretold the birth of a remarkable Prince who would dare to make war on the mightiest empire. As an infant in his cradle, he was marked for greatness by lightning. While he was still a boy, enemies in the castle poisoned his father, the King. His own mother, the Queen, tried to do away with the Prince. But he escaped and lived like Robin Hood in the wilderness for seven years. He grew strong and brave and learned the secrets of poisons and antidotes. The Prince returned to his kingdom and killed the wicked Queen. He became a beloved King, ruling over many nations. When the powerful Empire across the sea invaded his realm, people from many lands joined his grand war. The battles against the Empire lasted his whole lifetime. Many beautiful queens sat by his side, but the King found true love with a woman as valiant in battle as he. When the King died, his passing was echoed by a terrible earthquake. For thousands of years afterward, the Great King’s legendary deeds were remembered and retold.

  IT SOUNDS like a fairy tale.1 But add the documented facts and it’s history. In about 120 BC, Mithradates VI Eupator the Great, king of Pontus, inherited a small but wealthy kingdom on the Black Sea (northeastern Turkey). Mithradates (Mithra-DAY-tees) is a Persian name meaning “sent by Mithra,” the ancient Iranian Sun god. Two variant spellings were used in antiquity—Greek inscriptions favored Mithradates; the Romans preferred Mithridates. As a descendant of Persian royalty and of Alexander the Great, Mithradates saw himself bridging East and West and as the defender of the East against Roman domination. A complex leader of superb intelligence and fierce ambition, Mithradates boldly challenged the late Roman Republic, first with a shocking massacre and then in a series of wars that lasted nearly forty years.2

  Poisoning was a traditional political weapon. Mithradates’ father was murdered with poison, and Mithradates foiled several poison plots against himself. As a child, he dreamed of making himself immune to poisons. After hundreds of experiments, Mithradates unlocked the pharmacological paradox still studied today: poisons can be beneficial as well as lethal. Many believed that his special antidote was the reason for his celebrated vigor and longevity. After his death, Mithradates’ trademarked elixir was imbibed by Roman emperors, Chinese mandarins, and European kings and queens, inspiring a flow of scientific treatises on the Poison King’s mastery of toxicology. This is the first book to explain the inspiration and scientific principles underlying Mithradates’ antidote.

  Mithradates was an erudite patron of the arts and sciences. His military engineers built the first water-powered mill and technologically advanced siege engines. The cryptic Antikythera mechanism, the world’s first computer, may have been one of Mithradates’ prized possessions.

  Recruiting vast, ethnically diverse armies from far-flung lands, Mithradates envisioned a powerful Black Sea Empire to rival Rome’s might. He won magnificent victories and suffered devastating defeats in some of the most spectacular battles in antiquity. Luring the Romans deeper into hostile lands, Mithradates forced them to conquer and occupy the rich territory that they had intended only to plunder. Rome’s best generals won battle after battle but were never able to lay their hands on the last “untamed” monarch to defy the Roman juggernaut. His followers revered him as the long-awaited savior of the East. The Romans called him the Eastern Hannibal.

  Mithradates became a le
gend in his own time. After the long Mithradatic Wars, even the Romans developed a grudging admiration for their most relentless enemy. Mithradates enjoyed a colorful afterlife in art, music, and literature (see appendix 2). Medieval artists illustrated harrowing scenes from his reign, portraying him as a noble “Dark Knight” battling cruel Roman tyrants. Machiavelli praised him as a valiant hero; his reign fascinated Louis XIV. Immortalized in a tragedy by the great French playwright Racine, Mithradates and his doomed harem also inspired the fourteen-year-old Mozart to write his first opera. Poets celebrated the King of Poison: “I tell the tale that I heard told. Mithridates, he died old.”3 But even the details about Mithradates’ last hours, death, and burial are shrouded in mystery.

