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

by Adrienne Mayor

  Sulla’s counteroffer was equally audacious. “Why don’t you desert Mithradates and bring me all his mercenary armies? Together we can crush Mithradates and I’ll crown you king of Pontus!” Each general professed to be insulted by the other’s treasonous proposal. With their cards on the table, they began the negotiations.11

  Sulla summarized Mithradates’ crimes, deploring his takeover of vast territories; his confiscations of public and sacred funds of cities allied with Rome; his seizures of Roman property, land, and slaves; his murder of Roman allies; and the great massacre of Italian men, women, and children and even slaves of Italian blood in 88 BC. “Such hatred did Mithradates bear towards Italy! And now he professes to want our friendship and mercy—but only after I destroyed 160,000 of his troops in Greece!”

  Archelaus responded coolly: “It was the greed of other Roman generals that caused this war. My king will agree to fair terms.” These were the conditions the generals hammered out:

  • Return to territorial status quo of 89 BC: Greece belongs to Rome. Mithradates keeps his possessions as of 89 BC, but withdraws from Paphlagonia, Bithynia, and Cappadocia, allowing Nicomedes and Ariobarzanes to recover their thrones.

  • Sulla promises that Mithradates will be declared a Friend and Ally of Rome, upon Mithradates’ payment of a fine equal to the cost of the war.

  • Mithradates must give Sulla seventy fully equipped bronze-armored war ships.

  • Mithradates must release all Roman prisoners of war, including captive ambassadors and officers.

  • All Roman deserters and runaway Roman slaves who had joined Mithradates’ armies must be surrendered to Sulla.

  • A general amnesty would be declared; no reprisals against partisans.

  Archelaus had been fighting as a mercenary general for Mithradates for several hard years. The war to liberate Greece was lost, with sobering casualties. As Sulla enjoyed pointing out, Boeotia was left “impassable for the multitude of dead bodies,” the remains of Mithradates’ grand army. Archelaus negotiated an armistice remarkably favorable to Mithradates, by playing to Sulla’s impatience. One of the terms of their agreement was personal: Sulla gave Archelaus an estate of ten thousand acres in Euboea. Archelaus withdrew his troops from Euboea and agreed to accompany Sulla to Dardanus to finalize the treaty with Mithradates.

  On the way, Archelaus fell ill. Sulla tended Archelaus as if he were one of his own officers. Sulla’s favors and concern for Archelaus made some in Mithradates’ court suspicious that there had been collusion, that Archelaus had somehow “thrown” the battles at Chaeronea and Orchomenus, a dubious notion. Sulla defended his treatment of Archelaus in his memoirs, now lost. It seems likely that Sulla respected the commander as a noble adversary and realized that he needed his cooperation in convincing Mithradates to accept the treaty quickly.

  Mithradates sent envoys to Sulla and Archelaus, to contest two of the conditions. Mithradates wanted to keep Paphlagonia, which he had always maintained was his by inheritance. And he refused to turn over seventy ships. The ambassadors slyly hinted that Mithradates might obtain a better deal if he were to negotiate with “your other general, Fimbria.” Sulla flew into a rage. “What! Mithradates has been sitting in Pergamon all this time, directing a disastrous war from afar! He should humbly thank me for not chopping off his right hand, with which he signed the death warrant for thousands of innocent Romans. He’ll sing a different tune when I march into Asia!”

  Archelaus intervened. According to Sulla’s memoirs, the general tearfully begged for a chance to personally persuade Mithradates to accept the treaty. “If I fail,” Archelaus vowed, “I’ll kill myself!” That emotional scene may have been concocted by Sulla, but he did send Archelaus to confer with Mithradates.12

  FIMBRIA AND LUCULLUS INTERVENE

  Mithradates held a stronger hand than it might seem, but it had to be played carefully. Civil war was raging in Italy. Sulla was desperate to return, but suddenly he found himself caught in new emergencies. And Mithradates himself was in the same boat. An incredible situation was developing. Before their peace treaty could be ratified, a strange parallel war loomed on the horizon.

  Sulla’s rival, Flaccus, had now reached Bithynia with his army. But, taking advantage of his superior’s ineptitude, Flaccus’s young officer Fimbria led a mutiny against the older man. Flaccus (“Rabbit Ears”) fled to Bithynia’s capital, Nicomedia. But Fimbria and his men hunted him down and discovered Flaccus cowering in a well. Fimbria chopped off Flaccus’s head and flung it into the sea, leaving the body on the beach for the gulls.

