FIG. 14.1. Marble statue discovered near Pompey’s house, in Rome, identified as an idealized portrait of Pompey. Palazzo Spada, Rome, Alinari/Art Resource, NY.
Their reaction impressed Mithradates; Pompey’s intransigence enraged him. Confident of the loyalty of his supporters, Mithradates vowed that this would be a united struggle to the end: “No! I’ll never make peace with the rapacious Romans! I’ll never surrender anyone to them! I refuse to do anything that is not for the common advantage to all!”4
THE LAST CAMPAIGN
Pompey provoked an attack on the border outposts. Mithradates sent out his full infantry and the Romans retired. After ascertaining the extent of Pompey’s formidable forces, Mithradates withdrew to a mountain stronghold in southeastern Pontus that Pompey did not dare attack. Indeed, a large number of Pompey’s men deserted to Mithradates.
Mithradates created the impression that he was digging in. But one night, after lighting their campfires as usual, Mithradates’ army sneaked away from the stronghold—catching the Romans by surprise. Plutarch and Appian both claimed that Mithradates departed because he was ignorant of water and food in the region. That seems highly unlikely given his intimate knowledge of his homeland. Appian was puzzled: why did Mithradates “allow Pompey to enter his territory without opposition?”
Mithradates expected that Pompey would be unable to find food. But Pompey maintained his supply lines, dug deep wells for water, and set up a siege of Mithradates’ new position. After forty-five days, Mithradates killed his pack animals, keeping his cavalry horses and fifty days’ worth of provisions. According to Plutarch, his wounded men unable to march were killed by their comrades, to spare them from ignoble death at Roman hands. Again, Mithradates and his army “stole away silently by night over bad roads” to yet another stonghold.
Cassius Dio thought Mithradates had “become frightened [and] kept fleeing, because his forces were inferior.” Appian assumed these actions meant Mithradates must have been “suffering from fear and mental paralysis at the approach of calamity.” But these notions are dubious, given Mithradates’ history, character, and recent vow to resist. Instead, Mithradates’ evasive actions were in keeping with his new guerrilla tactics, modeled on nomadic warfare and on Alexander’s innovations in Afghanistan—and already tested successfully against Lucullus. Mithradates’ actions appear to have been calculated to lure Pompey deeper into the unfamiliar, rugged terrain between Pontus and Armenia. Indeed, in the next century, Frontinus, a Roman military strategist, would present these incidents as examples of Mithradates’ overall strategy to deceive Pompey.
Mithradates’ next movements confirm this explanation. Pompey followed Mithradates over the rough mountain paths with great difficulty, reported Appian. When Pompey caught up, Mithradates refused to fight directly. Instead, he “merely drove back the assailants with his cavalry—and then disappeared into the thick forest in the evening.” These new tactics perplexed the Romans—including the Roman friends who served in Mithradates’ own army. They tried in vain to convince the king to fight Pompey head-on. But Mithradates took up a strong position in the mountains, near Dasteira. The place was naturally defended by boulders and steep cliffs, accessible by only one path up the slope, guarded by about two thousand of Mithradates’ troops. Again, Mithradates counted on the scarcity of provisions to force Pompey to turn back.5
NIGHTMARE BY MOONLIGHT
At this place, during a full moon, Mithradates had a dream. It was written down by his soothsayers and discovered by Pompey among his papers after his death. The dream began happily. Mithradates was sailing with a good wind north across the Black Sea, enjoying the salt breeze, his face warmed by the sun’s rays. His mood was exuberant; he and his companions on the deck were all conversing pleasantly. Soon the green pastures and towers of Pantikapaion came into sight. Mithradates felt a glow of supreme confidence, joy, and security. He and his Amazon companion, Hypsicratea, would find peace in the Kingdom of the Bosporus on the northern shore of the Black Sea, with the freedom of the vast steppes at their backs. Suddenly the idyllic dream flipped into a nightmare. Mithradates found himself “bereft of all his companions, and tossed about in a rough sea, clinging to a bit of wreckage.” As the king thrashed in his sleep, his friends shook him awake. It was the middle of the night, but they were shouting: “Pompey is attacking!”6
Grabbing weapons and armor, Mithradates, Hypsicratea, and his generals rushed out to confront Pompey. Under the bright moon, Pompey observed their rapid deployment and called off his surprise attack. But his officers, eager to exterminate Mithradates once and for all, came up with a cunning plan. The full moon would be Pompey’s ally tonight. As it was setting behind the Roman position, the moonlight would shine forth behind their backs, illuminating the way as they advanced. But even more crucial, as the moon neared the horizon, it would cast extremely long shadows. As his officers sketched diagrams, Pompey suddenly saw that the elongated shadows would disorient the enemy, preventing them from correctly estimating the distance between the two armies (see plate 6).