  For two millennia, Mithradates’ extraordinary military and scientific achievements made him a household name, a major figure in the Roman Republic’s all-star cast of characters, alongside Hannibal, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar. Over the past half century, however, Mithradates’ name and deeds began to fade from popular memory. Of all the nations that “came into mortal conflict with Rome,” mourned one writer, “none is more utterly forgotten than the kingdom of Pontus. Her landmarks are uprooted, her temples fallen, and of her mightiest ruler there remain but distorted legends.”4

  But there are signs that Mithradates’ star is rising again, as historians and archaeologists reconsider ancient struggles against imperialism, and as scientists revive the old dream of a universal antidote to toxic weapons. New crises ignite in many of the strategic lands where Mithradates once ruled, fought, and won allies, a list familiar from today’s headlines: Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia, Crimea, Georgia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Syria, Kurdistan, Iran, Iraq. While researching Mithradates’ astonishing feat of crossing the Caucasus Mountains to make his last stand in the Crimea, I pored over maps of this little-known yet historically important corner of the world. In August 2008, the Caucasus burst onto the world stage, as the Russian army attacked Georgia (ancient Colchis)—an independent former Soviet republic—over the contested regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Invaders and refugees streamed over the very same rugged mountain pass traveled by Mithradates’ fugitive army two thousand years ago.

  Mithradates’ name may be unfamiliar in the West today, but his reputation as a defender against imperialism was not forgotten in the East. “Everyone knows the history of the struggle between Rome and Mithridates,” declared the great Russian historian Mikhail Rostovtzeff, and “everyone remembers that Mithradates made his last stand” in south Russia. In some former republics of the Soviet Union, Mithradates is still a local icon. For example, a Georgian biography of Mit’ridat appeared in 1965, and Russian novels about Tsar Mitridate Yevpatorus came out in 1993 and 2004. Between wars, sporadic scholarly and archaeological research takes place in Mithradates’ Black Sea Empire. Considering the recent spate of political poisonings in Ukraine and Russia, there is black humor in the name of a bar in the king’s old city of Pantikapaion (modern Kerch), daring you to order a drink in Mithradates’ Place.5

  In lands once allied with or ruled by Mithradates, he is recalled as a charismatic leader who resisted Western encroachment. In Armenia and Kurdistan, for example, many consider Mithradates (Mehrdad, Mirdad, Mhrtat) a national hero.6 After a long period of ignoring Mithradates, Turkey is beginning to take an interest in the first ruler to unite and defend the diverse peoples of Anatolia against foreign invaders. In 2007, historian Murat Arslan published his dissertation Mithradates VI Eupator, Roma’nin Büyük Düsmani (“Rome’s Great Enemy”), on the “ancient Anatolian hero, little known and neglected until today.” Arslan likens Mithradates, in his defense of Anatolia against the Romans, to Alexander the Great saving Asia from the Persian Empire. The leading Turkish historian Sencer Sahin compares Mithradates to the Turkish national hero Atatürk, who successfully fought foreign invaders.7

  ANCIENT SOURCES FOR MITHRADATES’ LIFE

  Nearly everything we know of Mithradates was written from his enemies’ perspective, by the inheritors of Roman imperial culture who looked through a Roman lens eastward toward the expanding frontiers of the empire. The extant (and missing) ancient sources for Mithradates’ life and times have been comprehensively evaluated by modern historians of the Roman world.8 Of the fifty or so ancient texts that contributed details of Mithradates’ life, our chief sources are Justin’s summary of a lost history by Pompeius Trogus; Appian’s Mithradatic Wars; Cassius Dio’s history of Rome; Strabo’s Geography; Memnon’s fragmentary history of Heraclea on the Black Sea; Cicero’s speeches; and Plutarch’s lives of the Roman generals (Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey) who fought the Mithradatic Wars. Important material also appears in Pliny’s Natural History, fragments of Sallust and Livy, and Diodorus of Sicily, Ammianus Marcellinus, Galen, and other Latin and Greek authors.

  These ancient writers were able to consult the works of many other historians and a host of records, archives, living memories, and oral folklore, all irretrievable. Because the surviving texts were written from the vantage point of the victorious Roman Empire, outright and subtle biases were inevitable. To tell Mithradates’ story from his own perspective, one would need to stand on the shores of the Black Sea and look, not just west toward Rome and Greece, but outward in all directions from Mithradates’ kingdom and the allied lands that resisted Rome, lands with their own vital cultures and empires. This book takes up the challenge of trying to write from outside a Roman point of reference, to evoke a time before the imposing edifice of the triumphant Roman Empire.

