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

by Adrienne Mayor

  Mithradates’ intelligence sources were formidable; his spies and friends in Italy and the provinces kept him very well informed. In the next portion of the speech he revealed what he had learned about Rome’s struggles with Italian tribes and the impending civil war.25

  At this very moment, all of Italy has risen up in war, following the lead of the Marsi and the Samnites. These peoples are demanding not just independence, but also a share in the government and the rights of citizenship. At the same time, Rome is also torn by internal strife among its leading men. This conflict is just as bloody as the war with the Italians, and much more dangerous for Rome’s survival.

  Even if the Romans could pursue individual wars against each of these enemies, this collective assault will overwhelm them. How [asked Mithradates] can they imagine they could have their hands free for a war with us? We must fight the Romans sooner or later. Let us seize this chance and swiftly build up our strength. The Romans have their hands full of trouble—now is the time!

  Here Mithradates set out his grievances against Rome.

  The Romans started a war against me when I was just a child, from the moment they took away Greater Phrygia, which they had granted to my father. This land already belonged to my great-grandfather Mithradates II, who received it as dowry when he married the sister of Seleucus II. Ordering me to leave Paphlagonia was another act of war! My father had inherited Paphlagonia peacefully.

  I complied with all these harsh Roman decrees. I relinquished Phrygia and Paphlagonia. I removed my son from Cappadocia, even though I had won it fairly and the Cappadocians requested my friend Gordius as their king. I even killed Socrates the Good when the Senate wanted to take over Bithynia. But did any of this mollify the Romans? No. They became more oppressive every day.

  The Romans sent Nicomedes of Bithynia—the son of a vulgar dancing girl!—to attack Pontus. When I tried to defend my kingdom, they made war on me.

  But I’m not the only victim of the Romans, continued Mithradates.

  The Romans hate the power and majesty of great kings of great lands. They cheated my grandfather, King Pharnaces I, who should have inherited Pergamon. They even mistreat their allies. After King Eumenes II of Pergamon helped the Romans crush King Antiochus the Great, the Gauls, and the Macedonians, the Romans declared Eumenes an enemy and destroyed his son, Aristonicus. No one rendered the Romans greater service than the African King Masinissa of Numidia, who helped Rome defeat Hannibal. Yet they turned on his grandson Jugurtha, and viciously paraded him as a slave in chains before throwing him in prison to die.

  Why do the Romans hate great and good kings? Is it because their own history is filled with a string of shameful kings? Lowly Latin sheepherders, Sabine soothsayers, exiles from Corinth, slaves from Etruria—these were the Roman royalty.

  The Romans are so proud of their founders, Romulus and Remus. By the Romans’ own account, their founders were suckled at a she-wolf’s teats! That explains why the entire Roman population has the temperament of wolves! Like wolves, the Romans have an insatiable thirst for blood and a ravenous hunger for power and riches.

  My pedigree is superior to that motley Roman rabble, boasted Mithradates.

  My family can be traced back on my father’s side to Cyrus and Darius, the founders of the Persian Empire. On my mother’s side, I am related to Alexander the Great and Seleucus Nicator, founders of the Macedonian Empire. Moreover, not one of the peoples in my new kingdom has ever fallen under foreign domination or been ruled by foreign kings. Even Alexander the Great never ruled Pontus, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Bithynia, or Armenia—not to mention Scythia!

  Before me, only two other kings, Darius and Philip, had ventured to even enter Scythia, much less subdue it. Any campaign beyond the Black Sea means extreme hardship and great risk. Not only are the nomads fierce and courageous, but they have no towns or property and their land is protected by desert wastes and freezing mountains. Those great kings barely escaped alive from Scythia! When I went to Scythia, I was just a raw novice at war. Yet now, I draw most of my strength against the Romans from my allies in Scythia!

  Our war against the Romans on our own land is entirely different. Our climate is mild. No soil is more fertile than ours, no land has as many important cities. If we take courage and pursue this war, I promise you we’ll spend more time celebrating than fighting, more time counting our riches, than going on campaign. Think of the wealth of Phrygia, Lydia, Ionia! We don’t even have to storm these lands; all we have to do is occupy them!

