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

by Adrienne Mayor

  Mithradates immediately dispatched his aide Gordius to Rome. The regent of Cappadocia delivered a spirited countermessage to the Senate. This boy was an impostor! Gordius revealed that the youth was really the son of a supporter of the notorious enemy of Rome, the rebel Aristonicus. It is striking that Mithradates and Gordius raised the specter of the revolt of the Sun Citizens (133–129 BC). That popular Anatolian insurgency—some thirty years earlier—still had the power to alarm the Senate and to galvanize Mithradates’ followers.

  Gordius also tried to bribe Roman officials. The senators’ response was measured. Both Nicomedes and Mithradates were ordered out of the kingdoms they had attempted to dominate. The Senate officially liberated Paphlagonia and commanded the Cappadocians to chose a new king, since their royal family was now extinct.

  At this time, Sulla, the new praetor of Rome, was on his way to Cilicia with a legion (about five thousand men). His orders were to suppress the pirates there. But Sulla made a detour to Cappadocia. This was Mithradates’ first indirect encounter with Sulla, who was a few years his senior. Sulla’s army overcame the troops protecting Gordius and his young charge, commanded by Mithradates’ general Archelaus. Gordius and young Ariathes IX had to return to Pontus, as Sulla personally crowned the new Cappadocian ruler, Ariobarzanes (ca. 95 BC). Sulla’s threatening presence was matched by his words. He warned the “minor kings” of Anatolia to withdraw from their recent landgrabs or else.16

  Mithradates observed with disgust the acquiescence of the Bithynian weasel, Nicomedes III. Nicomedes and Laodice were bankrupt: they clutched at an alliance with the Roman Republic as though it were a lifeline. Mithradates, hemmed in by Roman troops in western Anatolia, offered no resistance. He withdrew his armies and bided his time.

  KING TIGRANES OF ARMENIA

  Mithradates turned his attention east, to Armenia, far from Rome’s notice. He needed a strong, reliable ally. For the time being, he wanted to avoid confrontations with Rome. In about 96 BC, Tigranes II of Armenia returned from the Parthian Empire (ancient Persia, modern Iran), where he had lived for the past thirty years, to assume his father’s throne.

  As a boy, Tigranes (Persian for the planet Mercury) was sent as a royal hostage to be raised in the Parthian court. In Ctesiphon, he was educated in Parthian culture, a melding of nomadic and ancient Iranian traditions. Persian influence was very strong in Armenia, and Tigranes’ mother was an Alan princess from beyond the Caucasus. Like royal marriage alliances of this period, the practice of sending a prince as a hostage was a way to ensure civil relations between distrustful allies. (Other examples were Philip of Macedon, educated in Thebes, and Cyrus the Great, raised in Media.) When Tigranes’ father died, the Parthians allowed Tigranes, at age forty-six, to don the Armenian royal tiara with the understanding that he would abide by Parthia’s wishes, as his father had. But Tigranes harbored big ideas for building an Armenian empire.

  In about 94 BC, Gordius rode to Tigranes’ court in Artaxata as Mithradates’ envoy. Tigranes’ high ambitions were matched by keen intelligence. He would have been familiar with the oracles about Mithradates and the comets of 135 and 119 BC, and the Magi’s blessing of the long-awaited “savior-king” of Pontus. He kept abreast of Mithradates’ conquests. An alliance with this rising emperor of the Black Sea could be useful. Tigranes was in a position to protect—and also profit from—trade on the northern Silk Route from China to the Black Sea.17 Tigranes listened to Mithradates’ side of the story, as Gordius filled him in on the Romans’ imperial machinations in western Anatolia.

  Gordius had a proposition. He suggested that Tigranes attack weak Cappadocia and remove the Roman puppet Ariobarzanes. In exchange, King Mithradates of Pontus offered His Majesty the hand of his beloved daughter, Princess Cleopatra, age sixteen. The ancient writers agree that Mithradates cared deeply for all his daughters, and they returned his love. Indeed, his genuine attachment to them made his daughters all the more valuable in marriage alliances.