  The Roman Senate angrily withdrew support for Fimbria, who was now an outlaw but in control of two legions. Mithradates now faced two rogue Roman armies in his territory, commanded by outlawed generals who were bitter enemies, each lusting to win credit for Mithradates’ downfall. Sulla feared that the ruthless, hotheaded Fimbria, a Marius loyalist, would steal his hard-won victory over Mithradates. These unforeseen developments meant that Fimbria was now the common enemy of both Mithradates and Sulla!

  Cut off from Rome, Fimbria desperately needed to reward his troops with rich booty. He fixed his sights on Pergamon. He would sack Mithradates’ palace and take all the credit for concluding the war on Mithradates. Along the way, Fimbria devastated the land “like a hurricane,” destroying towns that refused to open their gates to his army. At Ilium, ancient Troy, the citizens reminded Fimbria that, according to the Roman foundation myth, Troy was Rome’s sacred mother city. Fimbria sardonically thanked the citizens and demanded entry. Once inside, he slaughtered the men, women, and children. Many fled into the Temple of Athena; Fimbria ordered the temple burned down along with the entire town, and unleashed his men to pillage. Witnesses described the awesome sight of the marble statue of Athena left standing in the ashes of her temple. Plutarch remarked that Troy had not experienced such utter destruction since Agamemnon had sacked Priam’s city in the legendary Trojan War. Indeed, Fimbria crowed that it took him only ten days to raze Troy, while it took Agamemnon ten years.13

  While Sulla sped to intercept the rival outlaw general, Mithradates sent out a contingent led by his oldest son, Mithradates the Younger. But Fimbria set a trap and killed six thousand of Mithradates’ cavalry. Fimbria continued toward Pergamon. Pergamon’s walls were strong, but after the recently discovered plots, Mithradates could no longer trust the citizens. Fearing they might sell him out to Fimbria before he could make peace with Sulla on advantageous terms, Mithradates was compelled to flee for his life. From Pergamon, he rushed to Pitane on the coast. Fimbria pursued and laid siege to Pitane.

  As if on cue, Lucullus suddenly arrived on the scene with his armada. Fimbria ordered Lucullus to block Pitane’s harbor, trapping Mithradates, Rome’s dire enemy, inside the city. “Together you and I will win all the glory in this war,” promised Fimbria, “and Sulla’s exploits in Greece will be forgotten!” What would happen now?

  Lucullus was loyal to Sulla; he loathed Fimbria, an ally of the hated Marius. Lucullus announced that his navy belonged to Sulla. He refused to block Mithradates’ escape route, so that the king could approve the treaty worked out between Sulla and Archelaus. It was an extremely close call. Had Lucullus thrown in with Fimbria, Mithradates would have been finished. Instead, Lucullus allowed Mithradates to take a boat from Pitane to Lesbos. There Mithradates joined Neoptolemus’s navy and arrived in Dardanus.14

  Here on a plain, not far from Troy, in view of both their armies, in late 85 BC, Sulla and Mithradates met face-to-face. Both were wary, but extremely eager to declare peace.

  SEALED WITH A KISS

  Each man was a master showman, skilled in the art of self-presentation. Each man scored propaganda points with oratory and body language, witnessed by thousands on the plain at Dardanus and recorded for history by Appian and Plutarch. Mithradates, defeated but still not beaten, wanted to make a strong impression. He was accompanied by Neoptolemus’s 200 ships, Dorylaus’s 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry, and “a thron
g of scythe-bearing chariots.” The victor’s party was more modest: Sulla brought 1,000 men and 200 cavalry.

  Mithradates, in his old-fashioned Persian finery, walked forward, hand outstretched. Sulla, standing at attention in Roman army attire, stiffly asked whether Mithradates accepted the terms agreed to by his general Archelaus. Mithradates did not reply immediately. “Surely,” spat out Sulla, “it is the victor who has the right of silence, while a suppliant should ask forgiveness!”

  Mithradates broke his dramatic silence, pointing out that he and his father had been good friends of Rome. “But Roman ambassadors, governors, and generals started this war out of pure greed—the vice of most Romans. They wronged me by taking away Phrygia and Cappadocia, and they urged Nicomedes to attack my kingdom. Everything I’ve done since then was in self-defense and out of necessity.”

