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

by Adrienne Mayor

  Mithradates, reveling in victory, looking forward to regaining his Anatolian empire, marched on the fortified port of Cyzicus, gateway to Asia. The army of 120,000 infantrymen, 16,000 horsemen, and 100 scythed chariots trailed a horde of camp followers and road and bridge builders; Mithradates’ total forces were said to approach 300,000.5

  MEANWHILE IN ROME

  Lucullus, Sulla’s protégé, had become consul in Rome in 74 BC. His coconsul Cotta was sent to govern the new Province of Bithynia. Lucullus was envious of his rival Pompey (a younger and more ruthless protégé of Sulla), who was winning honors fighting Mithradates’ new ally Sertorius in Spain. Determined to be the general who would triumph over Mithradates once and for all, Lucullus schemed to keep Pompey occupied in Spain.

  Sure enough, Lucullus was chosen to fight Mithradates in 74 BC. The Senate, fearing that Mithradates planned to attack Italy itself with his armada, pledged three thousand talents to raise a fleet. But Lucullus bragged that he would not need a navy to overcome Mithradates. He raised three legions himself and took command of the two “Fimbrian” legions still stationed in Anatolia, for a total of about 30,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry.

  Not only was Lucullus seriously outnumbered, but the Fimbrian legions would prove to be a problem. They had been complicit in mutinies and the deaths of their two previous generals, Flaccus and Fimbria. Tough fighters, but insolent and unmanageable, the soldiers were, in Plutarch’s words, “spoiled by habits of greed and luxury” and Murena’s undisciplined leadership. Like rotten apples, these Fimbrian legionnaires would insidiously infect Lucullus’s army with demands for booty and with outright insubordination.

  FIG. 12.2. Lucullus, marble bust. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

  Rome’s renewed war, to destroy the enemy Lucullus called the “new Hannibal,” was marked by ripsawing loyalties, devastating mayhem, and shocking reversals. This conflict—which has been described as a struggle between Roman oligarchic hegemony and democratic ideals of suffrage, freedom, and nationalization of land—drew participants from all corners of the classical world, from Spain to the Caspian Sea, from the River Don to the Persian Gulf. Treacherous terrain, cataclysmic weather—even celestial marvels, strange prodigies, and the gods themselves—would be players in this epic contest between Lucullus and Mithradates.6

  THE FALLING STAR

  Lucullus’s advisers urged him to take over Pontus, undefended while Mithradates was in Bithynia. The chief proponent was Archelaus—Mithradates’ turncoat star general. Perhaps Archelaus recalled Sulla’s earlier offer to crown him king of Mithradates’ rich Kingdom of Pontus during the negotiations at Dardanus. But Lucullus scoffed: “Why would I hunt for a wild beast in his empty lair?” Then Lucullus caught sight of the massive army drawn up by Mithradates. Stunned, he hung back—he needed a cunning strategy to overcome such an immense force.

  Mithradates immediately provoked a battle, sending out an army led by the Roman M. Varius, Sertorius’s one-eyed general. At Otryae, Lucullus marched out to meet the challenge. The two armies faced each other on the plain under a clear blue sky and were just on the verge of combat.

  Suddenly, the sky burst asunder. A huge, flaming object of molten silver ripped through the heavens and slammed into the ground between the two armies. The stunned armies “separated,” in Plutarch’s words, but the retreat must have been frantic. Fiction writer Michael Curtis Ford, in his adventure novel about the Mithradatic Wars, imagines the two armies pelted with a shower of clods of dirt and searing metal shrapnel as the burning celestial object plowed into the earth. Ford creates a scene in which Lucullus and Mithradates peer into the mysterious crater across from each other. The two generals lock eyes, each attempting to read the divine message that the other has taken from this event. In Ford’s fantasy, the commanders wordlessly agree to fight another day.7

  What was the extraterrestrial object? Richard Stothers, a NASA meteorologist who studies ancient observations of astronomical events, analyzed this incident using the scientific categories of Unidentified Flying Objects. Because there were thousands of eyewitnesses at close range, Stothers considers Plutarch’s account credible. The blinding flash in daylight indicates a high scale of magnitude. To be clearly observed overhead by armies standing just out of bowshot distance, the flaming object, Stothers estimates, must have measured more than four feet across.

