The Poison King

by Adrienne Mayor

  Mithradates learned how Rome’s monarchy had been replaced by a republic, governed by patricians, aristocratic clans who had received special political powers under the old kings. In the early Republic, the poor citizens had suffered great debt, loss of land, and food shortages. The poor plebeians, plebs, had banded together in the fifth century BC and created their own organization, a kind of parallel state, electing tribunes to improve their circumstances. The plebs gained some debt relief and land grants in newly acquired territories. As they won more political power, some ambitious, rich citizens joined forces with them. The exclusive privileges of the old noble families began to decline, precipitating direct conflict between patricians and plebs. This “struggle of the orders” brought about the rise of a new elite, made up of old families and wealthy allies of the plebs. This new elite ruled Rome through its domination of the Senate. Mithradates’ actions and speeches reveal that he had an excellent understanding of how the government by the Senate and “People of Rome” functioned.

  After the indigenous people of Italy were subdued, Rome had embarked on overseas adventures. Rome’s challenge to the great Carthaginian Empire in North Africa for control of Sicily began the Punic Wars, 264–146 BC. Hannibal invaded Italy in the Second Punic War, but his splendid victories came to naught. Hannibal was defeated in 202 BC, but, as Mithradates and his allies knew, the Carthaginian kept up the fight in Anatolia until his death in Bithynia. Ever after, Rome feared that another powerful enemy of Hannibal’s caliber might arise. Mithradates recognized that this anxiety kept them intolerant of independent-minded monarchs.

  After the defeat of Hannibal, Rome’s image was admired—until they began a series of ferocious wars to conquer Greece, Spain, and Gaul. The violent Roman culture of war and strife had bred generations of steadfast men and women of great physical and moral courage. Many in the ancient world respected the traditional Roman values and were impressed by rousing narratives describing unwavering loyalty, patriotism, and integrity.19 Mithradates and his allies knew the life stories of Rome’s greatest military leaders, such as Scipio Africanus, as well as they knew the stories of the Romans’ noble enemies, like Hannibal and Jugurtha.

  Tales of valor and glory continued to coalesce around Roman war heroes and their powerful opponents. But more and more accounts of Roman atrocities and savage behavior began to circulate as the old Roman order began to morph into a relentless engine of imperial expansion and resource extraction. Well before Mithradates assumed his throne, events in Rome seemed to overflow with every human passion, virtue, and vice. There were mountains and valleys of emotion, volcanic rage and cruelty, springs of mercy, abysses of terror. Mithradates appreciated that some Roman statesmen deplored the corruption of the traditional Latin virtues—austerity, bravery, justice, piety, mercy, and moral rigor.

  By the beginning of the first century BC, people from the Senate House in Rome to far-flung marketplaces across the Mediterranean were discussing frightening portents casting shadows over the empire and its ruthless—and superstitious—leaders driven by lust for power. For every glorious battle and triumph, it seemed that some Roman commander sat brooding amid the ruins of another great city and wept over the desolation his army had wrought—or over his own shattered ambitions.

  By the time Mithradates assumed his throne, Rome had transformed itself into a war machine, oiled with blood and plunder, ravenous for more slaves, more land, more riches: too much was not enough. By the first century BC, Rome had become a predator driven to survive by attacking and devouring. Plebs, patricians, new citizens, tax collectors, warlords, all had grown fat on the prey gobbled up by the beast of war. Each victory sharpened the appetite and the killer instincts of the predator. For Mithradates and other outside observers, Rome was a wolf that must kill to live and lives to kill. Recently, this same lupine image was used by modern historians to explain Rome’s success, likening the late Republic and Empire to a voracious predator for whom there can be no rest, no turning back. The scholars point out that, compelled by the logic of the predatory imperial state, it was impossible for Rome to stop attacking and consuming in every direction.20

  In the decades just before Mithradates’ reign, the Great Wolf’s attention swung toward Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Conquests in Macedonia and Greece drew Rome to invade Asia Minor, in 191–188 BC, with the ultimate defeat of King Antiochus the Great of Syria at Magnesia. Uprisings in freedom-loving Greece were savagely crushed in the 140s. The Roman army’s destruction of Corinth in 146 BC by fire, with unprecedented looting and the methodical slaughter of the populace, was a horrific event.21 In Mithradates’ day, it was still a searing, living memory. In that same year, Roman legions had utterly destroyed Carthage and sold the Carthaginians into slavery, ending the Third Punic War. Greece and North Africa became Roman provinces. In 133 BC, Rome inherited Phrygia, bestowed by Attalus’s dubious last will and testament.

