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

by Adrienne Mayor

  7. Thanks to Deniz Erciyas and Mehmet Tezcan for insights about the long-standing neglect of M in Turkey. A popular book of 1973 by Mahmut Gologlu portrayed Mithradates as a local hero and his Pontic Kingdom as “Turkey’s First National State.” Thanks to Murat Arslan for summarizing his book and the introduction by Dr. Sencer Sahin. Comparison of M’s and Alexander’s protection of Asia, Arslan 2007, 529. Turkey’s silence on M may be associated with accusations of Turkish genocide against Greeks living in Pontus and Armenians after World War 1.

  8. Reinach 1890, 418–7; McGing 1986, 176–79. Erciyas 2006, 4–8, for sources and evidence for M’s reign. Mastrocinque 1999, 59–75, 119–22, ancient sources and inscriptions. Højte 2009a.

  9. Diodorus’s hostility to Rome, Sacks 1990, 134–37. Cicero: Balsdon 1979, 170–76; Sanford 1937. Lands outside Rome’s sphere, see Sitwell 1986.

  10. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Hound of the Baskervilles.”

  11. “Broken shards,” Holland 2003, xx. Cf Lee 2007, 280. Goodkin 1986, 204, 216 n3. M unique: McGing 2009; Erciyas 2006, 121.

  12. Euripides’ Helen (412 BC) was based on a version of an alternative legend about Helen recounted in Herodotus 2.113–20. Livy 9.17–19.

  13. Gaddis 2002, 100–109, principles and rules for counterfactual reasoning.

  14. Ferguson 2000, introduction. Notable examples of narrative ancient histories: Holland 2003, Reinach 1890, Champlin 2003, Strauss 2004 and 2009, Lee 2007.

  15. Summerer 2009. Bengston 1975, Matyszak 2008, vi, 152.

  16. Alcock 2007. Tezcan 2003 and 2007, 91–102. Black Sea Trade Project, www.museum.upenn.edu/Sinop. Centre for Black Sea Studies, Aarhus, Denmark: www.pontos. dk. Højte 2009a. Chinese Eurasian studies: www.eurasianhistory.com/english.htm.

  17. Mayor 2009; Maskiell and Mayor 2001; Mayor, “Dirty Tricks in Ancient Warfare,” MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History 2 (Autumn 1997): 32–37; Mayor, “Amazons,” Reader’s Companion to Military History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

  18. Summerer 2009. Kopff 2007, director, conservative Center for Western Civilization, Univ. Colorado, Boulder, was arguing in favor of defending the American “empire” against terrorists.

  19. Merry 2005, 217–21, ch 12, “Ghosts of Mithridates.”

  20. In November 2006, for example, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, vowed that the Islamic jihad would destroy “Rumieh” (Arabic for the Roman Byzantine Empire). K. Gajendra Singh, ambassador to Jordan during 1990–91 Gulf War; to Turkey and Azerbaijan 1992–96. Singh’s editorials against the Iraq War appear in Islamic news service Al-Jazeerah and in Asia Times. Singh 2003 and 2006, per cor Dec 2006.

  21. Kay 2008, notes that Cicero’s Pro lege Manilia is “remarkable in its contemporary tone. If we substitute ‘US sub-prime loans’ for ‘Asian monies’ and the UK banking system for ‘the system of monies which operates in the Roman Forum,’ Cicero’s speech could have been written about the current credit crisis.” Piracy: Harris 2006.

  22. Champlin 2003, 34–35, 236–37, esp 46–47 on handling legendary and contradictory ancient biographical reports.

  23. Balsdon 1979, 60–64.Challenges to the Eurocentric historical view of the divides East/West, Greece and Rome/Persia, barbarian/civilized, evil/good are gaining momentum. See Summerer 2009 and Alain Gresh, Jan 7, 2009, http://mondediplo. com/2009/01/07west, citing Touraj Daryaee, “Go Tell the Spartans,” March 14, 2007, Iranian.com and Tzvetlan Todorov’s La peur des barbares (Paris: Laffont, 2008).

  • 1 •

  KILL THEM ALL, AND LET THE GODS SORT THEM OUT

  1. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Appian are from Mithradatic Wars. Massacre: Appian 22–23, 54, and 61–63. Appian’s sources, Mastrocinque 1999, ch 4; McGing 1986, 176–79; massacre, 106, 111, 113–18. Intelligence mystery: Sheldon 2003, 85, and 2005, 74–77. The chapter title comes from a Latin phrase first used during the Inquisition, ca 1210: Neca eos omnes. Deos suos agnoset.

