After his victory, Sulla spitefully ordered his men to ravage Boeotia, cutting down olive groves and burning vineyards and crops. He did this to take further revenge on the Greek population for supporting Mithradates. But the war was far from over. Sulla still had no idea whether Lucullus had succeeded on his dangerous mission to get a fleet. He also needed to monitor Flaccus and Fimbria’s two legions, coming to take over his command. Sulla’s plan was to set up winter quarters in northern Greece and spend the season building his own ships.
As Sulla had retired exhausted but exultant from the battlefield at Orchomenus, his greatest victory, he was unaware of furtive movement at the edge of the swamp still red with blood of the defeated army. In the waning light of dusk, a shadowy form emerged from the muddy stand of reeds. It was Archelaus. The crafty general had survived the slaughter, hiding for two days in the marshes. Now he headed for the seashore, found a small boat, and rowed alone to Chalcis, his headquarters. Archelaus summoned all the detachments of Mithradates’ army stationed around the Aegean and Anatolia.30
10
Killers’ Kiss
HOW LONG could Mithradates’ “honeymoon of absolute power and freedom” last? That question was answered by the gods of war in 86/85 BC. The heartbreaking loss of Mithradates’ favorite son Arcathius was followed by inexplicable losses in Greece. How on earth could Sulla’s five legions have destroyed so many multitudes?
Mithradates’ friends encouraged the king to suspect treachery. Dorylaus had voiced his own suspicions after the defeats in Greece. Traitors were a genuine threat—betrayals were involved in the Greek losses, and there were others who conspired with the Romans. Mithradates feared that his Anatolian allies would withdraw their support, perhaps abet his enemies—even plot assassination. Before disaffection could spread throughout his realm, he sent out agents to arrest turncoats. There was a new urgency for the royal toxicologists to perfect an antidote to all forms of poison.1
Mithradates still held the strategic island of Euboea, and he trusted his generals in the Aegean. But Archelaus’s army contained many Galatian soldiers. Had some of them aided Sulla? Galatians had a reputation for treachery. If Sulla advanced to Anatolia, Mithradates felt certain that Galatia would aid him. Something had to be done.
GALATIA
Mithradates invited sixty princes from Galatia’s ruling families to reside in Pergamon as his “guests.” They were really hostages, under surveillance. One chieftain named Poredorix, a very large, robust man, plotted to kill Mithradates. The assassination was to take place during a tribunal in a small pavilion perched on a ravine. In a Superman-like feat, Poredorix and his friends intended to tip the structure into the gorge. But informers overheard and Mithradates canceled his court appearance.
Poredorix devised a new plan. The Galatian “guests” would attack Mithradates at the next banquet. But this plot also reached the king’s ears. He seized Poredorix and his coconspirators, and summoned the other chiefs, along with their families, to a feast. Enough arsenic was on the Poison King’s menu to murder all the guests. Somehow, however, three princes survived and managed to escape to Galatia, where they raised an army. They drove out Mithradates’ satrap Eumachus. Despite his careful planning, this outcome was just what Mithradates had feared. He no longer controlled Galatia.
Now an example had to be set. In Pergamon, Poredorix and his friends were sentenced to death by the sword. Their bodies were to be denied burial, left to rot on the outskirts of the city.2
As the Galatians were marched away to the execution ground, Mithradates reflected on his affection for one of them, a handsome youth named Bepolitanus. They’d enjoyed such friendly conversations. Surely this innocent young man did not deserve to die for the older men’s conspiracy! Plutarch says Mithradates became extremely distressed imagining the death of this youth. Did Bepolitanus remind Mithradates of his lost son Arcathius? The king sent an emergency order to spare the youth’s life. Poredorix and the others had already been thrown out for the crows. But, as Plutarch relates, by a stroke of luck Bepolitanus was wearing beautiful, costly clothing when he was seized. His executioner wanted this fine outfit for himself. To keep the garments from being bloodstained, the soldier was “stripping them off in a leisurely way when he saw Mithradates’ messengers running towards him and shouting the youth’s name.”