In a lifetime of war and strife remarkable for extraordinary meteorological and astronomical events—comets, tempests at sea, cyclones, meteors—perhaps it was not surprising that yet another powerful force of Nature would be Mithradates’ undoing. Certainly it is ironic that the Moon, Queen of the Night, would bring about the downfall of Mithradates, champion of Sun and Light, in his epic struggle against the forces of Darkness represented by Rome. That Pompey would chose to attack at night was in keeping with Rome’s image in the Iranian-influenced East. Notably, Sulla had also attacked in the middle of the night. In contrast, Mithradates’ hero Alexander had famously rebuffed his generals’ advice to attack Darius at night, refusing to “steal victory like a thief.”7
The Romans advanced by the pale white light of the moon. The long blue shadows thrown far ahead gave the impression that the Romans were much closer than they really were. Mithradates’ archers, tricked by the optical illusion, let loose their arrows too soon. The missiles clattered harmlessly on the ground, far short of the mark. The Romans charged.
Many of Mithradates’ troops up the slope were still arming, rushing back to mount their chargers, in the rear with the pack camels. As the front ranks panicked and fell back in the Roman onslaught, terror coursed through Mithradates’ army, trapped in the rocky canyon. In the Moonlight Battle in the late summer of 66 BC, Pompey’s men cut down and captured nearly ten thousand of Mithradates’ warriors, many of them unarmed. Pompey seized his camp and supplies.8
But Pompey was disappointed. King Mithradates was not among the dead, the wounded, or the captured.
MITHRADATES AND HYPSICRATEA
At the outset of the battle, Mithradates, with Hypsicratea riding at his side, had led eight hundred of his riders to slice through the Roman advance. The fighting was ferocious—Pompey had ordered his infantrymen to stab Mithradates’ horses, to destroy his faith in his cavalry. Mithradates, Hypsicratea, and two other companions were cut off from the rest. These four finally broke out at the Roman rear and galloped up into the cliffs behind the battleground.9
Hypsicratea, in Persian-Amazonian garb—short tunic, cloak, pointed wool cap with earflaps, leather boots, and leggings with zigzag patterns—never tired of rough riding or combat. She wielded javelin, battle-axe, and bow with such “manly” expertise that it is not surprising that Mithradates called her “Hypsicrates.” And she was devoted to him. This “heroic amazon would accompany her lover to the very end of his long odyssey,” wrote Théodore Reinach. Mithradates had discovered the last, best love of his life, a stouthearted female companion for the desperate times ahead.10
FIG. 14.2. Amazons, nomadic women warriors adept with javelin and bow, as portrayed in classical Greek art. They wear leopard skins, tunics, leggings, and Persian-Phrygian “liberty” caps. Drawings from vase paintings in Bulfinch, Age of Fable, 1897 and Smith 1873.
After the Mithradatic Wars, as anecdotes from the last stage
of the seemingly endless conflict circulated in Italy, even the Romans thrilled to the story of Mithradates and Hypsicratea. Within a generation or so, their companionship had become a romantic tale of noble courage, adventure, and abiding love. In the imagination of Valerius Maximus, writing in the early first century AD, Hypsicratea was “a queen who loved Mithradates so deeply that for his sake she lived like a warrior, cutting her hair and taking up arms to share his toils and dangers.” When Mithradates was “cruelly defeated by Pompey” and fleeing among “wild peoples, she followed him with body and soul indefatigable.”11
In later tales of chivalry, Hypsicratea’s renown blossomed. She was the first in a long line of female pages, heroines in male disguise, featured in fairy tales, ballads, and Shakespearean plays. Medieval chroniclers depicted the king and the Amazon as friends and equals, and their love exemplified an ideal conjugal relationship. Boccaccio (1374) imagined Hypsicratea “choosing to make herself as tough and rugged as any man, journeying over hill and dale, traveling by day and night, bedding down in deserts and forests on the hard ground, in perpetual fear of the enemy and surrounded on all sides by wild beasts and serpents.” Mithradates’ comrade, wrote Boccaccio suggestively, “soothed him with the pleasures she knew he longed for.”
