Mithridates VI Eupator

Rulership

Where his ancestors pursued philhellenism as a means of attaining respectability and prestige among the Hellenistic kingdoms, Mithridates VI made use of Hellenism as a political tool. Greeks, Romans and Asians were welcome at his court. As protector of Greek cities on the Black Sea and in Asia against barbarism, Mithridates VI logically became the protector of Greece and Greek culture, and used this stance in his clashes with Rome. Strabo mentions that Chersonesus buckled under the pressure of the barbarians and asked Mithridates VI to become its protector (7.4.3. c.308). The most impressive symbol of Mithridates VI's approbation with Greece (Athens in particular) appears at Delos: a heroon dedicated to the Pontic king in 102/1 BC by the Athenian Helianax, a priest of Poseidon Aisios. A dedication at Delos, by Dicaeus, a priest of Sarapis, was made in 94/93 BC on behalf of the Athenians, Romans, and "King Mithridates Eupator Dionysus". Greek styles mixed with Persian elements also abound on the official Pontic coins – Perseus was favoured as an intermediary between both worlds, East and West.

Certainly influenced by Alexander the Great, Mithridates VI extended his influence from defender of Greece to the great liberator of the Greek world as war with the Roman Republic became inevitable. The Romans were easily translated into barbarians, in the same sense as the Persian Empire during the war with Persia in the first half of the 5th century BC and during Alexander's campaign. Mithridates VI was able to fight the First War with Rome on Greek soil, and maintain the allegiance of Greece. His campaign for the allegiance of the Greeks was aided in no small part by his enemy Sulla, who allowed his troops to sack the city of Delphi and plunder many of the city's most famous treasures to help finance his military expenses. Under his rule the Kingdom of Pontus became the intellectual and cultural capital of the Ancient world. He could be merciful and kind, yet ruthless and cruel, he was a very complex man overall.

Personal life

Immunity to poison

In his youth, after the assassination of his father Mithridates V in 120 BC, Mithridates is said to have lived in the wilderness for seven years, inuring himself to hardship. While there and after his accession, he cultivated an immunity to poisons by regularly ingesting sub-lethal doses of poisons, particularly the arsenic that killed his father Mithridates V. This form of hormesis is effective against some but not all toxins and subsequently became known as Mithridatism or Mithridatization. After he became king of Pontus, Mithridates continued to study poisons and develop antidotes, whose initial efficacies were tested on Pontic criminals condemned to death. Attalus III of Pergamon (d. 133 BC) is also known to have studied poisons and antidotes in this way. In keeping with most medical practices of his era, Mithridates' antitoxin routines included a religious component; they were supervised by the Agari, a group of Scythian shamans who never left him. (He was also reportedly guarded in his sleep by a horse, a bull, and a stag, which would whinny, bellow, and bleat whenever anyone approached the royal bed.) The Greek doctor Crateuas the Rootcutter may have worked directly under Mithridates or may have only been in correspondence with him. Mithridates was also said to have received samples including megalium and kyphi from Zopyrus of Alexandria and treatises from Asclepiades in lieu of a requested visit. By the time of his death in 63 BC, Mithridates was reported to have developed a complex "universal antidote" against poisoning, which he took every day with cold spring water and which became known as mithridate or mithridatium. He was said to consume it daily. The original formula has been entirely lost, although Pliny reports that Mithridates' various antidotes usually included the blood of Pontic ducks (possibly ruddy shelducks), which fed on poisonous plants like hellebore and hemlock and thus provided a kind of serum against them. Elsewhere, Pliny reports that surviving notes of Mithridates' work did not include exotic ingredients and that Pompey found an antidote recipe among Mithridates' notes that consisted of 2 dried walnuts, 2 figs, and 20 rue leaves, which were supposed to be crushed together and taken with a pinch of salt by a person who had fasted for at least one day.