So Bepolitanus lived, while his friends lay unburied. The next day, Mithradates’ guards discovered a young woman weeping by the naked corpse of Poredorix. For the crime of trying to cover him with dirt, she was brought before the king. The girl’s lovely appearance, her touching grief and innocence stirred pity in Mithradates. Why had she dared to disobey his orders? When he discovered that she was Poredorix’s lover, Mithradates relented. He allowed her to give the would-be assassin a proper burial. Mithradates knew the famous tragedy Antigone by Sophocles, in which a tyrant executes a young girl for this very same crime. By giving this widely known story a happy ending, Mithradates enhanced his reputation for mercy.
According to Plutarch, these two realistic and detailed stories of Mithradates’ empathy for innocent lives circulated by word of mouth more than a century after his death, as counterpoints to other tales of his cruelty and hard heart. Leavening harsh behavior with chivalrous gestures made one’s power seem godlike; it commanded the respect of enemies and friends, and might salve a bad conscience too. Mithradates was familiar with the stories of the great Alexander’s gallantry toward courageous men and women, and mercy was an important virtue of the ancient Persian kings.
Mithradates still trusted his Galatian general Konnakorix and he loved a Galatian princess named Adobogiona, the sister of a prince distrusted by Mithradates. Part of a portrait bust of Adobogiona has been discovered by archaeologists in the ruins of Pergamon. Perhaps she captured Mithradates’ heart during his purge of the Galatian royal families. We might guess that the king saved her from succumbing to the poison he served at the deadly banquet.3
CHIOS
Mithradates’ paranoid thoughts kept returning to Chios, that prosperous island whose sailors had rammed his royal warship during the battle for Rhodes. Chios had allied with Rome in the past: was it another nest of traitors? Some Chian aristocrats had joined Sulla after the massacre of 88 BC. When Mithradates sent spies to Chios, their reports doomed the island.
Master of malicious punishments on a theatrical scale, Mithradates wrote detailed instructions to his generals Dorylaus and Zenobius. Mithradates’ revenge began with a surprise attack on Chios. Zenobius’s army took over the city and delivered a proclamation: The citizens of Chios were to come to the Assembly to hear a message from Mithradates. In happier times, he had won chariot races in Chios. One of the island’s prized possessions was a letter from Alexander the Great, written after he captured Chios in 333 BC (now displayed in the island’s museum). Alexander had exiled all Chians who aided his enemies. Now Mithradates the Great wrote his own letter to Chios. He accused them of aiding his enemies, noting that his suspicions were first aroused when the Chian trireme tried to sink his boat.
Why, he demanded, “have you refused to confiscate the Romans’ property, as agreed? Why have you allowed Romans to flee to Sulla? For cooperating with Sulla and conspiring against me, all my friends say I should condemn you to death! But I am merciful,” wrote Mithradates. “I will be satisfied if you turn in your weapons and send the children from the leading families of Chios to me as hostages.” The Chians gave over their arms and the young men and women of aristocratic families to Zenobius and Dorylaus, who sent them to Pergamon.
But Mithradates was not finished with Chios. Zenobius read out another royal letter. “I know that you still favor the Romans! But instead of the death you deserve, I sentence you to pay a penalty of 2,000 talents.” One talent was equal to 6,000 drachmas; 2,000 talents was a very large amount of silver. The total yearly income of Athens at the height of its empire was 1,000 talents. In Mithradates’ day, 2,000 talents was equal to 12 million drachmas. A mercenar
y soldier’s pay averaged about 1 drachma per day of active service, so 2,000 talents would provide a year’s pay for an army of about 35,000 soldiers.
Crying out lamentations, the Chians gathered ornaments from their temples and women’s jewelry to pay the fine. Following Mithradates’ secret orders, Zenobius summoned everyone—men, women, children, and slaves, but no foreigners—to the theater to weigh out the goods. Fear shot through the crowd as Zenobius thundered: “You have short-changed the king!”