  “I know you are a clever orator,” Sulla cut in, “always justifying your wrongdoing. You should have sent an embassy to Rome long ago if you thought you were the victim of injustice. You had no right to Cappadocia and Phrygia. Nicomedes attacked you because you sent the assassin named Alexander to kill him and you armed his rival Socrates the Good. You have been planning this war a long time, thinking you could rule the whole world—why else have you allied with Thracians, Sarmatians, and Scythians? That’s why you built up such a huge army and navy—and that’s why you timed your takeover of our Asian Province while we were subduing revolts in Italy! You freed our slaves and canceled debts! You killed sixteen hundred men on false accusations; you poisoned the princes of Galatia! You butchered or drowned all the residents of Italian blood in Provincia Asia, including mothers and babies, not even sparing victims who fled into temples! What cruelty, what impiety, what boundless hatred you showed toward us!”

  Playing to the audience of officers, soldiers, and officials, Sulla continued to castigate Mithradates for war crimes, even declaring himself the “liberator” of Greece from the “slavery” of Mithradates. “You invaded Greece and deprived the Greeks of their freedom!”

  Mithradates’ final card was unspoken: Deal with me or I deal with Fimbria. Knowing he had the upper hand, he calmly broke in on Sulla’s vehement discourse. “I consent to the terms agreed by my general Archelaus.”

  Before the crowd, Sulla and Mithradates embraced and sealed the Peace of Dardanus with a kiss. What were the sentiments of each man during this intimate, traditional ritual? It’s interesting to consider the cultural differences. Romans sealed treaties with the osculum pacis, a mutual kiss on the cheek. Persians kissed equals on the mouth, but superiors accepted a kiss from inferiors on the cheek. Did Mithradates fake his kiss and accept Sulla’s lips on his cheek as that of an inferior? What passed through Sulla’s mind as he kissed the man who had snuffed out the lives of tens of thousands of Romans?

  Mithradates promised to withdraw from Bithynia, Cappadocia, and Paphlagonia. He hated to give up the title “King of Kings.” It was galling to go through the motions of a formal reconciliation with the loathsome puppet kings. Mithradates had agreed to hand over Roman deserters and former Roman slaves in his armies, but he had no intention of following through. He did release Oppius, the captive Roman general who had served as the king’s personal servant since his defeat in 89 BC (Oppius went to the temple of healing on Cos, to recover from his ordeal).

  Mithradates paid the fine demanded by Sulla—2,000 talents. As we saw above, Mithradates had recently imposed a fine of 2,000 talents on Chios, as a penalty for their revolt. Considering the king’s present circumstances and wealth, the fine requested by Sulla was a piddling sum—Mithradates could simply transfer the Chian payoff to Sulla. He turned over 70 ships to Sulla, along with 500 archers, but he still commanded more than 100 ships and an army of 80,000.15

  Mithradates the Great sailed away to Pontus, his original stronghold, leaving Sulla to deal with the loose cannon Fimbria. The war between Mithradates and Rome was over. All parties had given their word to abide by the truce—with one exception. The Roman Senate, controlled by Marius’s Populars, never recognized Sulla’s Peace of Dardanus. Yet who—besides the irrepressible king of Pontus—could imagine in 85 BC that this was only the first round in a conflict that would last a lifetime?

  SULLA MOPS UP

  Sulla’s soldiers were not impressed with the Peace of Dardanus. In fact, they were enraged. They had witnessed Sulla’s eloquent speech, reminding everyone of the crimes of Rome’s most hostile enemy. Mithradates had killed 150,000 innocent Romans in a single day! Now they saw Sulla kiss this vicious murderer and allow him to simply sail off, loaded with fabulous wealth, to his kingdom by the sea. Where was justice?

  Sulla’s mild conditions were due to his haste to return to Rome, after regaining Greece and punishing Anatolia, and his belief that Aquillius, an ally of Marius, bore responsibility for starting the war.16 But Sulla perceived his soldiers’ anger and deflected it, explaining that Fimbria was the clear and present danger now. What if Mithradates had joined Fimbria? How could they carry on a war against those combined forces? After we defeat Fimbria, Sulla promised, there’ll be riches galore and victory will be ours in Italy.

