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

by Adrienne Mayor

The word “disaster” comes from the Latin for “dire star” or comet—comets were traditional harbingers of war or the violent overthrow of rulers.

most famous apocalyptic revelation was an ancient Iranian prophecy known as the Oracle of Hystaspes, a Persian-Babylonian sage. This oracle foretold the destruction of Rome by fire and sword and the coming of a savior-king from the East whose birth would be proclaimed by a brilliant light from heaven.

In Greco-Roman popular lore, a nonfatal lightning strike promised great distinction and fame. Similar beliefs held in the East too. According to the writings of the Magi (Persian Zoroastrian priest-astronomers), the savior-king was to be distinguished by a special mark on his body. The Magi in his father’s palace saw Mithradates’ lightning scar as a sign of divine approval; the diadem shape meant the gods had “crowned” him at birth.

Cleopatra, her husband, and her father were all direct descendants of Alexander’s best friend and general, Ptolemy. When Alexander died in 323 BC in Babylon, Ptolemy hijacked the corpse—and presumably his cloak—to Egypt, in order to support his claim to be Alexander’s successor. Cleopatra’s husband may well have inherited this precious relic from his Macedonian ancestors.20

In ancient Persian court rituals, the robe or khilat of a venerated person or ruler was thought to transmit the owner’s personal qualities and authority.

Folklorists have a word to describe the way real-life actions can be guided by legends: ostension. Ostension explains how widely known myths and legends sometimes shape ordinary people’s behavior patterns, leading them to enact or perform certain elements from mythic narratives, thereby translating fiction into fact.

Events inspire stories and stories influence events.

Mithradates was not introduced to his father until he was five years old (a Persian custom intended to protect the king from grief should his son die in infancy).

rhododendron nectar.

Shared experiences at Comana strengthened the bond between Mithradates and his friend Dorylaus. At some point, Mithradates promised Dorylaus that as soon as he regained control of his kingdom, he would appoint him high priest of the Temple of Love. RUSTIC LESSONS

The most prized Indian poison was the mysterious dikairon, said to be excreted by a tiny orange “bird” that nested in the Himalayas. A few grains of dikairon, it was said, would bring a dreamy death in a few hours, ideal for suicide. I have suggested elsewhere that dikairon might have been pederin, exuded by large orange blister beetles of Asia, often found in bird nests. It is one of the most powerful biotoxins known to modern science, more potent than cobra venom. According to Aelian, this precious substance was “given exclusively by the kings of India to the kings of Persia.” Mithradates may have acquired some for his own pharmacy.7

Athenians! We must not bear this state of anarchy any longer, imposed by the Roman Senate while it controls our government. The Romans have closed our temples and let our schools fall to dust. Our theaters are off limits and our courts of justice and schools of philosophy are silenced. They have even taken the Pnyx, our sacred place of Assembly, away from the people!

Sacred treasures from Rome’s temples had already been sold to finance Sulla’s war chest for the Mithradatic War. After Mithradates’ victories in Anatolia and Greece, his influence was gaining momentum; he had promised to aid the Italian insurgents. Rome’s power in the East would be lost forever if Sulla failed to defeat Mithradates. A decisive triumph over the Republic’s deadliest threat since Hannibal would elevate Sulla’s status from civil warrior to heroic conqueror.

The once great, now ghostly city-states of Sparta and Thebes set aside their ancient rivalry with Athens and joined the Pontic Alliance, anticipating the arrival of Mithradates’ liberation army.

The armies met at Chaeronea, the broad plain surrounded by rocky hills that controlled the route between northern and southern Greece. So many battles had been fought at Chaeronea that the plain was known as the “dancing ground of Ares,” god of war. This was the same battleground where Alexander’s father, Philip, had defeated the Greeks in 338 BC.

Sulla returned to Italy with forty thousand men, many of them recruits from Macedonia and Thrace. Historian Barry Strauss speculates that one of these auxiliaries may have been Spartacus, a Thracian who, in ten years’ time, would become the gladiator who led the great slave revolt in Italy.20

His name is memorialized in the term mithridatism, the practice of systematically ingesting small doses of deadly substances to make oneself immune to them.

Recent scientific experiments show that nonfatal doses of snake venom can stimulate the immune response and allow humans to withstand up to ten times the amount of venom that would be fatal without inoculation.

Saint-John’s-wort, Hypericum, listed in many Mithridatium recipes, might help solve the ancient riddle of Mithradates’ immunity to poisons. Molecular scientists have recently discovered Hypericum’s astounding antidote effect. This herb activates the liver to produce a potent enzyme that can neutralize literally thousands of potentially dangerous chemicals. The scientists suggest that if Saint-John’s-wort was included in Mithradates’ antidote, it would have stimulated a powerful “chemical surveillance system” on “high alert,” able to sense and break down “otherwise deadly doses” of many different toxins.14

The Poison King’s universal antidote became the most popular and longest-lived prescription in history, available in Rome as recently as 1984.21

Mithradates and his best friends surely owned “poison cups,” chalices of electrum, a gold and silver alloy. A goblet of electrum revealed the presence of poison when iridescent colors rippled across the metallic surface with a crackling sound, apparently the result of a chemical reaction.