  Rome’s conquests delivered great wealth from plunder and taxes and a glut of human captives. But the chasm widened between rich and poor, especially in Italy, as the rich grabbed more and more land holdings, monopolized resources, raked in lucrative investments in the provinces, and choked newly conquered territories with taxation and debt.22 In 133 BC, murderous political violence broke out in Rome over land distribution and the unfair burdens of hard fighting in Spain, opening the floodgates of unrelenting civil wars. The next year, in 132, a massive slave revolt had to be crushed in Sicily. That same year Aristonicus’s Sun Citizens rebelled in Anatolia: his cities were finally broken in 128 BC.

  News of Italy’s current civil uprisings and overseas wars reached Mithradates in Sinope via travelers, traders, Roman exiles, Greek and Celtic refugees, spies, ambassadors, and pirates. Mithradates followed the careers of the main players and studied the characters, words, and deeds of the leaders emerging in the tumultuous period of the late Roman Republic. These were men like the bitter rivals Marius and Sulla; the courageous cavalry officer Sertorius who would lead a rebellion in Spain; the merciless Manius Aquillius, poisoner of cities; and Lucullus, Sulla’s resourceful young lieutenant.

  KING JUGURTHA’S DOWNFALL

  Of particular interest to Mithradates was Rome’s long war with King Jugurtha of Numidia, once a trusted ally. Jugurtha’s kingdom, inhabited by Berber nomads, lay between the Roman province that had once been Carthage and the kingdom of the nomadic Moors (Mauretania). Numidia provided the lions, leopards, and bears for circuses in Rome. Jugurtha had originally hoped to coexist with Rome but found all his diplomatic efforts blocked. After a series of vacillating decisions and conflicting diplomatic signals, and in the wake of poor military leadership, Rome declared war on Jugurtha in 112 BC.

  Mithradates surely observed the progress of the Jugurthine War, and what it might mean for his own confrontations with Rome. North Africa’s flora, fauna, and medical knowledge were also of great interest. There were reports of a mysterious tribe, the Psylli, immune to poisonous serpents and scorpions. According to the Romans, the Psylli were so “habituated to snake bites that their saliva was an effective antivenin” (antivenin is derived from human antibodies to live snake venom). Mithradates would have been fascinated to learn that Roman army doctors collected the saliva of Psylli nomads to counteract snakebites suffered by legionaries on the African campaigns. Roman writers railed against Psylli and other “professional poisoners” who set up shops in Rome around this time. Mithradates may have invited some Psylli to join his medical team.23

  The Roman campaigns against Jugurtha held practical military lessons for Mithradates. A series of incompetent Roman generals managed to win numerous battles, but could never deliver victory, in a war of dubious motivation. During a lull in the war, the Numidian population of Vaga set upon a Roman garrison during a festival. In a massacre with similarities to the large-scale one Mithradates would order in 88 BC, they slaughtered the unarmed soldiers and their women and children.

  In about 107 BC, five years into the war, Marius t
ook the Roman command. Vowing to overcome the Numidians, he reorganized the legions to include proletarian soldiers. But victory still eluded Marius. Whenever Jugurtha and his son-in-law, King Bocchus of Mauretania, appeared to be pressed to the wall, they slipped away into the hinterlands and recruited fresh warriors among the nomads. Mithradates might possess a similar advantage, if Pontus could control or ally with the nomadic groups around the Black Sea and beyond Armenia. Indeed, in the coming wars with Rome, Mithradates and his son-in-law Tigranes of Armenia would elude Roman pursuers by melting back into uncharted nomad territory, where they raised fresh armies.

  Finally, Marius’s lieutenant, Sulla, bribed Bocchus to betray his kinsman Jugurtha. Shrewd, calculating Sulla promised Bocchus part of Numidia and the dubious status of “Friend of the Roman People.” Bocchus turned over Jugurtha. Marius celebrated a Triumph, dragging the mighty King Jugurtha bound in chains through the streets of Rome. Marius’s procession displayed incredible booty: 3,000 pounds of gold, 6,000 pounds of silver, and 300,000 drachmas.