The legions under Pompey who had defeated Mithridates killed his secretary Callistratus and burnt some of his papers, but were also reported to have taken an extensive medicinal library and collection of specimens back to Rome, where Pompey's slave Lenaeus translated them into Latin and the Roman doctors like A. Cornelius Celsus began prescribing various recipes under the name of Mithridates' antidote (Latin: antidotum Mithridaticum). Numerous recipes survive from the 1st century, all consisting of a polypharmiceutical electuary including castor from willow-consuming beavers and opium sweetened with honey—Pontic honey tending to contain mild amounts of poison from local plants like rhododendron and oleander—but otherwise all differing in both ingredients and amounts. It seems likely Pompey and Lenaeus kept Mithridates' personal recipe secret, leading to various attempts to recreate it after their deaths. A foreign father and son both named Paccius seem to have become rich selling their own secret recipe under Tiberius. Around the same time, Celsus advocated taking an almond-sized amount of his ginger-heavy preparation daily with wine. Andromachus the Elder, Nero's court physician, developed theriac (theriaca Andromachi) by supplementing the versions of Mithridates' formula known in his day with more opium, poppy seeds, and a homeopathic addition of viper flesh. One of the vats uncovered at Pompeii seems to have been used to create this version of Mithridates' antidote. Galen added still more opium and a skink in his version of the recipe. Of the plants shared across these early forms of mithridate, many seem to be strongly odoriferous or to exhibit antibacterial and anti-inflammatory abilities; it is also noteworthy that bioactive alkaloids and poisons are not widely represented.

Mithridate and theriac continued to be staples of Western and Islamic medicine into the 19th century, consumed by Caesar and emperors, kings, and queens including Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, Henry VIII, and Queen Elizabeth. Some medieval preparations had as many as 184 ingredients. Owing to the idea that disease could be caused by "internal poisons", the antidotes also came to be thought of as panaceas able to cure damage from falls, some illnesses, or even all illnesses. When it failed, the problem was believed to be improper preparation or storage, leading some jurisdictions to legally require its preparation in full view of the public in city squares. Concerns about mithridate's purity and later inefficacy were closely involved with the development of medical and pharmaceutical regulation. Mithridate remains available from some doctors, particularly in the Middle East. As early as Pliny, however, some considered it quackery and its various components and proportions pseudoscientific. Chinese doctors received samples of mithridate from Muslim ambassadors in the Tang dynasty but never popularized or advocated it. The Islamic scientist Averroes, meanwhile, believed it may be helpful in some cases but cautioned against regular consumption by the healthy as it "could actually transform human nature into a kind of poison". It notably failed as a cure to plague and epilepsy, and William Heberden's 1745 Antitheriaca (Ancient Greek: Αντιθηριακα, Antithēriaka) helped fully discredit it in England. By the 19th century, it was only being prescribed for dyspepsia or described as of historical interest only.

Polyglot

In Pliny the Elder's account of famous polyglots, it is said that Mithridates could speak the languages of all the twenty-two nations he governed. This reputation led to the use of Mithridates' name as title in some later works on comparative linguistics, such as Conrad Gessner's Mithridates de differentiis linguarum (1555), and Adelung and Vater's Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde (1806–1817).

Family

Mithridates VI had a number of wives and mistresses, by whom he had several children. The names he gave his children are a representation of his Iranic and Greek heritage and ancestry.

His first wife was his sister Laodice. They were married from 115/113 BC until about 90 BC. They had several children. Their sons were Mithridates, Arcathius, Machares and Pharnaces II of Pontus. Their daughters were Cleopatra of Pontus (sometimes called Cleopatra the Elder to distinguish her from her sister of the same name) and Drypetina (a diminutive form of "Drypetis"). Drypetina was Mithridates VI's most devoted daughter. Her baby teeth never fell out, so she had a double set of teeth.

His second wife was a Greek Macedonian noblewoman, Monime. They were married from about 89/88 BC until 72/71 BC and had a daughter, Athenais, who married King Ariobarzanes II of Cappadocia. His next two wives were also Greek: he was married to his third wife Berenice of Chios, from 86 to 72/71 BC, and to his fourth wife Stratonice of Pontus, from sometime after 86 to 63 BC. Stratonice bore Mithridates a son Xiphares. His fifth wife is unknown. His sixth wife was Hypsicratea.

One of his mistresses was the Galatian Celtic princess Adobogiona the Elder. By Adobogiona, Mithridates had two children: a son called Mithridates I of the Bosporus and a daughter called Adobogiona the Younger.