His soldiers had surrounded the theater and lined the street to the harbor. Inside the theater, Zenobius singled out the slaves owned by the Chians and declared them free. This act by Mithradates carried a powerful propaganda message. Chios was notorious in antiquity for introducing the slave trade to the Greek world, a commerce that later became so profitable on Delos under the Romans. Chios was a wealthy society with an inordinate number of slaves—as early as the fifth century BC, the island possessed more domestic slaves than any other Greek state except Sparta.4
Next, the soldiers roughly separated the men from the women and children. They marched the two groups down the gauntlet of soldiers to the sea. The entire population of Chios was loaded onto Mithradates’ ships. While their former household slaves watched from shore, the ships full of wretched, wailing Chians sailed away. They were destined for the Black Sea, where they were to spend the rest of their lives as slaves in Mithradates’ mines in remote Colchis. Again, in devising this theatrical punishment for Chios, it appears that Mithradates may have been replaying yet another famous Greek tragedy, Euripides’ Trojan Women.5
For their payment of 2,000 talents, the Chians had purchased slavery! The calamity inspired an ironic proverb in antiquity: “The Chian has finally bought himself a master.” The Roman writer Athenaeus blamed the slave-trading Chians for their fate, and the “ancient villainy of Chios” was often recalled in the nineteenth century by antislavery groups. For example, the abolitionist-poet John Greenleaf Whittier penned his famous poem “Mithridates at Chios” in 1864, during the American Civil War. Whittier praised Mithradates for his “just punishment of that slave-cursed land.”
Chained and scourged, the slaves of slaves
The lords of Chios into exile went.
The fisher in his net is caught
The Chian hath his master bought.6
From Chios, Mithradates plucked another prize for his harem, a captivating young woman named Berenice. She must have been very young, since her mother accompanied her to the royal harem. Berenice was probably selected from among the aristocratic children sent to Pergamon. Like the Galatian princess Adobogiona, Berenice was saved from her people’s fate by the all-powerful, compassionate—and lustful—king.
Another honeymoon was now over: Mithradates had grown dissatisfied with Queen Monime. Plutarch says that their marriage became unhappy—she complained that her beauty had “won a master instead of a husband.” Maybe the king superstitiously believed that his strong-willed Greek wife had brought him bad luck in the Greek campaign. At any rate, at some point after the terrible omen of the crashing statue of Victory and the defeats in Greece that this event seemed to foretell, Monime was sent away. She traveled in opulent fashion, probably in a Persian-style harmamaxa, a private four-wheeled golden chariot with purple awnings, attended by royal eunuchs, to live the rest of her days in luxury in Pontus.7
Mithradates found comfort with his recently acquired lovers. He savored the sound of Berenice’s name on his tongue. She was his new lucky charm. A Macedonian name, Berenice means “bringer of victory.”
REBELLION AND REPRESSION
His tasks completed in Chios, Zenobius approached Ephesus with his army. Unnerved by Mithradates’ setbacks in Greece and the fate of Chios, the Ephesians insisted that Zenobius enter the city alone and unarmed. He agreed and visited Philopoemen, Monime’s father, Mithradates’ overseer in Ephesus—perhaps to reassure him that Monime was well cared for in Pontus. Ephesus had been an early supporter of Mithradates, complying with his orders to murder Romans just two years ago. We don’t know what Mithradates had in mind for Ephesus, but the citizens of the wealthy commercial city were nervous enough to disobey Zenobius’s ominous summons to the theater the next day. That night the Ephesians murdered Zenobius. Nothing personal, just business—the city depended on stable trade and gambled that Rome would prevail. After the murder, Ephesus went on red alert, hoarding food supplies and preparing to defend the city.
FIG. 10.1. Monime and Mithradates, a tense scene. Illustration for Racine’s play Mithridate, engraving by Girardet.
Other towns now had two violent models to follow, Chios or Ephesus. Tralles, Hypaepa, Mesopolis, Smyrna, Colophon, Sardis, and other towns previously allied with Mithradates followed the example of Ephesus and revolted. Mithradates reacted with rage, dispatching armies to inflict terrible vengeance on these rebels (was this when Mithradates poisoned his rival in chariot racing, Alcaeus of Sardis?). To preempt further defections, Mithradates sent proclamations to many Anatolian cities freeing slaves, canceling debts, and bestowing citizenship rights on resident foreigners. These privileges irritated the local aristocracy but won strong popular support among former slaves, debtors, and new citizens in each town.8
Some of the king’s closest associates, alarmed by the events in Greece and western Anatolia, began to hold secret meetings. Prominent Greeks began to reconsider their devotion to Mithradates. Two men of Smyrna invited two men of Lesbos to join a cabal against Mithradates. But one of them, a personal friend of the king, informed on the others. He arranged for Mithradates himself to hide under his couch to hear the plot from their own mouths. The three men were tortured to death.
