Chapter 11
When victorious, Mithridates was inclined to show the vindictiveness of many a Hellenistic monarch. When in difficulty he was vicious, and because of this he had alienated potential or existing allies when he was young. But when defeated, he was magnificent. In the past, the king’s response to resounding defeats had been to pick up the pieces, retreat and attempt to gather his strength, all the while continuing to hurt his enemy with all the means still at his disposal. He did not fall into despair, or look for scapegoats. Still, after Dasteria he must have known that this defeat would be very hard to come back from.
Of the hundreds of thousands he had once had at his command, he now commanded a troop of mercenary horse and about 3,000 infantry who had escaped the disaster. Believing the Romans to be hot on his trail, Mithridates led this little force directly for the fortress of Sinora, which was situated right against the Armenian border. Plutarch romantically describes their flight thus:
one by one his followers fell away until he was left with three companions, including his concubine. She was an excellent horsewoman, dressing and riding in the Persian style, which prompted the king to nickname her Hypiscrates [‘horsemaster’]. She, with a manly and daring spirit, accompanied the king on his flight, never tiring and never failing to attend to him even after the longest journey.
However, Plutarch contradicts himself and falls into line with other historians when he says that at Sinora he opened the treasury there and discharged his men, rewarding those who had stayed with him thus far with cash and rich clothing. Those who wanted to avoid falling into Roman hands at all costs were also given deadly poisons from the king’s personal repertoire. Mithridates’ original intention was apparently to return once again to the sanctuary of Armenia, but the beleaguered Tigranes was having none of it. Suspecting Mithridates of conspiring with his rebellious son, the Armenian king let it be known that there was a huge 100-talent bounty on Mithridates’ head.2 Tigranes suspicion may not have been unfounded, since the rebel son was, after all, Mithridates’ grandson.
With Armenia ruled out, there remained a final, desperate option. The Bosporan kingdom under Menchares had early thrown in its lot with the Romans, but it had never formally renounced its allegiance to Mithridates. Mithridates therefore decided to stake his life that this formal allegiance continued because there remained a hard core of support for his rule there. Of course, before Mithridates could stake his life on this belief, he had still to reach the Bosporus alive. The Romans were now masters of the Black Sea, and the peoples of Colchis, on the land route through which Mithridates and his handful of followers had to pass, were not particularly welcoming. They had suffered under invading Pontic armies in the past, and were equally worried about Mithridates drawing the pursuing Romans after him into their lands.
This is precisely what happened, but not immediately. For a start, it may have been that the Dasteria campaign was harder than the Roman sources let on, for after beating Mithridates, Pompey went on to populate a city which he founded nearby with his sick, wounded and discharged veterans. The city was called Nicopolis in commemoration of the victory at Dasteria (Nike being the goddess of victory).3 This victory had made Pompey master of most of the Middle East, and, with his genius for organization, he immediately set about tidying the place up. Under pressure from the Parthians, and with the threat of the Romans joining in against him, Tigranes realized that he had no alternative but to throw himself on Pompey’s mercy. Once his ambassadors had conveyed the assurances of Pompey that such mercy would be forthcoming, he literally knelt at the conqueror’s feet.
Apart from administrative issues, one of the problems with pursuing Mithridates was that no-one was yet sure where he had gone. The fugitive king seemed almost literally to have dropped off the face of the known world. All that Pompey could do was set a watch on the Black Sea ports, make diligent enquiries and wait for his enemy to resurface. He reportedly whiled away some of his time reading Mithridates’ mail, as he had captured the royal correspondence along with those castles which were gradually accepting the inevitable and changing their allegiance.
Once such castle, Symphorium, was handed over by Stratonice, a wife of Mithridates who was irked that the king had left her without even the protection of a garrison. Stratonice had been the subject of a royal wooing whilst the king was at the height of his power. Her father, a musician, had sung with her at a banquet, and had afterwards been dismissed by the king without a word. But the next morning, he was awakened by servants stocking his tables with gold and silver plate and his cupboards with fine clothing, whilst a top quality horse was brought up for him outside. Mithridates, it appeared, was taken with his daughter, and would like to wed her. The riches being bestowed on him were those of a local notable who had ‘died suddenly’. Father and daughter took the hint and the fortune which Mithridates offered. The fortune of Stratonice – in terms of both luck and money - outlasted that of her royal husband, for whilst Mithridates fled into the wilds of Scythia, Stratonice was confirmed in her current possessions.