  I’ve already recovered all of Pontus, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, and the Bosporus, my rightful dominions. I’m the only man in the world to have subdued fierce Colchis and Scythia. My soldiers and my enemies can testify to my fairness and generosity.

  All Asia has been awaiting me, declared Mithradates. Just imagine what a great army we can achieve if you follow me to glory!

  After arousing the fervor of his followers by word and deed, Mithradates, savior-king of Asia, plunged into the thick of his lifelong struggle against Rome. The primary objectives now were to consolidate his power in southern Anatolia, demonstrate naval supremacy in the Aegean, expel the Romans from the East, and liberate Greece. If the Senate chose to send either Sulla or Marius to oppose him, he wanted to have the best advantage. It would be better to defeat the Romans later, in Greece, than to have to fight them in the lands he now occupied. So, with the Anatolian coast and the entrance to the Aegean in his control, Mithradates called on pirate fleets and other allied ships to join the Pontic armada sailing out from the Black Sea to the Aegean to take Rhodes. That island was also the destination of Aquillius and Cassius.

  LOOT AND LOVE

  Mithradates continued to march across southern Anatolia, accompanied by a retinue of speechwriters, eunuchs, doctors, bodyguards, and troops. The citizens of Ephesus celebrated Mithradates’ arrival by toppling statues erected by the Romans in their city. Mithradates sailed over to the island of Cos where he was received with jubilation. The people of Cos turned over a vast hoard of money and treasures that had been placed in the Temple of Asclepius for safekeeping by the queen-regent of Egypt, Cleopatra III (wife of Ptolemy VIII, descendant of the best friend of Alexander the Great). One of the treasures was her grandson, the young son of the reigning ruler, Alexander, in Egypt. Malleable royal heirs could come in handy: Mithradates took the boy into his court and raised him with his other sons.

  Cleopatra’s treasure included splendid works of art, statuary, paintings, vases, faience, gems, jewelry, royal costumes, and coffers of gold and silver coins. This caravan of valuables was sent under heavy guard to Pontus. One very special item, stored in a cedar chest and carefully labeled, was the vintage cloak of faded purple that had adorned the shoulders of the great Alexander. Mithradates’ possession of this priceless heirloom reassured the king and his followers that he was the true inheritor of Alexander’s legacy, the one who could liberate Greece from the Roman yoke.

  Mithradates also carried away a large hoard of money, eight hundred talents, from Cos. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, the money was intended for the Temple in Jerusalem, deposited on Cos by Jews of Anatolia for safekeeping.26

  Next, Mithradates took Stratonicea, where Macedonian and indigenous traditions mingled: the city had supported Aristonicus’s revolt. It was in Stratonicea (according to Appian, or perhaps in Miletus, as Plutarch wrote), that a self-possessed young Macedonian woman caught Mithradates’ eye. The daughter of Philopoemen, a prominent citizen, Monime was a beauty “much talked about among the Greeks.” Plutarch recounted the fascinating story of her courtship. The fate of Mithradates’ first wife, his sister Laodice, was common knowledge, and so was the king’s resistance to making any woman his official queen after Laodice’s treachery. Mithradates was strongly drawn to Monime. Thinking he would make her the jewel of his harem, he began negotiations with her father.

  FIG. 7.4. Mithradates and Monime, who negotiated for the title of queen. Illustration for Racine’s play
Mithridate, artist unknown.

  But Monime herself rejected Mithradates’ offer of fifteen hundred gold pieces. She held out for more. Monime demanded a marriage contract and insisted that Mithradates give her the royal diadem and title of queen. Mithradates found Monime irresistible. Raised among strong, willful women, and as a gambler extraordinaire, Mithradates was attracted to powerful personalities whose intelligence complemented his own. For the past dozen years, the king’s only female companionship had been casual trysts in his harem. As Monime knew, victory is an aphrodisiac. Mithradates, reveling in his great good fortune and feeling expansive, agreed to her conditions. The royal scribes prepared the marriage contract, and the gold was turned over to Philopoemen. Mithradates appointed Monime’s father as his overseer in Ephesus. After the king tied the purple and gold ribbon around the head of his new queen, the pair withdrew to the private rooms of the palace in Pergamon to become better aquainted.27

  MEANWHILE IN ROME

  Alarming news reached Rome, telling of the unauthorized attack on Pontus by Nicomedes IV, instigated by Aquillius. The senators heard messengers recount details of the ignominious defeat, the flight of the three Roman generals, followed by Mithradates’ triumphant sweep through the Province of Asia. The loss of Roman honor and possessions demanded a quick and decisive response. The Senate declared war (after the fact!) on King Mithradates VI Eupator. The two rival consuls, Marius and Sulla, cast lots to see who would win the command of this long-expected Mithradatic War. The gods did not favor Marius. It was Sulla who won the coveted generalship.

