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

by Adrienne Mayor

  34. Routes and passes: Strabo 11.3.4–5. Bryce 1878, 43–48, 69–87. Roki Pass now a tunnel on the Transcaucasian Highway (1971–81). War broke out in August 2008 among Russia, Georgia, North and South Ossetia, and Abkhazia (ancient Achaea and Zygi); Russian tanks invaded Georgia by way of Roki Pass. Thanks to Hans Heiner Buhr, adventurer and mountain guide in Tbilisi, Georgia, who often traverses these passes. His knowledge of the history and terrain of this region was immensely helpful in enabling me to reconstruct M’s route.

  35. Tezcan 2003. Strabo 11.2.15–16.

  36. Xenophon March 4.5; Lee 2007, 165–67. M’s general Neoptolemus fought Scythians on frozen Bosporus Strait, Strabo 2.1.16, 7.3.18.

  37. Strabo 11.2.16–19, 11.5.6, 11.14.4.

  38. Cf Xenophon March 4.5.19–21; Lee 2007, 166.

  39. Descriptions draw on memoirs of early European travelers who retraced M’s route in 1837 and 1876: Wilbraham 1839, 140–42; Bryce 1878, 42–87; descriptions of Caucasus, 88–156. Complex logistics of large army traveling single file over constricted, snowbound mountain passes, progressing in peristaltic movements, cf Xenophon’s winter crossing of Armenian passes in Lee 2007, 163–67.

  40. Appian 102. Kurgans, Ascherson 1995, 126–35.

  41. M’s trip around Sea of Azov and arrival in Crimea; Machares and Xiphares: Appian 102 and 107. Cassius Dio 37.12, M killed some remaining sons who incurred his suspicion. Exipodras: Orosius 6.5. The eunuch Gauros: Reinach 1890, 405; Valerius Maximus 9.2.3. On Pantikapaion, Crimea, and “Little Scythia,” Strabo 7.4 and 11.2; Ascherson 1995, 220–26.

  42. Plutarch Alexander 49, Appian 107–8. The facial ulcers that caused M to withdraw bear similarity to the disfigured popular Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko, poisoned by political enemies in 2004. Like M, Yushchenko’s charisma relied on face-to-face contact. This and other poisonings in the region, Gutterman 2004. Duggan 1959, 181. In his novel, Ford 2004, 337, attributed the facial ulcers to stress and delayed effects of a cheek wound four years earlier.

  43. Hair samples of King George III (1760–1820), who suffered mental derangement, showed a high arsenic concentration of 17 ppm, from a lifetime of prescribed arsenic. Cox et al. 2005. Rue and Saint-John’s-wort (Hypericum), included in Mithridatium recipes, have toxic photosensitive compounds that can cause severe blistering. Vogel 2001. Arsenic poisoning, www.toxipedia.org.

  44. Plutarch Pompey 41; Josephus Jewish War 1.122–55.

  45. Justin 37.1.7. Darius: Herodotus 3.136. Plutarch Fortune of Alexander 340–42.

  46. Debate about Alexander, Livy 9.17–19; Sacks 1990, 135 and n75. McGing 1986, 122–23; see 165 and n95, “wildly unrealistic” plan anti-Mithradatic propaganda. Sherwin-White 1994 also dismisses the plan as rumor. Cf Ballesteros Pastor 1996, ch 13. Cicero’s speech, 63 BC, De lege agraria contra Rullum 437.

  47. Duggan 1959, 186–87. Ford 2004, 344–46. Maps of overland route to Alps, Talbert 2000, maps 11–12, 19–23. Reinach 1890, 403–4. M’s invasion plan figures in Norse oral traditions written down ca AD 1250: Younger Edda 1879, 229–30. See Mallet and Scott 1847, 51: in Scythia, M “sought refuge, and a new means of vengeance. He hoped to arm against the ambition of Rome, all the barbarous nations, his neighbors, whose liberty [Rome] threatened. He succeeded in this at first, but all those peoples, ill-united as allies, ill-armed as soldiers, and still worse disciplined, were forced to yield to . . . Pompey.” But one tribe, led by a chief named Odin, migrated to northern Europe and kept Mithradates’ dream alive. This legend is featured in Anderson 1960.