Pompey let on what he had been reading about Mithridates. No doubt for propaganda purposes, he let slip that Mithridates had poisoned a son he believed was getting too popular, and a famous horseman from Sardis who had been impertinent enough to beat the king in a race. He also released the saucy correspondence between Mithridates and one of his concubines, and it is probably from the same source that later Roman writers claim their knowledge of the king’s pharmacological research into poisons and countermeasures.
Regaining a kingdom
While Pompey was settling the affairs of Pontus and combining it with Bithynia to form a single administrative unit, Mithridates was adding to his reputation. The land to the northeast of the Black Sea was as little known to the peoples of the Mediterranean as darkest Africa was to the Victorians, and it enjoyed much the same reputation. Yet even here Mithridates was something of a living legend. ‘He pushed on through strange and warlike Scythian tribes’, reports Appian, ‘sometimes by permission, sometimes by force, so respected and feared was he, though a fugitive in his misfortune.’ He wintered in Colchis during 66 BC and pushed on around the sea of Asov in the following year, apparently not only gaining secure passage from the local princes, but even securing the allegiance of some. We get further detail from Strabo, and though many of the peoples mentioned have passed from history, some of the epic flavour of the journey is conveyed by their names.
The Heniochi had four kings at the time that Mithridates Eupator fled from the country of his ancestors to the Bosporus, and passed through their country, which was open to him, but he avoided that of the Zygi on account of its ruggedness, and the savage character of the people. He proceeded with difficulty along the sea-coast, frequently embarking in vessels, till he came to the country of the Achaei, by whom he was hospitably received. He had then completed a journey from the Phasis of not much less than 4,000 stadia (390 miles).
No doubt Mithridates promised them those lands and titles which were about to become vacant when he got his vindictive hands on his son’s kingdom and began settling accounts. Not all his family had died or gone over to the Romans, for we hear of several daughters in Mithridates’ entourage. Some of these were married to Scythian kings to secure their allegiance. The journey through the wilderness was not without cost. Mithridates was no longer a young man, and his constitution was irreparably damaged by the privations of the trip. He also developed a set of ulcers on his face which never fully healed.
In the spring of 65 BC Pompey set off in leisurely pursuit of Mithridates. It is uncertain whether he actually thought that this would amount to much, but it also gave him the excuse to do as Caesar was later to do in Britain and gain the kudos of having led his armies beyond the confines of the known world. Pompey rather liked the idea of being known as the Roman Alexander, and if earning this title meant taking his men far to the east as Alexander had done, then the pursuit of Mithridates provided a decent excuse.
He clashed with the Iberians, a people who lived in the area of modern Georgia, and after defeating them he proceeded up the Black Sea coast, keeping contact with the fleet which accompanied him. On discovering that circling the Black Sea on foot was not easy due to the mountainous country past the Phasis estuary, Pompey turned inland and fought several brisk battles with the peoples of the interior. According to the later writer, Pliny, Pompey had interested himself in the trade routes of the Silk Road which looped south of the Caspian Sea thereabouts, and which was, as mentioned, one of the possible sources of Pontic wealth.5 Certainly Pompey was keen to bring his army to the shores of the Caspian Sea, though whether he succeeded in this is doubtful. Plutarch is probably right to assert that his men, suffering from dysentery, and apparently astounded by the number of venomous snakes in the region, began to complain. Pompey, mindful of the fate of Lucullus, heeded the early warning and took his army to the more salubrious climes of northern Armenia, where Mithridates had left several juicy castles stuffed with treasure.
This was as close as Pompey came in his pursuit of Mithridates, whom the Roman commander probably suspected was by now either a captive of the Scythians, who would hand him over in due course, or a set of bones mouldering in an unmarked grave somewhere on the steppes. The Caucasus wilderness could be safely exchanged for the wonders of Palestine, Syria and the Red Sea.
