Mithridates VI

For a quarter of a century the king of Pontus, a realm on the southern shore of the Black Sea, was the most stubborn enemy the Roman Republic faced in the east. Mithridates VI ruled from 120 to 63 BCE, fought three wars against Rome, ordered the killing of tens of thousands of Romans and Italians in Asia Minor, and became a legend for his supposed immunity to poison.

Mithridates was born around 135 BCE at Sinope, in what is now northern Turkey. His family was of mixed Persian and Greek descent, and he claimed Cyrus the Great and Darius among his ancestors on his father's side and Seleucus I among the Macedonian generals on his mother's. When his father, Mithridates V, was poisoned at a banquet around 120 BCE, power passed to his mother as regent, who favoured his younger brother. According to later tradition, the young prince fled and spent years in hiding, hardening himself and taking small doses of poison to build up resistance. Between 116 and 113 BCE he returned, was acclaimed king, and imprisoned his mother and brother; his mother died in prison, and his brother either died there or was executed.

Mithridates set out to make Pontus the leading power around the Black Sea. He brought Colchis, in present-day Georgia, under his rule, and the Greek cities of Crimea, threatened by the Scythians, accepted his protection; his generals then forced the Scythians themselves to submit. In Asia Minor he divided Paphlagonia and Galatia with Nicomedes III of Bithynia, but a quarrel over Cappadocia brought Roman intervention against him in the 90s BCE. He also allied with Tigranes the Great of Armenia, who married one of his daughters.

In 89 BCE, urged on by Roman officials, Nicomedes IV of Bithynia invaded Pontus. Rome was then tied up with the Social War in Italy, and Mithridates routed the invaders and overran the Roman province of Asia. In 88 BCE he ordered the killing of Roman and Italian residents in the cities of Asia Minor, an event known as the Asiatic Vespers; ancient sources put the dead as high as 80,000. Presenting himself as the liberator of the Greeks, he won over Athens and much of mainland Greece. Sulla drove his armies out of Greece in the First Mithridatic War (89 to 85 BCE), but, needing to return to Rome to fight his rivals, granted a lenient peace. A Roman commander's attack on Pontus in 83 BCE began a brief second war, which Mithridates won.

The third and longest war began in 73 BCE, when Rome claimed Bithynia under the will of its last king and Mithridates invaded. Lucullus defeated him at Cabira in 72 BCE and drove him to Armenia. Mithridates came back in 67 BCE and killed some 7,000 Romans at Zela, but in 66 BCE Pompey routed him at the Lycus. He escaped across the Caucasus to Crimea, had his son Machares killed, took over the Bosporan kingdom and planned a new war, reportedly even an invasion of Italy by way of the Danube.

His demands on his subjects turned them against him, and in 63 BCE his son Pharnaces rebelled. Trapped in the citadel of Panticapaeum, modern Kerch, Mithridates killed himself. Appian says the poison he took failed because of his long immunity and that he had a Gallic officer, Bituitus, kill him with a sword; Cassius Dio says soldiers sent against Pharnaces finished him off. Pompey had the body buried among his ancestors in Pontus, which became Roman territory.

Ancient writers said he could speak the languages of all the peoples he ruled, twenty-two by Pliny's count. His reputed antidote, mithridate, became a famous remedy in European and Islamic medicine for centuries, and his life inspired plays and operas, including Racine's Mithridate and the young Mozart's Mitridate, re di Ponto.

Our 100 BCE map shows the Black Sea world early in his reign, with the expanding Roman Republic to the west and the Parthian Empire to the east; the 1 BCE map shows the region after Rome had absorbed Pontus.