  Tigranes agreed to the alliance. Armenia had fought against the Romans on the side of Antiochus the Great and had given refuge to Hannibal, who had designed Armenia’s capital city. But Tigranes had lived most of his life in distant Parthia, far from Roman reach. According to Justin, Tigranes knew little of Rome and did not anticipate that the Romans would object so strongly to a regime change in Cappadocia. Tigranes presented Gordius with some fine Armenian steeds for his journey back to Cappadocia, to prepare the way for Tigranes’ attack (see plate 5).18

  Mithradates was about forty in 94 BC, a few years younger than his new son-in-law. After the royal wedding sealed their treaty, the two monarchs became friends and natural allies, respecting each other as equals. Both were strong-willed, rich, ambitious, energetic, and popular. Both loved to ride spirited horses and lived for the chase, savoring the spartan outdoor life as much as they basked in luxury at court. They hunted deer, boar, and lion together, staying at Tigranes’ hunting lodges in his forest and mountain estates. Although both spoke Greek, Mithradates quickly picked up Parthian and Armenian. In court, the pair dressed in complementary traditional Persian-style garb, Tigranes in dark purple and a tiara, Mithradates in gleaming white with a simple purple diadem. As was his practice, Mithradates would have presented Tigranes with an agate ring bearing his portrait.

  Traditionally, Armenian monarchs wore a distinctive tiara studded with stars, but Tigranes’ was unique. His was decorated with a comet trailing a long curving tail, an image that appeared on some of Tigranes’ coins (see fig. 2.2). Mithradates would have taken this comet design as a signal of Tigranes’ allegiance to Pontus, as an allusion to the spectacular comets heralding the long-awaited savior. Mithradates considered himself the “King of Kings,” Shahanshah, the ancient title for the most powerful ruler in Persian-influenced lands.19

  But Armenia’s first great king, Tigranes, had his own agenda. The older monarch did not see himself as doing Mithradates’ bidding. Their mutual support furthered Tigranes’ own goals of unifying and expanding his kingdom. Tigranes had already annexed part of Cappadocia and was extending south, taking over the weak kingdom of Syria. He also bit off a big chunk of territory from the Parthians, who were fighting nomadic invasions on their eastern frontier. In time, Tigranes’ supreme armies would ravage Mesopotamia and occupy Syria, Phoenicia, and Cilicia. The Armenian conqueror rewarded cities that joined him, laid waste to those that resisted, and moved whole populations around as though they were game pieces. While Mithradates was engaged in the coming wars with Rome, Tigranes would begin building his fabulous new city, Tigranocerta. Intended to rival the magnificence of Susa and Babylon, the city was populated with the displaced citizens of towns that Tigranes leveled. Encouraged by his victories—and perhaps by the appearance of Halley’s Comet later during his reign—Tigranes would even begin referring to himself as “King of Kings.”

  But when he first allied with Tigranes in 94 BC, Mithradates was unaware of his new son-in-law’s grand plans. After Tigranes wed Cleopatra, the two friends struck another bargain. In their joint campaigns in Cappadocia and elsewhere, they agreed that Mithradates would take the cities and the land. All captives and treasure would belong to Tigranes. The arrangement indicates that Mithradates’ flow of revenue was already copious and reliable. He returned to Sinope, having set things in motion to regain indirect control of Cappadocia. Tigranes’ attack would be a way of testing the Roman resolve. Mithradates’ preparations for war included very heavy coin minting in 93–89 BC, to pay for large armies and arms.20

  The tangled situation in Anatolia became even more complex, and the chronology of events is hopelessly confused. We know that when Tigranes’ army, led by generals Mithras and Bagoas, invaded Cappadocia (in about 93 BC), the new puppet king Ariobarzanes panicked. He fled, sailing to his protectors in Rome. According to plan, Tigranes then recalled Ariathes IX and Gordius from Pontus to rule Cappadocia on Mithradates’ terms.

  Tigranes had kept his part of the bargain. He had no interest in
making war on Rome, and, anyway, Cappadocia was impoverished from years of despoiling armies. Tigranes took more captives than plunder. The Armenian army slipped away, back to Artaxata, to pursue Tigranes’ own grand strategies.21

  A TRAP FOR AQUILLIUS

  Around this time, Mithradates learned that his old foe, Nicomedes III of Bithynia, had died. He was succeeded by his weak son, Nicomedes IV, a brutal tyrant. Mithradates’ spies informed him that Nicomedes’ half brother, Socrates the Good, had popular support. Mithradates sent an assassin named Alexander to murder Nicomedes IV, but the plot failed.22

  Next, Mithradates gave Socrates command of a Pontic army. It seems that Mithradates also promised Socrates the hand of his daughter Orsabaris, a traditional way of sealing an alliance and maintaining indirect control of the throne (her name appears on Bithynian coins at this time). The Bithynian people welcomed Socrates as he marched across the countryside of Bithynia. But when Socrates approached the capital, Nicomedia, there was a stalemate, with Nicomedes IV barricaded inside his castle.