  A fresh meteorite (a meteor that lands and survives impact) is usually black, leading Stothers to suggest that the bright silvery color recorded was that of an incandescent fireball or bolide—an extremely bright meteor—while it streaked across the sky, before impact. Meteorites were revered in antiquity in shrines at Pessinus, Troy, Cyzicus, Abydus, and Ephesus. No surviving ancient sources indicate that the object at Otryae was recovered and placed in a shrine. Although Stothers believes that the evidence points to a meteorite, in strict scientific terms this event must be classified as a “Close Encounter of the First Kind,” an observation at close range of a large unidentified space object that leaves no apparent physical evidence. Since Plutarch’s original Greek terminology indicates that witnesses did examine the object on the ground, it seems safe to say that the battle was interrupted by a spectacular meteorite—perhaps the meteor crater will be identified at Ortryae someday. After the impact, the witnesses compared the meteorite’s size and shape to those of a pithos, a very large earthenware storage jar with a pointed end. Notably, as meteors hurtle through the earth’s atmosphere, they can take on a tapered “nose-cone” shape, similar to a Hellenistic storage jar.

  Modern historians pay little attention to this incident, except to assume that both sides saw it as an evil omen. Reinach, for example, says only that Lucullus used the ill-omened “chute d’un bolide” as an excuse to avoid fighting when outnumbered. No record survives to tell us how Mithradates’ Magi or Lucullus’s seers really did interpret this extraordinary prodigy. But we can make some educated guesses. It is true that Romans in this period feared comets, falling stars, and meteors. Both armies were alarmed and ran away. But afterward, I think it is likely that both Mithradates and Lucullus and their respective omen readers could find positive meaning in the event.

  Meteors were associated with the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele, who was represented as a stone that fell to earth. Lucullus—as well as Mithradates and his circle—knew that Cybele’s sacred black stone was worshipped at Pessinus—Marius made a pilgrimage there in 98 BC, hoping for victory against Sulla. Lucullus had been present when Sulla himself was encouraged by a dream of Cybele handing him a thunderbolt. Cybele worship became popular in Rome after the Second Punic War. The Sibylline Books had declared that Rome could defeat Hannibal only if Cybele’s “sky-stone” was brought to Italy. With great pomp, her sacred meteorite was transported from Pessinus to Rome in 204 BC. So, in 73 BC, when a meteorite at Otryae saved him from a battle against vastly superior forces, Lucullus may well have considered the prodigy as a sign of Cybele’s protection.

  FIG. 12.3. Witnesses described the meteorite that slammed onto the battlefield between the armies of Lucullus and Mithradates as a large, flaming object that resembled a giant pithos (storage jar) of molten silver. This artist’s impression illustrates the scale and shape of the meteorite. Image by Michele Angel.

  Mithradates, aware that Cybele was a goddess of victory and protector of Anatolian cities, could have seen the meteor as a positive sign too. Because the meteorite halted the battle, his seers could take it to mean that he would be victorious against Lucullus without bloodshed, or that the gods forbade a battle at that time. Mithradates and his priests usually considered a blazing light in the sky to be a good omen, recalling the awesome comets that had attended his birth, his coronation, and his massacre of Romans in 88 BC.8

  After the silvery fireball from heaven aborted the battle at Otryae, Mithradates took advantage of a dark, rainy night to march to Cyzicus, undetected by Lucullus. Mithradates captured about three thousand inhabitants of Cyzicus’
s chora and established what he assumed would be a brief siege to take the city.

  SIEGE OF CYZICUS, 73–72 BC

  Mithradates sent Metrophanes to blockade the harbor while his army camped on the slopes of the mountains. Cyzicus was losing hope—there had been no word from Lucullus since the ignominius defeat at Chalcedon. Menacing siege towers began to encircle the city walls, the work of Mithradates’ engineer Niconides. Finally, Lucullus advanced. But Mithradates’ soldiers terrified the Cyzicenes by pointing to the army far in the distance. “See those campfires? Those are Tigranes’ great armies of Armenians and Medes, come to help Mithradates!”9

  Lucullus’s intelligence reported that Mithradates depended on foraging and supplies delivered by sea to feed his vast army. “All we have to do is stomp on Mithradates’ belly,” remarked Lucullus to his officers, “and simply wait for him to surrender without a fight.” But Mithradates, on the advice of Taxiles, held the mountain pass to the territory Lucullus needed to occupy, to block Mithradates’ foragers and feed his own legions. Lucullus’s men were unhappy with the idea of camping idly all winter. No chance for plunder!