  2. Valerius Maximus 9.2 and Memnon 22.9 reported 80,000 dead; Plutarch Sulla 24 puts the death toll at 150,000. Others, Appian 61–63; Cicero Pro Flacco 25 and Pro lege Manilia 5.11; and Velleius 2.18, say that “all Italians” in Anatolia were wiped out. Sarikakis 1976, 255. Some, eg Brunt 1971, 38, and McGing 1986, 111–18, who are skeptical about the high death toll assumed a lower Italian population overall. Ñaco del Hoyo et al. 2009, 6–8. The lower estimate of 80,000 is now generally accepted as at least plausible. As Badian pointed out (1981, 66 and n22), “The extent of the massacre is, in general terms, not in doubt.” Population is very difficult to assess for this period. Rome’s census of 114 BC recorded 394,000 Roman citizens (men only? or including women?) in Italy and elsewhere. In 70 BC, Romans in Italy and the empire were said to number about 910,000. The figure of about 4 million was recorded for 28 BC: that census probably included men, women, and children over age 1. It has been estimated that the total population of the Roman Empire in AD 14 was about 54 million people. See Matthew White’s useful “Body Count of the Roman Empire” (2002). Thanks to Walter Schiedel and Bruce Hitchner for discussions of the death toll and population figures. Roman settlers “swarmed” to Asia Minor: Warmington 1969, 77. Magie 1950, 2:1103 n37, the higher number may have been inflated by Sulla in battlefield speeches to motivate Roman troops. Reinach gave the massacre the name “Ephesian Vespers” (after the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, when native Sicilians killed French colonists); it is also known as Asian or Roman Vespers. Reinach 1890, 129–32; Duggan 1959, 61–62. Ballesteros Pastor 1996, chs 8 and 10.

  3. Pergamon, first capital of Roman Asia: Rigsby 1988, 137–41; mixed demographics of Hellenistic cities in Asia, 130–37. Greek cities under Roman rule, Gleason 2006.

  4. Adramyttion: McGing 1986, 117. Ephesus: Rigsby 1996, 385–90. Pliny 36.21; Paul, Acts 19.27; cf Pausanias 4.31.8. “Barbarians” was used by the Greeks to denote non-Greeks; the Romans used the term for non-Greeks and non-Italians, even for very civilized cultures.

  5. Rigsby 1996, 1–31, 110, 173, 177, 184, 362, 366, 385–90, 400–420, 427, 582–83. Cos spared Romans who fled to Temple of Asclepius: Tacitus Annals 4.14.3. Extending asylum at Ephesus: Strabo 14.1.23. Alexander abided by asylia for runaway slaves in Babylonia: Plutarch Alexander 42.1–2.

  6. Caunus, Tralles: Bean 1989, 139–51, 177–79. Smith 1890. Cassius Dio fragment 101.1; McGing 1986, 116.

  7. Rigsby 1996, 402–3.

  8. Appian 23. Augustine City of God 3.22, written in AD 413; other pre-Christian disasters for Rome, see 2.24, 3.7, and 3.23.

  9. Sarikakis 1976, 262–64, compared the killing to nineteenth-century massacres of Armenians and Greeks by Turks in Anatolia, and suggested the killing of Romans was carried out by urban mobs of debtors and slaves, rather than by Asian Greeks. Amiotti 1980 claims the killing was done by Greek lower classes and merchants, rather by than indigenous Anatolians. McGing 1986, 113–17, 122, discusses M’s initial appeal to both upper and lower classes in Asia and rebels in Italy, noting, “It has usually been assumed that the massacre was carried out by the ‘rabble’ and it has been argued that [M] represented the ‘lower’ classes in a great war against their Roman and ‘upper’ class repressors” (113). Jewish communities were well integrated, generally wealthy citizens of the Anatolian cities of Ephesus, Pergamon, Adramyttion, Aphrodisias, Apamea, Laodicea, Sardis: Mitchell 1995, 2:32–37. Cassius Dio, fragment 109, declares the later massacres of Greeks by Sulla far exceeded the terror of 88 BC. Roman historian Tacitus was also very critical of Roman brutality. Greco-Western Asian hatred of Roman avarice, and Roman self-criticism, Sanford 1937 and 1950; Buitenwerf 2003, 222–23. Arslan 2007, 159–74, sees the killings in 88 BC as a “common, voluntary revolt” by all ethnic groups against harsh Roman administration. Cicero: Balsdon 1979, 168 and n42.

  10. Alcock 20047. Roman differences stood out in Anatolia, Balsdon 1979, 220. Mastrocinque 1999, 54–59. Mitchell 1995, 1:30.

  11. “Enlightened” kingship traditions of ancient Persia, Widengren 1959, 244. Slaves, Strabo
14.5.2. Thanks to Walter Scheidel for demographic information about slaves; see Scheidel 2005. Galen of Pergamon (b. AD 130) on Roman slaves in Anatolia, De Propr. Anim. 9. Brunt 1971, 40.