  48. Cassius Dio 37.11 marveled that M’s mind, at age 71, grew more steadfast even as his body was weakened by age, war wounds, and the mountain crossing. Appian 102, 107–8; Plutarch Pompey 41; Florus 1.40.15. On the economics, war preparations, and archaeology of Bosporan Kingdom, Saprykin and Maslennikov 1995; Logan 1994.

  49. The region sustained nomadic attacks and Diophantus’s conquests, Ch 5, but was not involved in the Mithradatic Wars except to supply tributes of grain and recruits; Saprykin and Maslennikov 1995. Cassius Dio 37.11 synchronizes this earthquake with the capture of M’s children at Phanagoria. Orosius 6.5.1, during grain harvest (or spring?) festival of the Greek mother goddess Demeter (the only recorded ritual by Mithradates directed to a goddess). Archaeological evidence of the quake of 63 BC, Blavatskij 1977; Logan 1994, 72; Saprykin and Maslennikov 1995, 267, 269, 273; but cf Traina 1995. This was not the same quake reported by Justin 40.2.1 in Syria, predicting Lucullus’s defeat of Tigranes, Ch 13. Cassius Dio 37.25, a “mighty” earthquake occurred in Rome in 63 BC, with lightning in a clear sky, flashes of fire, and apparitions; cf Obsequens in Lewis 1976, 128.

  50. Rostovtzeff 1921, 221, on Iranian, Jewish, Greek, and indigenous populations of Bosporan Kingdom; he suggests that the large Jewish presence was directly related to their support of M vs Rome. Artaphernes, age 40, apparently never a viable heir.

  51. M’s military men hated M’s “all powerful” eunuchs. This and other events of the revolt, Appian 108–14, Castor of Phanagoria was later designated Friend of Rome by Pompey. Sherwin-White 1994. The final fates of Cleopatra the Younger and Stratonice are unknown.

  52. Appian 109. Some of Appian’s speculation may be his own interpretation, but he also had access to memoirs of Romans and others with M. Grievances in Bosporan Kingdom, Saprykin and Maslennikov 1995, esp 281. Rostovtzeff 1921, 220, on the threat these northern tribes organized by M posed to Rome.

  53. Appian 109. “Last autonomous monarch,” Velleius 2.40.1; McGing 1986, 171.

  54. Appian 110 calls Metrophanes “Menophanes”; cf Appian 28 and Pausanias 3.23.2–5. Pharnaces’ children, M’s grandchildren: Dynamis later became queen of Bosporan Kingdom; Darius, Pharnaces’ son, grandson of Mithradates, was appointed king of Pontus by Mark Anthony in 39 BC. Eder and Renger 2007, 112–13. Mitchell 1995, 1:38–39; Rostovtzeff 1919.

  55. Appian 110–11.

  • 15 •

  IN THE TOWER

  1. The details that follow are from M’s death scenes reported by Livy Periochae 102; Appian 110–12; Plutarch Pompey 41; Cassius Dio 37.12–14; Valerius Maximus 9.2.3; Justin 37.1–2, 6; Aulus Gellius 17.16; Aurelius Victor 1.76; Orosius 6.5; Florus 1.40; and Galen De theriaca, ad Pisonem 14.283–84, cited in Totelin 2004, 5–6 and n22. Medieval version, Baley 1585. Ramsey 1999, 203 n16: M was thought to be alive in January 63 BC, but by November word of his death reached Rome. Reinach 1890, 406–13. His suicide appears to have been late spring or early summer of 63.

  2. I added the detail of a golden vial, based on Herodotus’s description of the small golden vials of poison that Scythian archers attached to their belts, Mayor 2009, 78–79. I also assume M comforted his daughters as they died. According to late Roman tradition, Orosius 6.5, M uttered a bitter curse, wishing the same ill treatment on Pharnaces by his own children. Did M pray? If so, it may have been similar to Cyrus the Great’s last prayer, Xenophon Cyrus 8.7.3.