  Mithradates, meanwhile, received dispiriting news from Spain. His ally Sertorius had been murdered. The hero of Marius’s Populars was stabbed while at dinner with “friends.” Pompey’s legions had easily overcome what remained of the Spanish rebellion. The assassination of Sertorius was a severe blow to the Populars who had joined Mithradates. One of these was Lucius Magius, the general sent by Sertorius to advise Mithradates.

  Magius told Mithradates that the two Fimbrian legions—once loyal to Marius—wanted to desert Lucullus. “So, let Lucullus camp wherever he likes,” reasoned Magius. “With those Fimbrian legions on our side, we’ll be victorious with no need for battle.” Mithradates trusted Magius and pulled his guards from the mountain pass. Crucial details are missing to explain this apparently irrational move. Was Magius a traitor? Maybe, but a different possibility was suggested by the biographer of Lucullus. Magius may have acted in good faith, based on secret communications with the unreliable Fimbrians. After all, they had betrayed two previous commanders, and they chafed at Lucullus’s restraint. The ancient historian Memnon alluded to a deal initiated by the Fimbrians that went terribly wrong.10

  Whatever Magius’s true motives, to give up the pass was a grave blunder. The Fimbrians did not defect, and Lucullus now occupied the heights above Mithradates. Hemmed in by Romans and mountains, Mithradates could receive supplies only by sea. But winter would halt shipping. Lucullus could hardly believe his good luck.

  Speed was key now. Mithradates attacked Cyzicus with everything he had. His men brought up battering rams and catapult towers. One stupendous tower, more than 100 cubits high (about 140 feet), supported a superstructure for raining catapult bolts, stones, and fire missiles into the city. Another immense contraption, straddling two large ships lashed together, moved into position against the city’s seawalls. This was a new version of the huge sambuca at Rhodes, with a drawbridge to allow men to swarm over the walls.11

  Mithradates, like Lucullus, hoped to win without risk: both men wanted to avoid a bloody battle or long siege. Accordingly, Mithradates’ first move was to herd three thousand prisoners of war from Cyzicus onto his ships. He directed his captains to row into the harbor, in full view of the Cyzicenes defending their seawall. As Mithradates expected, the captives shouted to their fellow citizens, begging them to spare them in their perilous position.12 But the Cyzicene general was unmoved: “You are in Mithradates’ hands now—we cannot save you! Meet your fate like men!”

  When he saw that the Cyzicenes would not surrender even to save their compatriots, Mithradates let down the sambuca drawbridge. The Cyzicenes were dumbfounded to see enemy soldiers running across the skyway to their walls. But the rest of Mithradates’ men hesitated to follow the first sortie, and the Cyzicenes quickly recovered from their shock. They poured burning pitch onto the ships, forcing the whole contraption to back away from the wall.

  Next Mithradates deployed all his siege engines on land. Again, the city manned an amazing defense, hurling boulders to break the battering rams and wrecking the machines with gigantic grappling hooks. The defenders had draped their wooden parapets with wet hides and doused the stone walls with vinegar to fireproof them against Mithradates’ hail of fiery missiles. In Appian’s words, the Cyzicenes “left nothing untried within the compass of human energy” to repulse the attack. But, as Mithradates knew (and as modern scientists have proven), if vinegar-soaked limestone is heated enough, it crumbles. The intense heat of his fire bolts collapsed a section of wall.13

  The Cyzicenes toiled all night to repair the breach. Then, “as if in admiration for their resolve and bravery,” Plutarch claims that Cyzicus was aided by female deities, who appeared to oppose Mithradates in all his wars. A tremendous winter gale suddenly toppled all Mithradates’ siege towers. Inside the city, it was time for the annual sacrifice to Persephone, protector of Cyzicus. Her ritual called for a black heifer, but the herds were in pastures across the water. Miraculously, a black heifer swam over to the city. Then Persephone herself appeared, urging her people to be resolute against the “Pontic trumpeter.” Spirits soared in Cyzicus.14

  Spirits plunged in the camp of Mithradates. Was he always fated to incur the wrath of goddesses? His friends and advisers strongly counseled a retreat from Cyzicus, obviously under the protection of very powerful deities—or magicians.

