Only a handful of enemy generals gave the Roman legions fits over multiple campaign seasons: Hannibal Barca (d. 183 BC), Vercingetorix (d. 46 BC), and Mithridates IV of Pontus (d. 63 BC). Mithridates is the least well known of this triumvirate today, but he resisted Rome the longest, almost thirty years, challenging imperial authority in a series of so-called Mithridatic Wars. Adrienne Mayor, research scholar in classics at Stanford University, brings the life and times of this legendary general to a modern audience in The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithridates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (2010).
Nearly fifty ancient texts provide context and details to Mithridates’s life, but virtually all of them are Roman sources, most notably Appian, Cassius Dio, and Plutarch’s Lives of Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey. Nowhere do we get Mithridates’s side of the story. He was born in 135 BC in Sinope, the capital city of Pontus on the southern shores of the Black Sea. A magnificent comet appeared in the sky in the year of his birth. It was interpreted as an omen, a sign of hope. Mayor writes that Mithridates receives a perfect score of 23 on the mythic hero index (by comparison Buddha, Joan of Arc, and Robin Hood score 13 to 16; even Jesus and Mohammed score under 20). And he certainly was impressive. Mithridates was eventually one of the richest men in history — richer than Kings Midas and Croesus combined, according to the author — spoke a dozen languages fluently (a book in several languages is still called a “mithridates”), and was virtually impervious to poison thanks to a daily regimen of micro-dosing arsenic and other highly toxic substances.
Mithridates claimed descent from Cyrus and Darius and vigorously pursued Alexander’s vision of Greco-Persian cultural fusion. Unlike his father, however, he would not be an official Friend of Rome. Mithridates became king in 119 BC, when he was just fourteen years old. His mother, Queen Laodice, initially served as regent, though she was said to favor Mithridates’s younger brother for the throne. The adolescent king fled Sinope and spent the next five years roaming Anatolia with his childhood friend Dorylaus, a confidant and future lieutenant who occupied a place in Mithridates’s life reminiscent of Hephaestion in Alexander’s.
Mithridates returned to his capital in 115 BC, overthrew his mother in a bloodless coup, and married his sister, whom he would later execute for adultery. He quickly tripled the size of the Kingdom of Pontus and began forging a foreign policy that asserted his independence from the hated Rome; “a brash, uncivilized newcomer,” in Mithridates’s estimation, “dangerous and powerful, but with an impoverished cultural history.” The Romans, for their part, regarded the peoples of Anatolia as inferior, even as they coveted their homeland as a kind of El Dorado, rich in gold and natural resources. That combination of contempt and avarice made Anatolia an inviting target for Rome’s increasingly systematic practices of enslavement, extraction, and imperial exploitation.
In 133 BC, Rome inherited the territory of Phrygia in central Anatolia through the dubious last will and testament of King Attalus. Mayor argues that this sudden and unexpected expansion of Roman power deep into the Anatolian plateau was the proximate cause of the Mithridatic Wars. To Mithridates, accommodation with Rome increasingly appeared impossible. The fate of Jugurtha in North Africa offered a stark warning of what awaited even nominal “friends of Rome” if they lacked the strength to resist Roman domination.
Mayor says that the young Mithridates possessed a bold vision for his Kingdom of Pontus and beyond. He planned to consolidate control over the Black Sea and the Anatolian peninsula. “The idea,” Mayor writes, “was to secure a co-prosperity trade zone and tax it fairly … Mithridates’s farsighted vision offered a positive alternative to Rome’s rapacious greed and violent resource extraction in its early period of conquest.” In short, instead of continual war and economic dislocation, Mithridates promised peace and prosperity.
Mayor stresses that Mithridates was inspired by Alexander the Great and sought to replicate his vision of a new and diverse Greco-Asian empire that was powerful enough to resist the encroachment and exploitation of the Roman legions. Debt was considered a morally deplorable condition in the Persian-dominated culture of Anatolia, which helps to explain why the Romans were so vehemently detested. “For a savior-prince predestined for mythic glory,” Mayor says, “there was only one honorable path” for the young Ponitc king to pursue and that was to confront Rome head-on.
Mithridates would face half a dozen Roman commanders before his final defeat. The first was Manius Aquillius, who invaded Pontus with two legions, without senatorial authorization, in 89 BC. According to Appian, Mithridates was waiting with an army of some 250,000 infantry and cavalry. He crushed the combined Roman and allied forces, and Aquillius was captured and publicly executed by having molten gold poured down his throat, a gruesomely symbolic punishment for Roman avarice.