  3. Appian 111–12. How old was M in 63 BC? About 71, based on birth date of 134 BC (Ch 2). Appian 116 calculated his age as 68 or 69; Eutropius 6 and Orosius 6.5 (following Livy) say he was 72, giving birth date of 135 BC. Average life expectancy for a man in the 1st century BC was about 50.

  4. What was the suicide poison? A tiny amount of aconite (monkshood, a neurotoxin) is deadly and painless, with numbness and full consciousness until respiration ceases; aconite was used in antiquity by old people in Chios to commit suicide. Henbane’s toxic ingredient is hyoscyamine, bringing hallucinations, euphoria, restlessless, dizziness, tachycardia, fever, coma, and death. Hemlock, used in ancient Greece and Rome for criminal executions and suicide, causes gradual paralysis and death by asphyxiation, like aconite. Hemlock could be combined with opium for a calm, dignified, painless death, like that of Socrates. Stuart 2004, 73–78 and 110–12; Cilliers and Retief 2000.

  5. Cassius Dio 37.13; Reinach 1890, 410. Entreaty to Bituitus, Appian 111.

  6. Appian 113 says the triremes went to Sinope; Plutarch Pompey 42 says Amisus
. Cassius Dio 37.14. Was Metrophanes one of the men responsible for Aquillius’s capture?

  7. Plutarch Pompey 41; Josephus Jewish War 1.1.139. Høtje 2009b sums up the irritation and awkwardness in the situation. Thanksgiving to mark M’s death: Cicero Prov. cons. 27. Pompey’s campaigns in the Near East, Sherwin-White 1994.

  8. Egyptian embalmers removed the brain in sophisticated mummification techniques; Persians traditionally covered royal corpse with wax and placed in rock-cut tombs; Scythians also had embalming procedures. Herodotus 1.137–41, and 4.84–86, on length of voyage across Black Sea.

  9. Corpse delivered to Pompey: Cassius Dio 37.14; Appian 113. Quotes, Plutarch Pompey 42. Xvarnah, Widengren 1959, 246 and 251, 254. Reinach 1890, 412, suggested Gaius, an old schoolmate, identified the scars. Hyacinth plume, Xenophon Cyrus 6.4.2. Gaius gave the crown to Sulla’s son; the scabbard was stolen by Publius and sold to grandson of Ariobarzanes I of Cappadocia. Reinach 1890, 412 n3 and 298.

  10. Plutarch Pompey 42. Pausanias 3.23.3–5, Apollo caused M to kill himself as punishment for sacking Delos. Ancient attitudes toward suicide, see Seneca Ep. Morales 70. Balsdon 1979, 249–52: a calm, premeditated, dignified suicide, by poison or weapon, was approved to provide escape from incurable illness, disgrace, subjugation, or tyranny, oppressive political conditions that destroyed dignity and liberty. Suicide “an escape route from slavery,” a way to achieve freedom, eleutheria, 250. Symbolism of suicide by poison as “deliverance,” Goodkin 1986, 212. Many modern war criminals have used suicide to cheat justice, eg Adolf Hitler and his officers in 1945 and Serb leader Slobodan Milošević in 2006. Notably, in the wars against Middle Eastern enemies in the early 21st century, the US military considered suicides of prisoners of war a hostile act of “asymmetrical warfare.” Selsky and Loven 2006.

  11. Cassius Dio 37.13. Alexander showed great chivalry toward Darius, laying out the body in state, paying for funeral at Persepolis and burial in royal Persian sepulcher: Arrian Anabasis 3.22.1; Plutarch Fortune of Alexander. Høtje 2009b.

  12. Appian 113; Cassius Dio 37.14; Plutarch Pompey 42.2–3. Sinope became the new royal residence under Pharnaces I, but the tombs at Amasia were still used, according to Strabo 12.3.29 (a native of Amasia). Archaeological surveys at Sinope: Fleischer 2009. Arslan 2007 assumes Pompey oversaw burial at Sinope. Høtje 2009b reasonably concludes that Appian and Plutarch were wrong about Sinope, since the royal tombs of the Pontic kings were in Amasia, and Pompey and people of Pontus knew M’s ancestors were in Amasia’s rock-cut tombs.