  But the city of Rome was torn by civil strife and murder, and almost all Italy was in open rebellion. Rome’s available troops were already fighting on many fronts; how could the Senate spare legions to send across the Mediterranean? Sulla was too embroiled in the civil war against Marius and his allies to depart for Asia. Mithradates’ excellent intelligence sources had again given him impeccable timing. Rome’s delayed military response would allow him time to build more ships and naval seige engines to attack Rhodes, while Mithradates’ armies marched to liberate Greece.

  The crisis atmosphere in Rome was compounded by a hard economic reality. There was no money to finance Sulla’s legions. The senators voted to take an unheard-of emergency measure. “So limited were their means at the time, and so unlimited were their ambitions,” wrote Justin, that the Senate seized the ancient treasures of Rome’s legendary King Numa, the successor of the founder, Romulus. King Numa had set aside his special treasure six hundred years earlier with instructions that it was to be used only for holy sacrifices to the gods. While Mithradates was in his counting house happily counting out his gold, the Senate’s agents were desperately selling Rome’s most sacred treasure to the highest bidders. Appian commented that the market price of Numa’s legacy came to only nine thousand pounds of gold. “This was all Rome had to spend on so great a war.”28

  Rhodes, meanwhile, was Mithradates’ immediate target. The island prepared for war, calling on Telmessus and its other allies in Lycia for aid.

  AQUILLIUS CAPTURED

  Aquillius had managed to reach the coast across from Lesbos. Oppius, he had heard, was Mithradates’ sorry captive; Nicomedes IV was sailing to Rome; Cassius’s whereabouts were unknown. Aquillius commandeered a boat to take him to Mytilene on Lesbos. There he hoped to arrange passage back to Italy. According to the historian Diodorus, Aquillius found refuge with a local doctor. But the citizens of Mytilene sided with Mithradates. They sent a posse of “their most valiant young men to the house where Aquillius was staying. They seized Aquillius, put him in fetters,” and rowed him back to the mainland, where they turned him over to Mithradates’ men. The soldiers set the prize prisoner on a donkey and paraded him before jeering crowds. All along the road to Pergamon, the soldiers forced the captive to repeat his name—Manius Aquillius—and confess his crimes against the people of Anatolia.29

  FIG. 7.5. Road to Pergamon, the acropolis and Mithradates’ palace in the distance. Steel engraving, T. Allom, 1840, courtesy of F. Dechow.

  All recognized the man’s name on the way to Pergamon. Fearful Romans in the area kept a low profile and stayed home. Everyone else spit on the memory of the captive’s notorious father, the elder Manius Aquillius, former Roman governor of Pergamon, erstwhile capital of Rome’s Asian Province. Deeply hated for crushing taxes, he had hatched schemes so egregious that he’d been prosecuted for extortion, yet acquitted. All remembered how Aquillius senior had poisoned innocent men, women, and children trapped in the cities that supported the Sun Citizens’ rebellion.

  Exploitation by tax profiteers like Aquillius and his son had kept resentment boiling in Anatolia, which the Romans viewed as an El Dorado overflowing with gold and natural resources theirs for the plundering. When Mithradates was a youth in exile, the elder Aquillius had interfered in his mother’s realm of Pontus, draining its treasury with high-interest loans. Officially, provincial tax rates were supposed to be set in Rome, but the office of tax collector was sold to the highest bidder, who then squeezed as much as he could for personal profit while the Roman courts of justice turned a blind eye. Aquillius the younger had headed the provincial commission in Asia, and, like his father, he was guilty of levying corrupt taxes and bribery. And now, as everyone knew, Aquillius’s arrogant son had blackmailed and ordered the king of Bithynia, Nicomedes IV, to invade Pontus, out of pure greed.30

  Jubilation and revenge inflamed the Greeks and Anatolians who turned out to castigate the shackled Roman on his humble mount. As humiliating as the procession was, Aquillius dreaded his meeting with King Mithradates more. The tables were turned, the Romans were on the run, and Mithradates ruled Asia.