Mithradates’ dazzling memory and facility with languages were legendary in his own time (and a book in several languages is still called a “mithridates”). The king was naturally endowed with these gifts from childhood. But he may also have benefited from special memory techniques taught by the leading philosopher in his court, Metrodorus the Roman Hater.

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.

In the pantheon of Rome’s three most dangerous enemies, Spartacus stood alongside Hannibal and Mithradates.

Italian historian Attilio Mastrocinque proposes an intriguing theory. Could the Globe of Billarus be the mysterious Antikythera device, the oldest complex scientific instrument ever discovered? This intricate, gear-driven bronze mechanism—the world’s first computer—was recovered in 1901 by sponge divers from a Roman shipwreck near Antikythera, an island north of Crete. The three-hundred-ton ship sank between 70 and 60 BC on the way to Italy, crammed with plunder from the Third Mithradatic War. The divers also brought up superb marble and bronze statues, jewelry, datable coins, and an ornate bronze throne—all treasures looted from defeated Anatolian cities allied with Mithradates, perhaps including Sinope. The strange bronze instrument apparently belonged to Mithradates or someone in his circle.

In 66 BC, however, the poison honey would be deployed as a deliberate biological weapon against the Roman invaders, ignorant of Xenophon’s experience. The Turret-Folk placed tempting honeycombs along Pompey’s route. Mithradates had recently passed through their territory, ahead of Pompey. Were the Turret-Folk

Folk following Mithradates’ suggestion? That is unknown, but the ploy certainly would have pleased the Poison King, and it was a great success. Pompey’s advance cohorts stopped to enjoy the treat. Struck dumb and blind, wracked by violent vomiting and diarrhea, they lay paralyzed along the roadside. The Turret-Folk descended with their iron battle-axes. When Pompey arrived on the scene, a black cloud of flies buzzed over a thousand legionnaires sprawled on the road, sticky with honey and blood.1

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.

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.”

In the oft-repeated legend—heavy with irony and recounted in nearly every ancient version of Mithradates’ death—the king who had made himself invulnerable to poisoning by ingesting infinitesimal doses of poisons all his life, was in the end unable to poison himself.

“I—the absolute monarch of so great a kingdom—am now unable to die by poison because I foolishly used other drugs as antidotes. Although I have kept watch and guarded against all poisons, I neglected to take precautions against that most deadly of all poisons, which lurks in every king’s household, the faithlessness of army, friends, and children.”

Her “extraordinary fidelity was Mithradates’ greatest solace and comfort in the most bitter and difficult conditions, for he considered that he was ‘at home’ even when wandering in defeat, because she was in exile with him.”

And after four decades of conflict, a certain admiration and awe surrounded this king who eclipsed all other kings, a noble ruler who had reigned fifty-seven years, who had subdued the barbarians, who took over Asia and Greece, and who resisted Rome’s greatest commanders and shrugged off what should have been crushing defeats; a warrior who never gave up but renewed his struggle again and again, and then—against all odds—had died an old man by his own choice, in the kingdom of his fathers.

An obscure will-o’-the-wisp legend, mentioned by Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), even gives Mithradates his final revenge. I have traced this tradition back to medieval Norse saga, in which a barbarian tribe from the Sea of Azov, allied with Mithradates, carried on his dream of one day invading Italy. Led by their chieftain Odin, this tribe was said to have escaped Roman rule after Pompey’s victory, by migrating to northern Europe and Scandinavia. They became the Goths, who, still inspired by Mithradates’ old struggle, avenged his defeat by overwhelming the Roman Empire. In the vision of the poet William Wordsworth, this old tale tells How vanquished Mithridates, northward passed, And, hidden in the cloud of years, became Odin, the Father of a Race by whom Perished the Roman Empire. . . .26

Hypsicrates’ works have not survived, but they were quoted by other historians. Strabo of Pontus cited Hypsicrates as an authority on two highly significant topics: the military fortifications of the Bosporan Kingdom, and the lifestyle and customs of the Amazons of the Caucasus region.

In his relentless resistance to Rome, Mithradates, the savior born under an Eastern star, represented a genuine alternative to Roman imperialism in the turbulent last days of the Republic. Some sixty years after Mithradates’ death, another savior and champion of Truth and Light was born under a different Eastern star. In the turn of the millennium, in the new world that emerged from Mithradates’ armed resistance and the Republic’s military response, that new King of Kings would challenge and eventually win over the mighty Roman Empire, but not by force of arms.

Take charge. Let us, following your name, Live up to being your sons everywhere we go. Set dusk and dawn on fire by your hands; Fill the universe without ever leaving the Bosporus; May the Romans, hard pressed from one end of the world to the other, Be unsure where you will be, and find you everywhere.