  As is often pointed out, certain foes of the Romans ended up more famous than their conquerors. Rome’s fascination with its dangerous enemies, and admiration for their courage and ideals, produced a wealth of biographical material. Some Roman writers (Cicero, Tacitus, and Diodorus) were sharply critical of Rome’s harsh imperialism and avarice. At least three sources (Strabo, Plutarch, and Trogus) had personal links to the Mithradatic Wars. They understood animosity toward the late Roman Republic and treated some aspects of Mithradates’ life favorably. Regrettably, we cannot consult the lost accounts by Mithradates’ contemporaries who were personally involved in the wars, such as Rutilius Rufus, Lucius Cornelius Sisenna, Lenaeus, Metrodorus, and Hypsicrates.9

  Intriguing clues in ancient and medieval texts are now all that remain of a rich store of lively anecdotes that once circulated orally about Mithradates. Every scrap in the literary record is valuable—along with artistic, numismatic, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence, much of it only recently come to light. A surprising amount of material about Mithradates and his times can be pieced together, to form a flickering picture of his upbringing and education, influences and heroes, speeches and appeal to followers, military strategies, scientific experiments and leisure pursuits, love affairs, hopes and doubts, motivations, and his complex psychology—even the king’s moods, jokes, and dreams were recorded.

  HISTORICAL METHODS

  The incomplete nature of the ancient record sometimes forces historians into the realm of guesswork. In such cases, the approach followed by the great detective Sherlock Holmes is appropriate. When compelled to rely on “guesswork,” Holmes explained his method thus: We must “balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to work.”10

  In piecing together a coherent historical narrative from “broken shards,” to reconstruct missing elements that were taken for granted but not described in the ancient record, historians of antiquity draw on classical and modern knowledge to fill in background details of economy, cultural influences, climate, geography, topography, natural history, political alliances, and so on. Historical reconstruction is essential in retrieving a fully realized life of any ancient figure. In the endeavor to balance fidelity to history with fidelity to an individual from the past, however, character and motivations “cannot be completely and authentically represented or expressed in the domain of history” alone. To b
e faithful to Mithradates, the historical person we can never really know, one can apply “the scientific use of the imagination” to fill in the spaces between surviving accounts and contextual facts. This is especially apposite for Mithradates, a unique, atypical Hellenistic ruler.11

  In recent years, historians have also introduced counterfactual, “virtual,” or “what if” thought experiments as tools for understanding the meaning and ramifications of historical events, imagining alternative outcomes and filling in gaps. These techniques are not a modern invention. As early as the fifth century BC, for example, the Greek historian Herodotus and the playwright Euripides recounted alternative versions of the story of Helen of Troy, in which Helen never went to Troy but spent the entire war in Egypt. The Roman historian Livy asked what would have happened had Alexander the Great lived to invade Italy (Livy argued that Rome would have defeated him).12

  John Lewis Gaddis’s Landscape of History (2002) was influential in helping me map uncharted areas of Mithradates’ life while maintaining historical fidelity. Gaddis also explains how scenario building allows historians to use their imaginations to revisit and replay the past, by asking in a disciplined way what might have happened under specific conditions.13

  To narrate (and in a few cases to dramatize) Mithradates’ story, I sometimes flesh out missing elements in the historical record, drawing on known facts, literary and archaeological evidence, comparable events, and probabilities. In these instances, I follow the widely accepted rules for disciplined alternative history, established in Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History (2000): the details must be probable or plausible for Mithradates’ time and place, and they must match contemporary experiences, derived from ancient literature, art, and history and/or archaeology. Phrases like “might have,” “could have,” and “perhaps” signal these passages, but I also clearly identify, in text or endnotes, all instances of my filling in gaps or dead ends, adding historically appropriate details, reconciling contradictory accounts, or proposing logical scenarios for how events could have unfolded. In proposing scenarios, I adhere to the known historical landmarks and “conditions of possibility” in the ancient sources. This approach differs significantly from historical fiction, in which novelists are free to contradict known facts and create new characters and conditions.14