  The man on the donkey could not imagine what awaited him in Pergamon.

  PLATE 1. Mithradates testing poisons on a condemned criminal. The doctors Papias and Krateuas (right) display monkshood (Aconitum apellus), ginger (Zingiber officinale), and gentian (Gentiana lutea). “The Royal Toxicologist,” by Robert Thom, History of Pharmacy, Pfizer. American Pharmacists Association Foundation.

  PLATE 2. Mithradates and Hypsicratea, riding to battle. “Hypsicratea, concubine of Mithradates, follows her mate to battle,” by Antoine Paillet, 1672. Chateau de Versailles. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

  PLATE 3. Scenes from Mithradates’ life story, depicted within the castle, beginning with poisoning his mother and brother (far left); Mithradates besieged (center); his death (right); and ending with the rebellion of Pharnaces (foreground). Medieval manuscript illustration. Miroir historial; speculum historiale/Mithridate, Français 50, folio 172, Bibliothèque National de France.

  PLATE 4. Mithradates (left) takes the antidote, offered by his herbalist Krateuas (right). This elaborate gold and terracotta Mithridatium jar, decorated with scenes from Mithradates’ life, is one of a pair of sixteenth-century drug jars with glazed, watertight interiors. These jars would have been prominently displayed by the owner or apothecary. Annibale Fontana, ca. 1570, detail 90.SC.42.1 J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

  PLATE 5. Mithradates the Great in lionskin cap (right) and Tigranes in tiara (left) seal their alliance in Tigranes’ palace in Artaxata, Armenia. Painting by Rubik Kocharian, 2008, portrays the friends clasping hands, dressed in costumes like those in contemporary images of Persian-influenced Hellenistic kings.

  PLATE 6. Moonlight Battle. Mithradates awakened by friends (left) as Pompey attacks by the full moon. Plutarch’s Life of Pompey, ca. 1500, presented to Louis XII of France. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague.

  PLATE 7. Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Mithradates probably crossed the Daryal Pass in the center of the range. NASA Visible Earth satellite image, www.visibleearth.nasa.gov.

  PLATE 8. Mithradates (incognito) and Hypsicratea, departing. Des dames de renom, De mulierbus claris/Hypsicratea, Français 599, folio 67, Bibliothèque National de France.

  PLATE 9. Pompey turns away from the corpse of Mithradates, while m
en fight over his crown and scabbard. Plutarch’s Life of Pompey, ca. 1500, presented to Louis XII of France. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague.

  PLATE 10. Horseman on the steppes. Photo by David Edwards/National Geographic.

  8

  Terror

  IN THE PALACE at Pergamon, Mithradates was enjoying two honeymoons, one political and the other personal. Between romantic interludes with his new love Monime, the king reveled in his victories and devised a public punishment for Aquillius. The Roman deserved to die for invading Pontus and preying on Anatolia. The king’s heralds summoned the populace to the Theater of Dionysus, perched on a steep hillside of the Acropolis, where Mithradates had recently delivered his speech declaring war on Rome.

  The crowd watches as a super-hot bonfire is stoked in the center of the theater. Next, a “giant” figure well known in Pergamon, a freakishly tall soldier called Bastarna (from the Bastarnae of Carpathia), appears, riding a huge horse at a stately pace around the fire, dragging a long chain. At the end of the chain stumbles Aquillius. Suspense builds, and a dramatic recitation of the prisoner’s crimes incites the audience.

  Next, with exaggerated ceremony, heaps of gold coins from Mithradates’ treasury are trundled out. The glittering coins ring out as men laboriously tip them into a large stone crucible suspended over the fire. Within a few minutes, the coins are melted down. A glimmer of what is in store begins to dawn on the crowd and Aquillius. Then his captors force his jaws open and pour the molten gold down the greedy Roman’s throat. A diabolical last meal for a glutton for gold.1