Mithridates quickly consolidated his victory through a series of shrewd political measures. He relieved public and private debts, canceled loans owed to Roman creditors, and suspended tax collection for five years. The First Mithridatic War (89–85 BC) was an extraordinary initial success, aided by the political turmoil engulfing Rome itself. “In less than a year [Mithridates] had gone from a minor king of a rich little realm on the Black Sea to one of the most powerful rulers in the ancient world,” Mayor writes. He accomplished this through a potent combination of military victory and astute political leadership, presenting himself not merely as a conqueror but as a liberator from Roman exploitation. As Mayor argues, Mithridates “offered a real alternative to Rome’s oppressive administration.”
To consolidate his control over Anatolia, Mithridates orchestrated a coordinated massacre of Roman men, women, and children throughout the region. An estimated 80,000 civilians were killed in what Mayor describes as “the most horrendous and the most successful single act of terror in ancient history.” She goes so far as to call it “the Roman 9/11.” Another 20,000 Romans were subsequently massacred on the Roman-controlled Greek island of Delos. Rome’s response was formidable: five legions under the command of one of the Republic’s most fearsome generals, Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
Mithridates’s next objective was the liberation of Rhodes and Greece from Roman domination. He failed to capture Rhodes but succeeded in landing an occupying force of some 120,000 men in Greece. Athens rallied to the self-proclaimed savior-king and declared war on Rome. Sulla responded by laying siege to Athens, eventually storming the city in 86 BC and executing Aristion, its last democratically elected leader.
Sulla then turned against the main Mithridatic army. Despite being vastly outnumbered, his battle-hardened legions shattered Mithridates’s forces at Chaeronea, “one of the greatest battles in ancient history,” according to Mayor, and followed that victory with another at Orchomenus. “Sulla’s tactical skills and amazing personal power over his troops were factors in the spectacular upsets in Boeotia (Chaeronea and Orchomenus); his battle-hardened legions’ loyalty and courage constituted another.” Yet Mayor argues that the crushing defeat in Greece ultimately became Mithridates’s Tet Offensive—a disastrous military campaign that nevertheless yielded a significant political and propaganda victory. Mithridates had survived Rome’s counterattack, while Sulla faced an increasingly dangerous crisis at home: back in Rome, Marius and Cinna were systematically liquidating his supporters.
Mithridates still commanded an army of some 80,000 men and was now fighting on home ground, but he was reeling from the brutal efficiency and professionalism of Sulla’s legions. The King of Pontus also recognized Sulla’s keen desire to return to Rome, celebrate his triumph — Pliny the Elder claims that he paraded 115,000 pounds of silver and 15,000 pounds of gold — and settle his domestic political scores. The result was the Treaty of Dardanus, signed in 85 BC, which ended the First Mithridatic War. Its terms were surprisingly lenient: Mithridates agreed to pay a relatively modest indemnity of 2,000 talents and surrender seventy fully equipped warships in exchange for a general amnesty and the restoration of territorial possessions to the status quo ante bellum.
Sulla, however, almost immediately violated the spirit of the settlement. He imposed a staggering fine of 20,000 talents on the inhabitants of the Roman province of Asia as punishment for supporting Mithridates, ten times the indemnity imposed on Mithridates himself. According to Mayor, the proceeds flowed directly into Sulla’s personal coffers.
The Second Mithridatic War (83–81 BC) was essentially a continuation of the first. Despite suffering staggering battlefield defeats, Mithridates refused to abandon his dream of consolidating political, economic, and military control over the Black Sea, the Anatolian plateau, and both shores of the Aegean. At this stage, Rome remained open to an accommodation with Mithridates, provided that he relinquished his expansionist ambitions and retreated into his Pontic homeland.
The Third and final Mithridatic War (76–63 BC) grew out of the alliance between Mithridates and Sertorius, a Roman general and ally of Marius who had established himself in Spain after becoming disillusioned with the greed and brutality of Roman imperial rule. “Without ever meeting,” Mayor writes, “they had recognized their similar spirits and common interests.” Sertorius would be assassinated at a dinner party in 73 BC while waging war against Pompey in Spain.