At almost the same time, news reached Menchares that his father was alive and, if not in full health, at least well enough to descend on the Bosporan kingdom like an avenging thunderbolt. The tidings caused considerable alarm and despondency in the royal court, not least because Mithridates had done his reputation no harm by arriving via the ‘Scythian Gates’, from wild country which no-one was known to have traversed before. At his back was a horde of Scythians, whilst at Menchares’ back was a horde of courtiers who were hastily reconsidering their allegiance. Politically, Menchares was wrong-footed from the start. As soon as his father had reached the Taman Peninsula and his whereabouts were known with certainty, Menchares sent a stream of messengers to protest his unflinching loyalty and argue that the Romans had given him no choice but to act as he had done in the recent past.
It is significant that Menchares seems not for a moment to have contemplated military action, which suggests again that there was considerable support for Mithridates in the Bosporan kingdom. Mithridates crossed to Panticapaeum and there put to death another of his sons, Xiphares.6 The fault of this lad was apparently no more than that he was also a child of Stratonice, and Mithridates was deeply annoyed that his wife had docilely handed his treasure over to Pompey. One of the conditions of that handover had been that Xiphares should be spared if Pompey caught him.
Menchares, meanwhile, had understood that his father was not in the mood for reasoned discussion and fled to the Pontic Chersonese, burning his ships to prevent pursuit. Mithridates followed inexorably in a makeshift fleet. Once he landed the game was up for his son, who either committed suicide or was preempted in his death by those with a pressing need to gain the old king’s favour. Mithridates in victory surprised many by sparing the friends of his son, saying they had acted according to their position and loyalties. His grudge was with his own ‘friends’, whom he had sent to counsel his son on his behalf. He considered that these men had betrayed him, so he had them hunted down and imaginatively executed.
News of the re-emergence of the enemy he had been sent from Rome to fight failed to galvanize Pompey into action. By now he was set on establishing Roman rule firmly in the remnants of the Seleucid empire, ignoring a rather plaintive request from the last Seleucid emperor to be given back what Tigranes of Armenia had taken from him. Pompey’s only reaction to Mithridates’ re-establishing himself in the Bosporus was to send the fleet to blockade the Bosporan ports on the Black Sea, claiming that, like Lucullus, he would let famine do the fighting for him. This overlooked the fact that at Cyzicus Mithridates had the army of Lucullus across his food-supply lines, whereas blockading a grain-exporting country was hardly likely to cause widespread starvation. These facts were fairly clear to Pompey’s army, and they continued to make the point that they were meant to be fighting Mithridates even when they were far to the south campaigning around Petra. Even Cicero, generally an enthusiast for Pompey, commented that no-one would regard Roman possession of Asia Minor as secure until it was certain that Mithridates was not going to rise from defeat yet again.7
There was, however, a certain logic to Pompey’s actions. By blockading the ports open to Mithridates he prevented both the import of war materiel and the export of grain which could be used to turn a profit for the kingdom. At the same time, he had been given a sharp lesson in the difficulties of campaigning in the north. With support from sympathetic Scythian kings, Mithridates was quite capable of retreating deep into the hinterland where Pompey would find it difficult to follow and where Scythian horsemen would make life very difficult for foragers or supply convoys. Given that Mithridates was in his late sixties and in poor health, Pompey took the position that the Mithridatic issue would resolve itself in due course. Time was an enemy even more relentless than Rome.
The Grand Plan
Mithridates might indeed have considered it excusable to retire in the sanctuary he had won for himself and spend his last years in peace. Probably this was the gist of an embassy he sent to Pompey. With a certain degree of brazenness, his messengers announced that Mithridates was prepared to let bygones be bygones, and would even pay tribute to the Romans if he was allowed to return to ruling his ancestral kingdom of Pontus. Pompey appeared to take the offer at face value and replied that Mithridates had the same opportunity as Tigranes had been offered – he should make his submission in person, and trust to the mercy of the conqueror.
Against the example of Tigranes, Mithridates would have set the treatment offered to Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, who had been brought before Pompey in chains at the end of the civil wars of the 80s BC. He had received only the mercy of a summary execution - and if this was the treatment meted out to a former consul of Rome, then the killer of 80,000 Romans and Italians might well have reservations about an unconditional surrender. Furthermore, the king had an eye on how he would be viewed by posterity, and replied that such a surrender was unthinkable ‘as long as he was Mithridates’.8 However, sons (whom Mithridates generally considered expendable), or other ambassadors, were available to make the king’s submission on his behalf, should Pompey so require.