  After the procession, following Roman custom, Marius’s thugs stripped off Jugurtha’s royal robes. In the struggle to seize his golden earring, they tore off his earlobe. The king of Numidia was thrown down into the Tullianum, the same dark dungeon where Aristonicus, leader of the Sun Citizens, had been strangled. That was a fate Mithradates intended to avoid. The once-proud Jugurtha went mad and starved to death in 106 BC. That same year saw the birth of a Roman boy who would become Sulla’s protégé, nicknamed the “Bloodthirsty Teenager,” later known as Pompey the Great.24

  To Marius’s disgust, his rival Sulla seized credit for the victory. Sulla loved to show off a gold signet ring with a carved gem depicting himself accepting Jugurtha’s surrender. Coins were issued showing Sulla on a throne above Jugurtha bound in chains. The Senate even approved a marble statue group showing Jugurtha kneeling before Sulla. According to the historian Plutarch, this final insult “almost drove Marius insane with rage.” During the first rounds of the battle to the death between Marius and Sulla, Marius himself visited Mithradates in 99 BC. Mithradates could have heard details of the Jugurthine War then and probably learned more about Sulla too.25

  Mithradates watched Roman manpower stretching to the breaking point, despite the innovations of Marius to recruit poor men into the army. Marius’s military reforms inadvertently ushered in the rise of private armies made up of battle-hardened plebeian veterans wholly dependent on spoils and loyal only to their commanders. Such commanders could be played off against one another, as one hungry predator might attack a rival. The events shaking Rome’s foundations just before and during Mithradates’ early reign seemed to suggest that the awesome machine was juddering. Perhaps the Great Wolf was not so invincible after all.

  THE REIGN BEGINS

  The Pontic army had dwindled under his mother’s rule. To avoid becoming a passive client of Rome, Pontus needed a strong army. Mithradates started modestly, recruiting an army of 6,000 Greek mercenaries, about the equivalent of a Roman legion. This force of traditional Greek hoplites, armed with shields and spears, was trained to fight in very close formation. Roman military organization, in this period, was based on legions (about 5,000 men), each legion made up of ten cohorts of about 480 soldiers in three ranks, armed with light javelins and wicked machetes, supported by about 300 cavalry.26

  In Pontus, Mithradates paid assiduous attention to training cavalry and war chariot drivers. He recruited experienced Greek seamen from around the Black Sea, organizing a large, efficient navy. The Romans had manned a big navy during the Punic Wars, but they had allowed it to decline. Mithradates’ ships now dominated the Black Sea, and the roaming pirate fleets were his allies. Early in his reign, Mithradates annexed Trapezus in eastern Pontus. Its hidden pirate coves made Trapezus the perfect home base for his navy. These early activities marked the beginning of Mithradates’ grand plan for a Black Sea Empire.

  MITHRADATES’ FAMILY

  Meanwhile Mithradates attended to domestic responsibilities. If he followed traditional Persian custom, his honeymoon began on the first night of spring and he fasted that day, eating nothing but an apple and a dish of camel marrow. Roughly a year later, in about 113 BC, Mithradates and his sister Laodice had their first son. Predictably, they named him Mithradates. Laodice had two more sons with Mithradates, named Arcathius (Greek, “ruler”) and Machares (“warrior”). In 110, a daughter was born. Instead of naming her Laodice, as might be expected, Mithradates chose a traditional Macedonian name, Cleopatra.

  Mithradates enjoyed sex with many women who caught his eye. The names of several of Mithradates’ lovers were recorded: besides Laodice, there were Adobogiona (Galatian), Monime (from a Milesian family settled in Stratonicea), Berenice (Chios), Stratonice (Pontus), and Hypsicratea (Caucasia). Mithradates fathered numerous offspring. I found the names of nineteen children born to women other than Laodice in the ancient sources, bringing the total number of Mithradates’ known, named progeny to twenty-three.