FIG. 14.3. Mithradates flanked by Hypsicratea (and Bituitus?). Des dames de renom, De mulierbus claris/Hypsicratea, Français 598, folio 116, Bibliothèque National de France.
Hypsicratea was included in the City of Ladies, a celebration by Christine de Pizan (b. 1364) of women who were the equals of men in war strength, intellect, and ingenuity. Like Boccaccio, Christine sympathized with Mithradates’ struggle, reflecting the negative European image of the Roman Republic’s avarice and antagonism toward popular monarchs. “The Romans waged a terrible war on Mithradates,” wrote Christine. “The fate of the kingdom was at stake and the threat of death at the hands of the Romans ever present,” yet Hypsicratea “travelled everywhere with him to far-off places and strange lands.” Christine pictured her as a courtly lady “made for softer living,” cutting off her “long, golden hair to disguise herself as a man,” giving “no thought to protecting her complexion from sweat and dust.” For love of Mithradates, Hypsicratea transformed her “graceful body” into that of a “powerfully built knight-in-arms” clad in helmet and “weighed down with a coat of chain mail” (see plate 2).13
In reality, of course, Hypsicratea was a robust horsewoman-warrior from a Eurasian nomadic culture in which girls and boys learned to ride, hunt, and make war together.
TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN
In the hills above the battlefield, Mithradates, Hypsicratea, and their two comrades caught their breath. The others were not named by Plutarch. Perhaps one was Bituitus, a cavalry officer from Gaul, praised for fighting valiantly by the king’s side. Maybe the other was Gaius son of Hermaeus, a childhood friend, or General Metrophanes. The band of four walked their horses on rough trails away from the battlefield. Other survivors of the Moonlight Battle joined them, a few cavalry and about three thousand on foot. Mithradates had lost nearly ten thousand in Pompey’s night attack, yet he and his most faithful followers had emerged from the ordeal.
Mithradates led this ragtag group to Sinora (Synorion, “Borderland”), his fortified treasury on the border of Armenia. Near a Turkish village still known as Sunur or Sinuri (“Border”), archaeologists have discovered the ruins of Sinora’s strong tower. Here, the fugitives were welcomed by Drypetina and the eunuch Meniphilus. In the Middle Ages, Drypetina’s devotion became an icon of filial love. “The girl was extremely ugly,” wrote Christine de Pizan, but “she loved her father so much that she never left his side.” As queen of Laodicea, Drypetina “could have lived a safe and comfortable life. . . . but she preferred to share her father’s sufferings and hardships when he went to war. Even when he was defeated by the mighty Pompey, she did not abandon him but looked after him with great care and dedication.”14
FIG. 14.4. Drypetina serves Mithradates a meal at Sinora. Des dames de renom, De mulieribus claris/Drypetin, Français 598, folio 113v, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
The atmosphere at Sinora was fraught with anxiety and foreboding, but Mithradates had already devised a plan. He sent a messenger to Tigranes to request refuge again in Armenia. Mithradates needed to move fast: Pompey would soon pick up their trail. Sinora’s great treasure was essential. But how to transport the heavy load of money and goods? Mithradates’ wealth was useless—unless it could somehow be made portable. He had no pack animals, only some cavalry horses and a few thousand loyalists.
For Mithradates, as he had vowed, it was all for one, one for all. His solution was ingenious and generous. The king gave all that remained of his riches to his followers, thereby distributing the burden—and possession—among the many. Cedar chests filled with sumptuous raiment and jewelry were flung open. The king handed out robes, bracelets, necklaces, and rings to his soldiers. He then pried open bronze caskets filled with 6,000 talents’ worth of gold and silver coins (equal to a year’s pay for about 100,000 soldiers). He divided the coins, giving much more than a year’s pay to each follower and generous rewards to senior veterans. The rest was stuffed in leather saddlebags. In efficiently and equitably dispersing his treasure, Mithradates’ solution recalled Alexander, who had shared his possessions with his loyal troops. It was also a remarkable testament to the mutual trust and loyalty of Mithradates and his followers—his kingdom was lost, yet they would follow their leader into danger and exile for the rest of their lives.