  But the king had received some good news. In Italy, a gladiator named Spartacus had gathered an army of six hundred slaves, which eventually swelled to seventy thousand and defeated a series of Roman legions. Spartacus was said to be Thracian; he may have belonged to a tribe allied with Mithradates. Spartacus sympathized with and apparently planned to join Sertorius’s rebellion; he may have seen military action in Greece when Sulla defeated Mithradates there. In the pantheon of Rome’s three most dangerous enemies, Spartacus stood alongside Hannibal and Mithradates. Notably, both Plutarch and Appian wrote admiringly of Spartacus’s military skill and his humane ideals. The news of Spartacus’s victories against Rome encouraged Mithradates. He had lost his ally Sertorius in Spain, but now the Romans faced a formidable foe on Italian soil.15

  In another piece of cheering news, Mithradates learned that his general Eumachus (former satrap of Galatia) was victorious in southern Anatolia, killing a great many Romans there, along with their families. Yet Mithradates desperately needed to succeed here in Bithynia, before supplies ran out. He stubbornly devised an ambitious strategy. All winter, his sappers dug tunnels under the city walls, and his soldiers constructed an enormous ramp out from Mount Dindymus (ominously for Mithradates, a mountain sacred to Cybele). New siege towers were built all along this mound.

  Provisions dwindled. Winter storms prevented ships from bringing Mithradates’ great stores of grain around the Black Sea. Some of his famished soldiers looking for food were captured by Lucullus, who slyly asked each man how much food was left in his cohort’s tents. From their replies, Lucullus calculated that Mithradates would run out very soon. Exulting that his strategy of “kicking Mithradates in the stomach” was working, Lucullus promised his impatient troops, whining for loot, that they would be victorious without bloodshed.

  Mithradates’ generals tried to keep him in the dark about the specter of starvation. But the king soon learned the truth. He was appalled to discover his soldiers eating weeds, pack camels and mules, and even dead comrades. Plague had arisen from hundreds of unburied corpses, killing as many as the famine. There was no grass for the starving horses. Mithradates decided to send his entire cavalry on a roundabout route over the mountains for the winter. The horses, pack mules, and shaggy Bactrian camels were accompanied by a large contingent of wounded and sick soldiers. In freezing weather, the weak men and animals struggled through ice and snow.16

  Lucullus pursued them with 5,000 men and cavalry. A blizzard struck; many Romans fell behind with frostbite. But Lucullus forged on
and attacked Mithradates’ limping cavalry at the River Rhyndacus. Many were slain in the snow, and Lucullus captured 15,000 of Mithradates’ men, 6,000 horses, and the beasts of burden. For many of the Roman soldiers, this was their first sight of two-humped camels, imported from distant Bactria to the snows of Bithynia. Lucullus deliberately marched this long train of feeble prisoners and animals before the eyes of Mithradates’ demoralized men.17

  That humiliating spectacle was compounded by more bad tidings. Galatia hated Mithradates for murdering their leading families, and now the Galatian army, allied with Rome, had driven Mithradates’ general Eumachus out of southern Anatolia.

  The Cyzicenes still had plenty of grain, which they had cleverly preserved from spoilage by mixing it with Chalcidic earth (lime carbonate). Lucullus sent some Roman soldiers into the city to dig a countertunnel. They managed to trick Mithradates himself into entering his own tunnel. A Roman centurion inside Cyzicus sent a message to the king promising to betray the city. That Mithradates actually agreed to meet this man in the tunnel reveals his desperation at this point, as well as his personal courage. Mithradates went down alone into the subterranean passage. As he cautiously approached the shadowy figure, the Roman suddenly rushed forward with his sword. Mithradates turned and dove behind the tunnel’s door, slamming it shut in the nick of time!

  The Cyzicenes rejoiced when yet another winter storm struck. The wind tossed up immense waves, and Mithradates’ new siege towers began to creak and sway. Suddenly a gust of wind burst forth “with incredible fury,” shattering the towers. In nearby Ilium (ancient Troy)—where the statue of Athena still stood after Fimbria’s sacking—it was reported that an apparition of Athena had appeared. The goddess, panting and disheveled, had just come from saving Cyzicus. Centuries later, Plutarch read all about the goddess’s marvelous manifestation on a marble inscription in Ilium.