  12. Classic study of Roman slavery: Hopkins 1978. See also Balsdon 1979, 77–81. Tattoos: Mayor 1999; punitive tattooing of slaves and criminals, Jones 1987. The Monumentum Ephesinum, legal inscription at Ephesus, dates to 1st century BC. This long Roman customs law decrees that slaves imported to and from Asia must be tattooed “tax paid” by the tax-farming company; see Epigraphica Anatolia 14 (1989), sec 51, p 151 (thanks to Christopher Jones).

  13. Ephesians descended from slaves, Athenaeus 6.267. Runaway slave at Ephesus: Rigsby 1988, 138. Cures at Temple of Asclepius, Pergamon: Bean 1979, 60–61. Slaves and Mithradates: McGing 1986, 114–16, 128–29. Duggan 1959, 62: number of freed slaves, 6,000, lends support to the death toll of 80,000.

  14. “Credible commitments” and “precommitments”: economic game theory applied to conflicts among nation-states by 2005 Nobel Prize winner Thomas C. Schelling. Credit collapse, described by Cicero: Kay 2008.Trumpet: Plutarch Sulla 7; Diodorus of Sicily (hereafter Diodorus) frag 38–39.5. Halley’s Comet appears about every 76 years; it was visible summer 87 BC. Gurzadyan and Vardanyan 2004. Comets sinister omens for Rome, see Ch 2.

  15. For some, M’s coordinated strike against noncombatant citizens of an enemy empire in 88 BC, intended to drive Rome out of the Near East, evokes resemblances to modern terror attacks on Western targets, especially Islamic jihadist Osama bin Laden’s synchronized attack on three US targets, September 11, 2001 (four commercial airplanes hijacked in different cities deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center, New York City, and the Pentagon in Washington, DC). Merry 2005; Kopff 2007. Osama bin Laden’s intended victims were noncombatants; the motive was to force the United States to alter its foreign policy. Unlike M’s plan, bin Laden’s reportedly entailed selecting targets for symbolic value, and the death toll was higher than he expected.

  16. Boudicca’s insurgency: Tacitus Annals 14.29–39 says 70,000 perished; Cassius Dio 62.1–12 says 80,000 and gives ghastly details. Warmington 1969, 77. King Herod’s order to kill all Jewish male infants in Bethlehem (Matthew 2.16–18) could be classified as genocidal, since it was intended to stifle reproduction.

  17. Definition of genocide: the attempt to annihilate an ethnic, religious, national, or political group. In a comparative study of genocide in history, Jonassohn and Bjornson 1998, 190–91, include the massacre of 88 BC as a case study of historical examples of genocide. Holt 2006 and Eliot 1972 discuss the difficulties of quantifying man-made death tolls with precision and moral response to the vast “nation of the dead,” countless victims of mass violence in human history. Genocide as an “exercise in community-building”: Alcock 2007.

  18. US Federal Bureau of Investigation defines terrorism as the “unlawful use of force against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in the furtherance of political or social objectives.” Bolich 2006.

  19. Terrorists or freedom fighters: “Consensus on Terror” 2005. In 2005, the UN General Assembly attempted to formulate a political definition of terrorism for a comprehensive international treaty against terrorism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

  20. I am grateful for conversations with R. Bruce Hitchner on inhumanity in the Roman world. I have also benefited from discussions with international relations scholar Robert Keohane, Princeton, who sees the massacre of 88 BC as a clear case of ancient terrorism and genocide. Roman terrorism: Bolich 2006, Ñaco del Hoyo et al. 2009.

  21. Alcock 2007, “archaeology of memory.” Many Greek and Latin authors also avoided detailed discussions of the massacre, according to Sarikakis 1976, 256. Appian quotes three speeches by Sulla harping on the bloody details of the slaughter, 54, 58, and 62. For another example of very high death tolls exacted by a single leader, Pliny 7.25.92 stated that Julius Caesar killed more than one million people in his conquests, a “prodigious even if unavoidable wrong inflicted on the human race.” See also Plutarch Caesar, one million Gauls killed, one million captured. Turkish scholar Murat Arslan (2007) surmises that the total killings by M were equal in scale to the total number of people killed by the Romans in Asia. For estimates, see White 2002.

  22. Erciyas 2006, 23–24. From Erciyas’s “scientific point of view,” M was “brave” yet “overzealous” in his struggle against Rome. Erciyas per cor Sept 3, 2008.

  23. Figures for armies and battlefield casualties in the Mithradatic Wars given by the ancient writers generally agree; they had access to official records and eyewitness memoirs, now lost. Most modern historians consider many of the numbers to be exaggerated. I state the figures given by the ancient sources and cite recent scholarly opinions in notes; Callataÿ 2000 and Pillonel 2005. It is worth keeping in mind that this period was marked by the largest armies and biggest battles in Western history, until the early modern period in Europe. Even if the figures are halved, historians agree that the magnitude of armies and of casualties was staggering in the Mithradatic Wars.