  Meanwhile, to distract the Romans, Mithradates sent envoys to the tribes north and west of the Black Sea (Thracians, Cimmerians, Bastarnae, Sarmatians, Roxolani). Offering rewards, he urged them to attack the Roman garrison in Macedonia, northern Greece.23

  Soon, however, the Roman Senate, having staved off the war with the Italians for a while by offering them citizenship, turned its attention back to Provincia Asia. Cappadocia and Bithynia were supposed to be passive client kingdoms. Now both were in crisis again, with the puppets Ariobarzanes and Nicomedes IV cowering in Rome, begging for aid. Troubled by the new developments, but unable to spare any more troops, the Senate dispatched Manius Aquillius to impose order in Anatolia. By senatorial decree, Aquillius’s dual mission in 90 BC was to restore Nicomedes IV’s rule in Bithynia and return Ariobarzanes to the Cappadocian throne. Both client kings understood that they ruled at Rome’s pleasure. Aquillius would be backed up by Lucius Cassius, governor of Asia, and one Roman legion stationed in Pergamon.

  Aquillius was an ill-considered choice for this sensitive diplomatic mission. He was the son of Manius Aquillius the elder—detested throughout Anatolia as the notorious Roman governor who had destroyed the Sun Citizens with poison. Infamous for his corrupt government in Pergamon, Aquillius senior had been tried in Rome for gross avarice, profiteering, and bribery, but escaped punishment. His son would not be so lucky. Aquillius junior—unaware of the ghastly fate in store for him—sailed to Bithynia, expecting to make a fortune as his father had, by raking in bribes and skimming exorbitant taxes.24

  With his ally Tigranes of Armenia occupied in the east, and with the Senate sending threatening envoys like Sulla and Aquillius, Mithradates had to reframe his strategy and remain flexible, without losing face. Conveniently, Socrates the Good suddenly died of an unknown cause. Apparently he ate or drank something that disagreed with him, as did so many whose earthly existence had become inconvenient for the Poison King. Orsabaris returned home to Pontus, and Mithradates recalled the Pontic army. As a result, the military crisis in Bithynia sputtered out just as Aquillius and Cassius arrived with the Roman legion, reinforced with draftees from Phrygia and Galatia. Nicomedes IV scrambled back onto the throne of Bithynia.

  But Nicomedes IV had been compelled to borrow heavily from Roman backers to finance his restoration. Not only had he mortgaged his kingdom to his financiers, but he had promised big payoffs to senators who returned him to power. Mired in blackmail and debt, stripped of free will, Nicomedes was—to put it in terms familiar to Mithradates and his Persian-influenced followers—sucked into the abyss, forced to do the bidding of the forces of Darkness and Deceit.

  Aquillius and his gang of Roman legates paid a visit to Nicomedes in Bithynia. Aquillius reminded the client king of his overdue financial obligations. But Nicomedes complained that the Bithynian countryside had been plundered by Socrates’ troops, sent by Mithradates. Bithynia’s royal treasury was empty. How, Nicomedes whined, could he possibly pay off his debts?

  Aquillius had a cunning plan. Bithynia was broke? Well, Pontus was rich. Mithradates had supported the pretender Socrates the Good, who tried to steal Nicomedes’ crown. Roman informers reported that Mithradates’ entire navy was in the northern Black Sea. Aquillius instructed Nicomedes to send his fleet to raid Mithradates’ unprotected port cities. At the same time, Nicomedes’ army should make incursions over the border, pillaging towns of western Pontus. While Nicomedes collected the money he owed, Aquillius promised that Cassius’s Roman legion would defend Bithynia from retaliation. Nicomedes had no choice. He capitulated and followed Aquillius’s orders. Nicomedes, who had come from a long line of collaborators, became Rome’s creature for the rest of his days.25

  And thus began the war with Rome that would last all of Mithradates’ life.

  In late 89 BC, Nicomedes IV sent his ships to assault Mithradates’ ports as far east as Amastris, and he ordered his troops to attack western Pontus. Nicomedes did return with plenty of booty to repay his outstanding debts to the Roman senators, generals, and other creditors. Nicomedes’ master, Aquillius, assumed the raids would teach the arrogant “minor king” Mithradates a lesson. But fear gripped Nicomedes’ heart. For during all his incursions, his men had met no resistance at all. It was like raiding an unguarded candy store. Where were the local garrisons? This eerie silence from Mithradates could not bode well.