His sons born from his concubines were Cyrus, Xerxes, Darius, Ariarathes IX of Cappadocia, Artaphernes, Oxathres, Phoenix (Mithridates' son by a mistress of Syrian descent), and Exipodras, named after kings of the Persian Empire, which he claimed ancestry from. His daughters born from his concubines were Nysa, Eupatra, Cleopatra the Younger, Mithridatis and Orsabaris. Nysa and Mithridatis, were engaged to the Egyptian Greek Pharaohs Ptolemy XII Auletes and his brother Ptolemy of Cyprus.

In 63 BC, when the Kingdom of Pontus was annexed by the Roman general Pompey, the remaining sisters, wives, mistresses and children of Mithridates VI in Pontus were put to death. Plutarch, writing in his Lives, states that Mithridates' sister and five of his children took part in Pompey's triumphal procession on his return to Rome in 61 BC.

The Cappadocian Greek nobleman and high priest of the temple-state of Comana, Cappadocia, Archelaus was descended from Mithridates VI. He claimed to be a son of Mithridates VI; but the chronology suggests that Archelaus may actually have been a maternal grandson of the Pontic king, and the son of Mithridates VI's favourite general, who may have married one of the daughters of Mithridates VI.

Cultural depictions

• The demise of Mithridates VI is detailed in the 1673 play Mithridate written by Jean Racine. This play is the basis for several 18th-century operas including one of Mozart's earliest, known most commonly by its Italian name, Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770).
• Nathanial Lee wrote the play 'Mithridates, King of Pontus' in 1678
• Mithridates is the subject of the opera Mitridate Eupatore (1707) by Alessandro Scarlatti.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson included his "Mithridates" in his 1847 Poems.
• Alexandre Dumas's novel The Count of Monte Cristo refers to the potential of a mithridate as an instrument both of defense and offence.
• William Wordsworth, amidst casting about for poetic themes in The Prelude (Bk i vv 186 ff):

Sometimes, more sternly moved, I would relate

How vanquished Mithridates northward passed,
And, hidden in the cloud of years, became
Odin, the Father of a race by whom

Perished the Roman Empire.

• James Joyce alludes to Mithridates' immunity to poison in his love poem Though I Thy Mithridates Were.
• The poet A. E. Housman alludes to Mithridates' antidote in the final stanza of "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff" in A Shropshire Lad:

There was a king reigned in the East:

There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
–I tell the tale that I heard told.

Mithridates, he died old.

• Dorothy L. Sayers' detective novel Strong Poison, from 1929, has the protagonist, Lord Peter Wimsey, solve a case of murder by arsenic poisoning, and quotes the last line from Housman's poem.
• In The Grass Crown, the second in the Masters of Rome series, Colleen McCullough describes in detail the various aspects of his life – the murder of Laodice, and the Roman Consul who, quite alone and surrounded by the Pontic army, ordered Mithridates to leave Cappadocia immediately and go back to Pontus – which he did.
• The Last King is a historical novel by Michael Curtis Ford about the King and his exploits against the Roman Republic.
• Mithridates is a major character in Poul Anderson's novel The Golden Slave.
• In the novel Mithridates is Dead (Spanish: Mitrídates ha muerto), Ignasi Ribó traces parallels between the historical figures of Mithridates and Osama bin Laden. Within a postmodern narrative of the making and unmaking of history, Ribó suggests that the September 11 attacks on the United States closely paralleled the massacre of Roman citizens in 88 BC and prompted similar consequences, namely the imperialist overstretch of the American and Roman republics respectively. Furthermore, he suggests that the ensuing Mithridatic Wars were one of the key factors in the demise of Rome's republican regime, as well as in the spread of the Christian faith in Asia Minor and eventually throughout the whole Roman Empire. The novel implies that the current events in the world might have similar unforeseen consequences.
• In The King's Gambit, the first volume of the SPQR series by John Maddox Roberts, the protagonist, Decius Metellus, becomes aware of a plot between Pompey and Crassus to relieve Lucullus of command and allow Pompey to lead the final campaign against Mithridates. At the time of this novel, Decius reflects that Mithradates has successfully resisted Roman military campaigns for so long that the public has built him up as some kind of superhuman bogeyman.
• Mithridates and his wife Monime are characters in Steven Saylor's 2015 novel Wrath of the Furies.
• The Iron Maiden song "The Parchment" in their album Senjutsu describes the life, rise and fall of Mithridates.