  13. Valerius Maximus 4.6.2 (source Cornelius Nepos?). Eutropius 6.12. Reinach 1890, 297, 387. On unique relationship of M and Hypsicratea, see Konstan 2002, 16–17.

  14. Ford 2004, 332. Boccaccio, Des cleres et nobles femmes, ca 1450, f. 47v; and Jean Boccace, “Hipsicratee royne de ponce” illustration in Hypsikrateia et Mithridate le grand. Cavalli’s Pompeo Magno, 1666. French views of M, Flinois 1983; Snaith 2007. Inscription at Phanagoria: Bowersock 2008, 600–601, citing Plutarch Pompey 32; Valerius Maximus called her “queen.”

  15. Preceding events from Appian 116–17; Josephus Jewish War 1.6.6 and Jewish Antiquities 14.3; Lucan 2; Plutarch Pompey 44–45; Pliny 7.26. Beard 2007.

  16. Plutarch Pompey 42. Justin 37.1.6–9. Appian 112. Pliny 25.3.5. Velleius 2.18; Cicero Academica Priora 2.1. After the Mithradatic and Civil Wars, Rome’s taxation policies were more enlightened, and Rome “grew more receptive to eastern ideas,” Sacks 1990, 184.

  17. Appian 117. Hellenized “Iranian Alexander,” Rostovtzeff 1919, 95. Pompey was assassinated in Egypt by supporters of his enemy Julius Caesar, in 48 BC.

  18. Gaddis 2002; Ferguson 2000. For artistic alternative histories, se Summerer 2009. I thank Michelle Maskiell for suggesting an alternative historical narrative in which M survives; and Deborah Gordon, Ian Morris, and Josh Ober for valuable conversations about the following scenario.

  19. Racine 1965; see Goodkin 1986, 204–7; citing remarks of Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (1963) on M’s “elusive” and “double death,” the faked and the real. Mozart’s Mitridate of 1770, Sadie 1972 and “Mozart Mithridate,” L’Avant Scene Opera, special issue, July 1983, essays, photos, and libretto. Political, diplomatic, and emotional intrigues of M’s Pontic Kingdom held strong appeal for Racine and Louis XIV, at a time when armies of the Ottoman Empire of Turkey had marched into Europe (they would besiege Vienna in 1683). See Brèque 1983. McGing 1986, 166 n98. According to Herodotus 1.137, Persians “hold it utterly improbable that a son would ever murder his true father.”

  20. See Ch 6 for substitution of M’s son. M presumed dead while in youthful exile, while reconnoitering as king, when he leaped onto a pirate ship in a raging storm, and when he disappeared into the Caucasus. Ptolemy’s ruse, Aelian Historical Miscellany 12.64. “Faked celebrity death” conspiracies have fascinated since antiquity; there were postmortem sightings of Nero in the 1st century AD and of Alexander the Great in AD 221: Champlin 2003, 20–24, 235–37, on heroes and antiheroes who “die but return anyway,” eg King Arthur, Adolf Hitler, John Kennedy, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Saddam Hussein.

  21. Some consider counterfactuals mere nostalgia for “what might have been” unless they test causation claims. In this alternative outcome, we can show that, despite Pompey’s and Rome’s anxiety, the specific place and time of M’s death, whether in the tower or among the nomads a decade or so later, would not have changed the course of history (thanks to Ian Morris). See Bekker-Nielson 2004 on whether M’s life or death “mattered” in the long run.

  22. Appian 112. M pardoned, at the last minute, the Galatian Bepolitanus, believing he was innocent, Ch 10. M’s personality, see Olbrycht 2009 and Bekker-Neilsen 2004.

  23. Pharnaces’ revolt and bid to take back his father’s kingdom crushed at Zela, Pontus, 47 BC, by Julius Caesar. The victory was so overwhelming that Caesar reported the result with the celebrated phrase Veni, Vidi, Vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”). Cassius Dio 37.12–14; 42.7–9 and 42.45–48. Dynamis: Rostovtzeff 1919, esp 98–105, Eder and Renger 2007, 112.