The degree of sincerity which both sides brought to the negotiating table was probably best illustrated by the fact that even as negotiations dragged on (Pompey was now in Syria), Pontus was being integrated into the Roman empire, and Mithridates was energetically preparing for war.
According to Appian, Mithridates had decided that as Pontus was in Roman hands, he no longer needed to defend his kingdom, and so might as well go to the source of the problem and invade Italy. For an old, sick, semi-refugee this was a breathtakingly audacious plan, but Mithridates always liked to think big. The man who had recently come through the trackless wilds of Scythia was hardly to be daunted by the thought of doing the same through the much better-charted tribes of the upper Danube, which, far from being an obstacle, Mithridates probably considered a potential recruiting ground.
Basically Operation Invade Italy would have run along something like the following lines. First an army was to be raised by the recruiting of freed slaves and mercenaries paid for by a heavy programme of taxation. At the same time, ambassadors would approach the tribes of the Danube basin with an eye to recruiting these men for a march through the eastern approaches to the Alps and from there a surprise descent into plunder-rich Italy. Mithridates calculated that the Italians would rise again if presented with a credible saviour. If Spartacus, an escaped slave, could rampage up and down the country for two years unchecked due to the support he had received from the Italian dispossessed, how much more eagerly would they support a man with credentials which included twenty years (and counting) of opposition to Rome, a king who was bringing his own army to the event?9
Buoyed by a wave of discontent with Rome, Mithridates and his Danubian allies would sweep down Italy, plundering all who resisted, and finally kill the Roman wolf in its lair. With Italy aflame, Spain would rise (it was already half-risen, with Rome’s garrisons there occupied with fierce Spanish guerrilla resistance), Africa would opt for the independence it had only recently lost, and the Macedonians would rebel for a final time. In short, the Roman empire would collapse like a house of cards.
The theory that Mithridates was contemplating such a plan is made more credible by the fact that he did not treat the Bosporan kingdom as a long-term base. His tax regime was fierce and unsustainable. Also he ordered the killing of plough-oxen for their sinews. This move had obvious economic implications for future crop yields, but Mithridates evidently regarded this as less important than that these sinews were one of the few elastic substances known in the ancient world (women’s hair was another) and important in building catapults for siege warfare. Significantly, neither Hannibal nor Spartacus had possessed the wherewithal to mount a serious siege of Rome.
Some modern historians are sceptical that the ‘grand plan’ was anything other than a Roman propaganda exercise. The logistic and financial difficulties were immense. Various routes between the Bosporus and Rome have been proposed by historians ancient and modern, but the most practical (or least impractical) was through Thrace, then across eastern Macedonia, and up the Danube valley to the Alps. Of course, this meant overcoming Roman resistance in Macedonia, presumably with the help of the Macedonian people, and giving the Romans due warning of his arrival. One of the alternatives involved a huge loop which brushes the borders of modern Ukraine, and would certainly have killed off the ageing king if his army did not mutiny first, and even Mithridates must have ruled such an odyssey out of consideration.10
The End
The army was already more than somewhat unhappy, as Mithridates was now 68 years old and increasingly unwell. Access to the royal person was limited to three eunuchs, who, it was rumoured, were enriching themselves by making the exactions of Mithridates’ tax men even more ferocious than necessary. On the other hand, it is quite possible that Mithridates was using the dodge, ancient even in his day, of getting someone else to carry out vital but unpopular actions, and then later repudiating the doer, but not the deed. If so, he received early warning that all was not well when the trading town of Phanagoria revolted and Trypho, one of the unpopular eunuchs, was killed.
Three of Mithridates sons and one daughter were captured in the rising. Though the rebels set fire to the citadel, the garrison there held out, inspired by the resistance of another royal daughter called Cleopatra (a common Hellenic girl’s name). Eventually, this gallant girl and the rest of the garrison were evacuated by ship, since Phanagoria was on the shores of the Black Sea.
This rebellion caused several other local strongpoints to join the rebellion. Mithridates feared that the army – which at this point was mainly conscripts -was no longer to be trusted. Accordingly he arranged to marry some of his apparently-inexhaustible supply of daughters to more Scythian princes in return for military support. The princesses set off with an escort of 500 men under the command of the surviving royal eunuchs, but as soon as the escort considered itself out of Mithridates’ reach, the men killed the eunuchs and defected to the Romans, taking the princesses with them.