Next, Mithradates and the eunuch Meniphilus went to the citadel’s apothecary and prepared poison pills. Plutarch reported that before departing Sinora the king gave Hypsicratea and “each of his friends a deadly poison to carry with them, so that none of them would fall into the hands of the Romans against their will.”15
The fugitive army must have been a bizarre sight: Mithradates’ battered armor topped with a purple cape, the Amazon draped in unaccustomed finery, and each foot soldier and rider decked out like royalty in fancy cloaks, gold and silver bangles, and bulging money belts. There had been a slight change in plans. Tigranes, worried about Roman retribution (and against the advice of his queen Cleopatra, Mithradates’ daughter), refused to shelter Mithradates in Armenia again. In fact, Tigranes had put a price on his old friend’s head. Mithradates couldn’t decide whether to be insulted or amused by the stingy reward Tigranes was offering for his capture: a mere one hundred talents. This was less than what Mithradates had offered for his enemies Chaeremon and his two sons back in 89 BC.16
Mithradates revised his escape plan. The outlaw army marched day and night north, beyond the headwaters of the Euphrates River. Some of Mithradates’ troops, natives of these mountains, served as guides. The region was teeming with snakes deadly to strangers (locals were not bothered by the venom). By hidden forest paths they passed through the land of the king’s allies the Heniochoi and the Turret-Folk. Three days later the group reached Colchis. At Phasis, they might have been reunited with the eunuch Bacchides and the pirate Seleucus, who had sailed to Colchis after the fall of Sinope in 70 BC. Here, Appian tells us, Mithradates halted to “organize and arm his forces and those who joined him,” Turret-Folk, Heniochoi, Iberi, Albanoi, and perhaps the Soanes of the noxious arrow poison, and the strange tribe known as the Lice-Eaters.17
IN THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE
Mithradates’ army crossed the Phasis River. In the grassy meadows strutted beautiful golden-red birds with iridescent blue-green heads and long tail feathers. The “Phasian” bird, known today as pheasant, was prized for its succulent dark meat. Mithradates led his army further north: the road ended where the Caucasus range met the Black Sea. Here they camped for the winter of 66/65 BC, at Dioscurias, a market town with a mild climate.
Early in his reign, Mithradates’ army had tried to subdue the “wild” Achaeans in the mountains here, but he lost many men to ambushes and freezing cold. Since boyhood, Mithradates had b
een steeped in the mythology of this land. Somewhere in the alpine meadows above his camp Medea had once gathered magical plants and liquid fire. On a snowy crag in the Caucasus, Hercules freed Prometheus from his iron chains. The quest for the Golden Fleece ended here—ancient authors explained how the Colchians used lambskins to collect fine gold dust carried by streams flowing down from the Caucasus.18
During this strategic retreat, says Appian, Mithradates “conceived of a vast plan—a strange one for a fugitive on the run!” Pompey was closing in on Colchis, intending to trap Mithradates between the sea and the impassable mountains. Yet, marvels Appian, the irrepressible Mithradates pursued his “chimerical project” with supreme confidence and energy. The plan was indeed remarkable. Pantikapaion in the Crimea would become the new center of his Black Sea Kingdom. The Bosporus was presently in the hands of Machares, Mithradates’ last living son by Laodice, his sister and first wife. Sadly, Machares had inherited her treacherous ways, making peace with Lucullus while his father fought for his life and realm. So Mithradates “planned to take back the kingdom he had given his ungrateful son and confront the Romans once more.” The Black Sea itself was no longer in Mithradates’ control, but most of the lands around it were allies. So the first step of his master plan was to trek overland counterclockwise around the Black Sea. Rounding the Sea of Azov, Mithradates would march across Scythia and Sarmatia, down to the Crimea. All along the way, of course, he would gather more followers and allies.19
It sounds feasible on paper, but a glance at a topographic map reveals the plan’s breathtaking audacity (see map 5.1). Mithradates intended to cross over the Greater Caucasus Mountains, the monolithic barrier between Europe and Asia, stretching nearly a thousand miles from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. The highest peaks are eighteen thousand feet. Mithradates and his little army would attempt the crossing in early 65 BC, braving snow and ice, precipitous trails, and the danger of avalanche (see plate 7).
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy Page 38