  Mithradates was far from ignorant of Aquillius’s provocations; his friends in Bithynia must have informed him of Aquillius’s plan. Mithradates’ army and navy, all his forces, were in readiness, but he held off. Instead, he sent his navy on exercises in the northern Black Sea. He dispatched messengers to Pontus’s rich ports and the towns on the frontier to warn them of the coming attack and to inform them of his strategy. Accordingly, the populations of the places targeted by Nicomedes had withdrawn to safety, leaving behind enough valuables to be grabbed up by the Bithynians. No Pontic troops were in sight during the invasion.

  Mithradates “wanted to have a good and sufficient cause for war,” says Appian. He understood that the Romans distrusted and covertly sought to destroy the great Black Sea Empire he was creating. Nicomedes was a weakling, impelled by his Roman masters to attack Pontus. This confrontation had been building for a long time. Mithradates saw that Rome, preoccupied with the Social War in Italy, could not afford to send any more legions to Anatolia.26 Nicomedes’ invasion allowed Mithradates to set a trap. The Roman generals in Bithynia and their reluctant coalition had walked right in. Now, before all the world, Mithradates was the innocent, unsuspecting victim of an aggressive, unprovoked attack on Pontus, instigated by the rapacious Roman wolf.

  Until now, Mithradates’ policy had been to probe and test, goad and withdraw, constantly assessing Rome’s reactions. He “orchestrated crises here and there, sowing confusion and ambiguity in Rome,” remarks historian Brian McGing, “all the while observing carefully, making Pontus invincible and prepared for war, so that when the situation exploded, the chips would all fall to his advantage.” Mithradates had already sent the eminent orator Xenocles of Adramyttion and other envoys to Rome, to plead Anatolia’s complaints before the Senate. Until Aquillius and Nicomedes invaded Pontus, the king’s actions had been patient and opportunistic.27

  MITHRADATES MAKES HIS CASE

  Now Mithradates seized the opportunity to make his case against Rome in a very public manner. He dispatched an eloquent Greek statesman named Pelopidas to a high-profile debate with Nicomedes’ spokesmen, to be judged by Aquillius, Lucius Cassius, and Quintus Oppius at their camp in Bithynia. Appian, who had access to imperial archives and the memoirs of some who were present, recounts what was said by each party. One of Appian’s sources was P. Rutilius Rufus, a former friend of Marius who later wrote a history of the Mithradatic Wars (now lost). An honorable and sympathetic provincial official in 105 BC, Rutilius had attempted to restrain ruthless tax collectors but was condemned in Rome for his efforts in 92 BC. After t
hat, Rutilius remained in Anatolia, where he was a popular figure. Another source for these meetings was Lucius Cornelius Sisenna, a Roman soldier-historian of the Mithradatic Wars, whose multivolume chronicle is now lost but was consulted by surviving historians like Appian and Sallust.28

  Modern historians accept the speeches recorded by Appian as accurate reflections of the grievances that Mithradates communicated to the Roman representatives, even if their actual words have been lost. Mithradates, master of propaganda, would have disseminated these speeches to friends and allies in Anatolia and Greece. Mithradates also intended to present his case before the Senate, so his arguments probably existed in written form, consulted by ancient historians.29

  As an astute student of traditional Roman foreign policy, Mithradates assumed that the Senate would not approve of Aquillius’s decision to start a war. Yet Mithradates had to prepare for every contingency, since it was becoming obvious that developments in Italy were undermining the Senate’s power to control ambitious military commanders like Sulla, Marius, and Aquillius.

  Pelopidas began by reminding the Romans that Mithradates’ father had been an official Friend of Rome—and that Mithradates himself had maintained this peaceful friendship. In return, said Pelopidas, “Phrygia and Cappadocia were wrested away from Mithradates. Cappadocia had always belonged to Pontus. It was recovered by Mithradates’ father, with no opposition from Rome.” Pointing at Aquillius, Pelopidas said, “Your own Roman general, your father, Manius Aquillius, gave Phrygia to Pontus, as a reward for the victory over Aristonicus and the Sun Citizens.”

  Now, Pelopidas told the Romans, “you allow Nicomedes’ navy to threaten the security of the Black Sea trade. You let Nicomedes overrun Pontus and carry off plunder—in quantities of which you are well aware.” The clever juxtaposition of peaceful trade with illicit plunder cast the Romans as pirates, while depicting Mithradates as the peaceful protector of Black Sea commerce.