  The boys born to concubines were named after illustrious Persians: Cyrus, Xerxes, Darius, Artaphernes (one of Darius III’s generals), Oxathres (a brother of Darius who became Alexander’s general), Pharnaces (Mithradates’ grandfather), and Xiphares. Other sons mentioned in the ancient sources were Mithradates of Pergamon, Phoenix (son of a Phoenician or Syrian concubine), and Exipodras. A man named Archelaus was raised as the son of Mithradates’ general Archelaus, but he claimed that his real father was Mithradates. That is not implausible—but he might have been a maternal grandson of Mithradates, who may well have married one of his daughters to his favorite general.

  Mithradates’ daughter Adobogiona’s name was Galatian; other girls’ names were Greek: Nyssa, Eupatra, Athenais, and Cleopatra the Younger. He called his most devoted daughter Drypetina, the diminutive form of the name of Darius’s daughter Drypetis. The king’s last two daughters received Persian names, Mithradatis and Orsabaris (from berez, “brilliant Venus”). All of Mithradates’ children were said to be extraordinarily attractive, with one exception. Poor Drypetina’s appearance was marred by an accident of nature: her baby teeth never fell out, so she had a double set of teeth.27

  CASTLES, GOLD, ALLIES

  Mithradates initiated an intensive—and expensive—fortress-building program. He constructed seventy-five castles in Pontus and his eastern lands during his long rule. That’s more than one castle a year. Each new stronghold contained hidden cisterns, weapons caches, trapdoors and stone steps to an underground treasury carved out of bedrock, like the older castles of Pontus and Armenia. In these secret vaults were stacked bronze caskets bound with iron, filled with gold and silver, highly strategic in the coming campaigns. The construction projects were signs of Mithradates’ foresight and obsession with security, but they also indicate his ready supply of money.28

  What was the source of Mithradates’ seemingly unlimited stores of gold? The question must have puzzled the Romans and his neighbors as much as it nags modern historians. We know that Pontus’s prosperity came from trade and rich natural resources, gold, silver, iron, and precious minerals. Mithradates’ affluent forefathers had hidden away coin hoards in castles throughout the realm (unavailable to Queen Laodice as regent). How Mithradates the Great became so very rich remains a mystery. Somehow he was never short of cash, throughout the long wars with Rome. Not only could the king raise an army on short notice, but he always had plenty to pay his soldiers well.

  Mithradates drew substantial revenues from tributes and his control of Black Sea trade in grain, salt fish, wine, olive oil, honey, wax, gold, iron, minerals, dyes and pigments, leather, furs, wool, linen, and other goods. His tax policies must have been wisely calculated to enable him to profit from commerce without suppressing it, a policy that would have differed radically from Rome’s at that time.

  Mithradates’ Scythian allies controlled rich gold fields. The nomads also looted kurgans, grave mounds, that dot the steppes around the Sea of Azov and the Black Se
a. Modern archaeologists have discovered that many of the elaborate graves had been plundered in antiquity—some even contain the skeletons of ancient would-be robbers. The evidence suggests that successive waves of nomads dug for treasure in the kurgans of newly conquered lands.29 Some of this gold may have found its way to Pontus as tribute and in trade agreements.

  Mithradates also profited from overland trade with India and China. The Silk Route had opened during Mithradates’ childhood; the first camel caravans arrived in Parthia bearing Chinese silk in exchange for fine Parthian horses in 106 BC. As Chinese armies pressed westward into the Tarim Basin, and as Parthia began to clash with its neighbors in the Middle East, caravans shifted from the southern to northern routes through Colchis and Pontus to the Black Sea. Again, Mithradates would have encouraged this trade without overtaxing it.30

  Yet another stream of wealth may have been related to the extensive black market in slaves and plunder carried on by pirates based in Crete, Cilicia on the coast of Syria, and the Black Sea. Piracy in the first century BC was not small-scale thievery and robbing ships at sea. This vast shadow navy constituted a political power in its own right, a terroristic paramilitary force, controlling the sea-lanes of the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Pirate harbors in Crete and Cilicia were protected by invincible fortresses. The corsairs not only looted ships’ cargoes and held rich passengers for ransom; they made bold raids inland to capture droves of slaves, and they even besieged walled cities. Pirates offered mercenary services to warring parties during the late Hellenistic period. As a matter of war strategy and for profit, Mithradates continued and built upon his father’s lucrative relations with the pirate admirals.31