  Sulla marched to Fimbria’s camp and demanded that he surrender the two legions, which he held illegally. Fimbria refused, pointing out that Sulla had been voted Rome’s Public Enemy. War between Roman legions on foreign soil seemed inevitable. While Sulla’s soldiers fortified their camp and dug trenches around Fimbria’s camp, a wondrous thing occurred. Fimbria’s men came out and pitched in to help their fellow Romans. In despair, Fimbria fled to Pergamon and entered the great Temple of Asclepius, where so many Romans had lost their lives in 88 BC. There Fimbria fell on his sword and died. In the words of the contemporary Greek historian Diodorus, “Fimbria should have died a thousand deaths” for the terror he had spread.17

  Issuing proclamations praising Lycia, Rhodes, Stratonicea, Magnesia, Patara, and other places that had cooperated with Rome, Sulla dispatched troops to punish all the towns that had allied with Mithradates. Blatantly ignoring the treaty’s amnesty terms, banning reprisals against partisans, he proceeded to take savage revenge on Anatolia for supporting Mithradates. Sulla imposed a penalty on the entire Province of Asia in the extraordinary amount of twenty thousand talents, ten times what he had demanded of Mithradates.

  He assigned his mild-mannered and efficient officer Lucullus to collect this money. Sulla billeted his unruly troops in private homes and forced the Anatolians to pay outrageous sums for the “privilege” of feeding and clothing their insolent “guests.” All freed slaves were ordered back into slavery. In Ephesus and other cities, Sulla compelled citizen assemblies to borrow money at exorbitant interest rates, “mortgaging their theaters, gymnasiums, harbors, city walls, statues, and every other scrap of public property.” Sulla also plundered artworks and treasures on a massive scale. All this money and property went into Sulla’s personal war chest.

  Many towns resisted. In retaliation, massacres were carried out by Sulla’s soldiers, despite his many speeches claiming that “Romans would never dream of indiscriminate slaughter or other acts of barbarism.” In this chaotic period of Mithradates’ withdrawal and Sulla’s vindictive rampage, swarms of pirate ships plagued the Aegean coast, attacking harbors and castles in coastal cities and islands from Miletus to Samothrace. Sulla callously allowed the brigands access to sack and burn towns, such as Iasus, that had supported Mithradates. The economic devastation was deep and long-lasting. Many of these cities would not recover the prosperity they had enjoyed under Mithradates until the reign of Constantine four hundred years later.18

  In 84 BC, Sulla declared his mission accomplished. He left his eager young officer Murena to occupy Phrygia with the two legions that had served Fimbria. On his way back to Italy, Sulla stopped briefly in Greece. He visited a hot spring to treat a mysterious illness and arranged for the shipment of thousands of objets d’art, famous paintings, precious manuscripts, fine sculptures, and other antiquities, including colossal colum
ns from the unfinished Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens. Several ships laden with Sulla’s loot sank in a storm on the way to Italy; archaeologists have identified the contents of at least one shipwreck as part of his plunder. From the bottom of the sea, modern divers hauled up a great number of marble columns, bronze statues of Eros and Dionysus, and marble sculptures of Aphrodite, Pan, Satyrs, and other figures.19

  Sulla returned to Italy with forty thousand men, many of them recruits from Macedonia and Thrace. Historian Barry Strauss speculates that one of these auxiliaries may have been Spartacus, a Thracian who, in ten years’ time, would become the gladiator who led the great slave revolt in Italy.20

  The horrors visited upon Asia and Greece were now repeated in Italy. In 83 BC, Sulla’s ruthless confiscations of land, proscriptions, and murders culminated in a partisan bloodbath of such horrendous proportions that, in the view of the Roman historian Cassius Dio, Sulla’s cruel tortures and killings of his fellow Romans surpassed even Mithradates’ massacre of 88 BC. “Husbands were butchered with their wives, mothers and babies were slain,” wrote Plutarch, “homes and even temples were soaked in blood.” “What a sea of Roman blood was shed,” wrote Saint Augustine, the scale of death “beyond computation.” Sulla’s men annihilated 18,000 of Marius’s men at Fidentia; at Capua, 7,000 enemies were slaughtered; at Signia, 20,000; one day Sulla ordered a massacre of 6,000 innocent people locked inside the Circus of Rome; on yet another day, Sulla executed 12,000 men accused of favoring Marius. Sulla became dictator in 81 BC. At his Triumph, Pliny the Elder says Sulla paraded 115,000 pounds of silver and 15,000 pounds of gold, the combined loot from all his victories.21