Mithradates’ paranoia emerged in full force now. His fears were justified: betrayals and revolts were not imaginary. But his draconian reactions cut his support among the upper classes, and many people took advantage of the climate of fear to turn in their personal enemies. Mithradates rewarded informers lavishly. Plots continued, very close to home. One night in Pergamon, eighty citizens were discovered planning to murder the king. Mithradates executed them. According to Appian’s sources, about sixteen hundred men suspected of treason lost their lives in this purge.9 We don’t have the details of how they died. But many of these men must have been involuntary guinea pigs for Mithradates’ poison experiments. The king was known to test toxins and antidotes on prisoners condemned to death.
In 85 BC, Mithradates’ spies reported more bad news. Sulla’s aide, Lucullus, had done the impossible! Despite pirates and winter storms, he had assembled a navy. Ptolemy of Egypt welcomed Lucullus, inviting him to visit the Pyramids in luxurious style. But Lucullus declined, worried about his commander in chief Sulla enduring hardships at the siege of Athens. Lucullus accepted an emerald-and-gold ring engraved with Ptolemy’s likeness, and enough cash to hire ships and sailors from Syria, Cyprus, Phoenicia, Pamphylia, and Rhodes. He sailed on the Rhodian flagship, commanded by Mithradates’ old enemy Admiral Damagoras, who had chased the Pontic navy away from Rhodes in 88 BC. Moving north, they took possession of Cos, Samos, and Chios. But Mithradates’ admiral Neoptolemus (Archelaus’s brother) was lying in wait near the small island of Tenedos. In the naval battle that followed, Damagoras put Neoptolemus to flight.
Is this the moment when Mithradates finally began to realize that he would not be victorious in the war against Rome, as suggested by the historian Reinach? Sulla had the upper hand. Yet there were some positive signs for the king. His defeats in mainland Greece had not been due to disloyalty or disillusionment on the Greeks’ part; his armies fought courageously but were overwhelmed by professional, technologically advanced Roman legions. Even so, Sulla had struggled for nearly two years to take Greece, and Archelaus held Euboea, a key position. Flaccus, Sulla’s rival, lost most of his ships in a tempest in the Adriatic. Through intelligence sources, Mithradates learned that Flaccus was detested by his soldiers; many deserted to join Sulla. Meanwhile in Rome, Marius was dead, but Sulla’s suppo
rters were murdered on a daily basis, exerting a strong pull on Sulla to return as soon as possible.
Flaccus had bypassed Sulla, marching across Thrace. It appeared that he intended to invade Mithradates’ territory by himself! Sulla was tracking this rival Roman army with his own legions, and Lucullus was bringing up a vast navy. Mithradates still commanded two hundred ships and an army of eighty thousand men in Anatolia, under the command of Dorylaus. It was time to make contingency plans. Perhaps diplomacy—a truce—could buy time. Reflecting on the enormity of his losses in Greece and calculating that Sulla must be itching to get home, Mithradates sent word to Archelaus to make peace on the best terms possible.10
THE PEACE OF DARDANUS
Sulla and Archelaus met at the Roman camp near Delion, Boeotia. Both men were practical soldiers of fortune looking to make the best bargain. Their first volleys over the peace table were tests of the other’s commitments. As Archelaus well knew, Sulla was in a great hurry to conclude the war so he could take his army back to Italy, kill his foes there, celebrate a Triumph, and become the absolute dictator of Rome. Archelaus proposed that Sulla should be satisfied with recovering Greece and leave Asia to Mithradates. “If you promise to return to Italy now, my king Mithradates promises to give you a very generous war chest, many ships, and as many soldiers as you need. With these, you can destroy Marius’s Populars and take over Rome!
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy Page 26