  24. Cicero Pro Flacco 25; Academica Priora 2.1. Velleius 2.18. Roman attitudes toward Greeks and vice versa, Gleason 2006, 228–29, 240–42; antipathy between Romans and “barbarians,” Balsdon 1979, 66–67, 161–92; “great rift between East and West,” 60. Mommsen was responsible for establishing the East-West divide in the 1850s, casting M as an “oriental sultan” acting out of blind cruelty. Summerer 2009.

  • 2 •

  A SAVIOR IS BORN IN A CASTLE BY THE SEA

  1. Justin 37.2. Justin’s summary of Pompeius Trogus is unique for descriptions of events and perspectives outside and even hostile to the Roman Empire; Justin may have lived in the 2nd century AD. Writing in the late 1st century BC, Trogus drew on sources including lost biographies of Hellenistic kings and firsthand accounts of his relatives. Comet of 135 BC, Seneca Natural Questions 7.15: “There appeared a comet which was small at first [then] spread . . . its vast extent equaled the size of the Milky Way.” As noted earlier, in this period, “Asia” referred to lands from the eastern Mediterranean to India. The Near and Middle East, including the lands around the Black Sea, Anatolia (called Asia Minor by the Romans), Armenia, Syria, Persia, Babylonia, Parthia, and Scythia, constitute Eurasia or Western Asia. Sanford 1937, 453. Ramsey 1999, 230. Athenaeus 5.213.

  2. “Luster”: Ramsey 1999, 198–99. Fotheringham 1919, 166: European astronomers as early as 1783 had assigned M’s comets to 135 and 119 BC. Two authoritative classical encyclopedias, Pauly-Wissowa RE 1932, and the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed, 1996, ignore the comets, as does Højte 2009a. Reinach 1890, 51 n2, offered a symbolic interpretation of the comet “fable”; 52, he dated M’s birth to 132 BC. Various dates and lifespans of M given by ancient sources, see McGing 1986, 43 and n1, who accepts the year 133 for M’s birth and 120 for accession at age 13; 45–46, story of the comets is “Iranian legend.” The comets were “myths”: Ballesteros Pastor 1996, ch 2. Comets in M’s coins and propaganda, Arslan 2007, 73–76.

  3. Fotheringham 1919. Han Dynasty (206 BC to AD 220) comet records and drawings: Loewe 1980, 12–14; diagram of “war banner” comet, no 639, pl 4, p 32. The comet of 135 is mentioned by Justin, Pliny 2.24.95, and Seneca; for these and other Greco-Roman and Chinese records of comets 500 BC to AD 400, see Ramsey 2007, esp years 135, 134, 119, 88, and 87 BC.

  4. Ramsey 1999, esp 200 and n9, 206 and n30. Eutropius 6.12 and Orosius 6.5 (probably following Livy) give M’s birthdate as 135 BC. Appian 112, M lived to be 68–69 and ruled 57 years. Strabo 10.4.10 and Memnon 22.2

  5. Greco-Roman dread of comets, eg Seneca Natural Questions, “On Comets”; Pliny, Natural History 2.23. Ramsey 1999, 201 and n11; on 228–30, Ramsey speculates that M’s followers reinterpreted the comets in a favorable light by referring to ancient Iranian prophecies; comet coins, minted 110–80 BC, found around the Black Sea, 216 and n71; photos of comet c
oins, see 245–46, figs 1–2. The crescent moon and eight-rayed star (sun) symbolized the Anatolian god Men and the Persian god Ahuramazda/Mithra, respectively, according to Rostovtzeff 1919, 91–93; Erciyas 2006, 131–32.

  6. Gurzadyan and Vardanyan 2004. Halley’s Comet reappeared in 87 and 12 BC and AD 66. Tigranes’ comet coins, probably issued before 69 BC, show a younger man than his other coins. Some associate Halley’s appearance in 12 BC with the birth of Jesus. Augustus issued a coin with a comet in 17 BC, but by that time Romans had begun to accept Persian-influenced interpretations of comets as marking the birth or death of great leaders. Ramsey 2007, “Caesar’s Comet” of 44 BC, 180, 183 (ancient sources), 196, nn21 and 23.

  7. Thanks to John Ramsey for insightful discussions on comets in this era. Ramsey points out that the tiny coins issued by young M were anonymous, while Tigranes placed the comet on his tiara with his name on larger coins, perhaps signaling more confidence about the comet symbolism. Tigranes may have intended to appropriate the comets to his own reign. Ramsey 2007 notes that Tigranes’ comet tail resembles the comets of 135 and 119, which had long curved dust trails; Halley’s gaseous tail is never curved.