  24. M’s relatives who took refuge among the nomads, Rostovtzeff 1919, 104.

  25. Achilles and Helen of Troy enjoyed a halcyon afterlife on the legendary White Isle, in the northern Black Sea. West 2003, 162–66.

  26. For this Northern European-Scandinavian legend, based on the 9th-century Norse Saga, see Younger Edda 1879, 229–30 and sources cited, esp Paul Henri Mallet’s influential Northern Antiquities (1756), which Gibbon read in 1770. Mallet and Scott 1847, 51. Henri de Tourville, in Histoire de la formation particularise (1903), proposed that the hero Odin was originally based on a historical Scythian chieftain allied with M, a far-traveling caravan leader and warrior, who brought Asian nomad culture to the north, from the city “Asgarda” on the Azov, after M’s death. Thanks to William Hansen for help in tracing this legend’s origins. For a novel based on this legend in the writings of Snorri Sturlason, see Anderson 1960, 275–82. Wordsworth, Prelude (1798–1850), lines 185–89.

  27. Ammianus Marcellinus 31.2. King 2004, 33–37. History of Bosporus after M’s and Pharnaces’ deaths, Rostovtzeff 1919.

  28. Long-lived Persian ancestors of M: Cyrus the Great said to have died at 100, Artaxerxes at 86 or 94, Mithradates I at 84, and Tigranes the Great at 85, according to Lucian Macrobii (Long Lives) 10–14.

  29. Numerous kurgans have been looted and excavated around the Sea of Asov and steppes of south Russia; many more are undiscovered. There is no evidence to support the rumor that Brigadier-General Sir Harry Paget Flashman (1822–1915) discovered the “true grave” of Mithradates in the Crimea in 1854–55.

  30. Hypsicrates: Strabo 7.4.6 and 11.5.1–4. Strabo coyly says Hypsicrates was “not unfamiliar” with Amazon customs of Caucasia—if my theory is correct, this was “the historian’s” homeland. Hypsicrates mentioned in Josephus Jewish Antiquities 14.8.3 (as historian of Julius Caesar’s campaigns); fragment in FGrH 190 F 3; Orosius 5.3.5; Lucian Macrobii (Long Lives) 22. Rostovtzeff 19
19, 103 and n28. Stern, Greek and Latin Authors 1.220; and Oxford Classical Dictionary sv (freed by Caesar when he took Amisus); Pauly-Wissowa sv. Did Hypsicrates give M’s antidote to Caesar’s doctor Aelius?

  31. Battling the tide of history: M “was an anachronism,” McGing 1986, 171. Racine (1673) 1965, act 3, scene 1, lines 929–34, my translation. These words are spoken to M by his sons before his death.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ANCIENT SOURCES

  Greek and Latin texts are available in translation in the Loeb Classical Library or online at www.perseus.tufts.edu, unless otherwise noted.

  Aelian, On Animals; Historical Miscellany

  Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman History

  Appian, Mithridatic Wars, bk. 12 of Roman History; Civil Wars; Syrian Wars

  Athenaeus, Learned Banquet

  Augustine, City of God

  Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights

  Cassius Dio, Roman History

  Celsus, On Medicine

  Cicero, Pro lege Manilia; Tuscan Disputations; De lege agraria contra Rullum; Pro Flacco; In Verrem; Academica Priora

  Diodorus of Sicily, Library of History

  Eutropius, Abridgement of Roman History, trans. J. S. Watson. London, 1853.

  Florus

  Frontinus, Stratagems

  Galen. C. G. Kühn, Galeni Opera Omnia. Leipzig: 1821–33, rpt. Hildesheim, 1965. G. Fichtner, Corpus Galenicum. Tubingen,1990. Selected works by Galen, trans. P. N. Singer. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006.

  Herodotus, Histories

  Josephus, Jewish Antiquities; Jewish War

  Justin, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, trans. John Yardley. Scholars Press, 1994.

  Juvenal

  Livy, History; Epitome; Periochae. Budé edition, 1984.