Undeterred by his earlier defeats, Mithridates raised yet another army, this time a colossal force of 140,000 infantry, 16,000 cavalry, and 400 ships, according to Appian. Lucius Licinius Lucullus, a protégé of Sulla, was elected consul in 74 BC and dispatched to Anatolia with five legions, roughly 30,000 men, to defeat Mithridates once and for all. At the siege of Cyzicus in 72 BC, Lucullus turned the tables on his vastly larger opponent, and his legions proceeded to dismantle the Mithridatic army even more decisively than Sulla had done in Greece. Plutarch claims that although Mithridates himself escaped, some 300,000 soldiers and camp followers were killed or captured. Lucullus, understandably but prematurely, declared victory.Mithridates retreated across Anatolia and then into Armenia, where he allied himself with the powerful King Tigranes and his massive polyglot army, a quarter-million-man force that the author derisively labels a “ponderous juggernaut.” Lucullus pursued at the head of an increasingly exhausted and surly army. Mithridates eschewed direct engagement with the invincible legions and instead relied on an asymmetrical strategy of feints, ambushes, withdrawal, and delay. When the armies met head-to-head at Tigranocerta in 69 BC, Lucullus and his relatively tiny band of hardened legionnaires crushed Tigranes’s massive force in a “battle like no other,” according to the author. “Never had the Romans been so outnumbered,” she says, “and never had they won so decisively against overwhelming odds.”
Lucullus’s triumph may ultimately have proved Pyrrhic, for his exhausted army was approaching mutiny. His soldiers had simply had enough. In 67 BC, the hitherto unbeaten Roman legions sat down and refused to march any farther. Mithridates, meanwhile, came surging back phoenix-like and defeated the Romans at Zela, killing twenty-four tribunes and 150 centurions in the process, the largest number of officers ever killed in an ancient battle, according to Mayor.
Lucullus was recalled in 66 BC, although he was eventually permitted to celebrate a triumph in Rome, where he paraded sixty of Mithridates’s captured generals and advisers along with 2.5 million silver coins. He then used the immense profits of his campaigns to retire into a life of legendary extravagance. His reputation for lavish entertaining and sumptuous cuisine proved so enduring that “Lucullan” survives today as a synonym for extreme luxury, particularly in food and dining.
Mithridates’s final foe was Pompey the Great. Another protégé of Sulla, Pompey was ruthless, methodical, and extraordinarily efficient. He pursued Mithridates across Anatolia and into Colchis in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Mithridates fled across the Caucasus Mountains — a feat Mayor considers even more impressive than Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps — and continued northward.
Even then, the aging king refused to concede defeat. In a final burst of grandiosity, he proposed leading his dwindling band of warriors around the Black Sea, through what is now Eastern Europe, and then descending upon Italy to attack Rome itself, retracing on an even grander scale the path Hannibal had taken nearly 150 years earlier. The scheme came to nothing. By 63 BC, trapped in his palace at Pantikapaion and confronting the hopelessness of his position, Mithridates attempted suicide by poison. His lifelong theriac made him invulnerable. He had to ask a bodyguard to slay him. For centuries many believed that he faked his death.
Mithridates had reigned for fifty-seven years and spent nearly three decades defying the most powerful state in the Mediterranean world. Cicero called him the greatest king since Alexander, while Plutarch likened his death to the destruction of ten thousand enemies in a single blow. His importance in Roman history extended far beyond the Kingdom of Pontus. The Mithridatic Wars exposed both the extraordinary military resilience of Rome and the rapacity of its imperial administration, while providing the stage upon which three of the late Republic’s most formidable commanders — Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey — built their reputations, fortunes, and political power. In this sense, Mithridates was not merely an enemy of Rome but a significant figure in the transformation of the Republic itself. The enormous armies, personal commands, accumulated wealth, and political prestige generated by the eastern wars strengthened precisely the kind of military strongmen who would eventually destroy the republican political order.
Mithridates also represented one of the last serious attempts to construct an independent Hellenistic power capable of resisting Roman domination in the eastern Mediterranean. Drawing consciously upon the legacy of Alexander, he fashioned himself as both a Greco-Persian monarch and a liberator of peoples subjected to Roman taxation, debt, and exploitation. His ultimate defeat helped clear the way for Roman supremacy across Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean and for Pompey’s sweeping reorganization of the East. Yet Rome defeated Mithridates only after more than two decades of warfare, repeated military disasters, and the efforts of some of the greatest commanders the Republic ever produced. His career therefore serves as a reminder that Rome’s eventual mastery of the Mediterranean was not preordained; it was violently contested and, at moments, remarkably uncertain.
Mithridates achieved an equally extraordinary afterlife. “It was his mastery of poisons and his long life that made Mithridates a household word in Western literature and popular culture,” Mayor writes. The universal antidote associated with him — mithridatium — was embraced by later Romans and evolved into one of the most enduring medicinal preparations in Western history. His legend likewise inspired generations of European artists: Racine dramatized his life in 1673, followed by Scarlatti in 1707 and Mozart in 1770, while poets including Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Joyce returned to his story centuries after his death. Rome ultimately destroyed Mithridates’s kingdom, but it never quite succeeded in destroying Mithridates. The king who had spent his life cultivating immunity to poison proved, in a different sense, remarkably immune to oblivion.
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