That he should so badly have misjudged his men is a sign that Mithridates was losing his usually sure grip on the political situation. Certainly he had made misjudgements in the past, and others had conspired to betray him. But earlier disloyalty was swiftly rooted out, and none of the earlier mistakes were fatal, simply because until now Mithridates had got the fundamentals right.
However, as Appian remarks, ‘there was nothing mean or contemptible about him, even in misfortune’.11 Whilst he had been ill, his generals had been conquering outlying parts of the Chersonese and Bosporus, and the royal army was an impressive, though brittle, force of 36,000 men. With this force he was (allegedly) determined to press on with his plan to invade Italy. Amongst those who had grave reservations about the plan was Mithridates’ son and heir apparent, Pharnarces. By any standard, an invasion of Italy was a huge gamble against massive odds, and Pharnarces had little interest in going for death or glory. Rather Pharnarces reckoned that Pompey was showing so little interest in the Pontic remnant in the north that he had every chance of inheriting a tidy little kingdom on the death of his father. But this required that his father did not insist on ruining the place in pursuit of his doomed vendetta with Rome.
It is probable that the discontent of Pharnarces had not progressed far beyond the point of grumbling, because inevitably word of what was afoot reached Mithridates. Ever quick to scent a conspiracy, Mithridates rounded up the ‘ringleaders’ – that is, those whom he suspected were positioning themselves to best benefit from his death or deposition from power. However, he did not include his son amongst those condemned to death or exile. Possibly Mithridates felt that Pharnarces was genuinely guilty of no more than honest disagreement with his father’s policy, or maybe, as Appian suggests, he was dissuaded from violent action by genuine fondness for his son.12 If so, this was the first time Mithridates had turned from drastic action out of family considerations. This was after all, the man who had killed his mother (probably), brother (almost certainly), sister and sundry offspring (without doubt), and often on a very slight pretext.
Pharnarces did not intend to take the risk that his father’s uncharacteristic mercy was merely a passing moment of weakness. In this, as with his commitment to decisive action, Pharnarces was certainly his father’s son. He went first to Mithridates’ hardest core of supporters, the Roman exiles. Either these exiles, being better informed than most about the dangers of invading Italy, welcomed a leader who offered an alternative, or they simply understood that Mithridates was ageing fast and decided to transfer their allegiance to a younger man who could offer them decades of protection. In either case, the exiles were won over and with their support the tide turned in favour ofPharnarces’ coup. Through the night, messengers were sent speedily to other units of the army, which generally welcomed the news that the current oppressive regime was at an end.
The collapse of Mithridates power came quickly. Even those loyal to him saw that they were in a rapidly decreasing minority and realized that their chances of survival depended on how swiftly and convincingly they changed sides. By early in the morning, when Mithridates was eventually awakened by the tumult, it was already over. He sent servants to find out what was going on and these brought the reply that the army had turned against him. Appian has them say ‘We want your son as king. We prefer a young king to an old one who rules through and is ruled by eunuchs, a man who has killed so many of his sons, generals and friends’.13
Undaunted, Mithridates went to rally his men, perhaps believing that even now the force of his personality combined with a few well-timed concessions might be enough to stop the revolt in its tracks. If so, he would have been shaken when his soldiers fled from him and tried to join the ranks of the advancing rebels. The rebels refused to accept these latest defectors, pointing to Mithridates and telling them to prove their worth. To avoid death or capture, Mithridates retreated to one of the towers of his fortress, and there, from one of the upper galleries he watched as his son was crowned king in a makeshift ceremony.
Even now Mithridates was scheming for a way out. He sent messengers to his son saying that he would not oppose the usurpation of his kingdom if he was given only the chance to flee with his life. None of the messengers returned. Mithridates must have known that they probably would not. The dearest ambition of Pharnarces was to be confirmed by the Romans in possession of the Bosporan kingdom; there was no surer way of gaining Roman goodwill than handing Mithridates over in chains. That at least Mithridates had in his power to prevent.
He sent his bodyguard, ostensibly to surrender themselves to the new regime. However, Pharnarces knew his father, and at the sight of Mithridates’ loyalists approaching him in a group he did not pause to reflect on their motives. The men were immediately cut down. This last desperate throw of the dice, if it had been that, failed. The kingdom of Mithridates consisted now of a few rooms and the battlements of his tower, and his subjects were two of his daughters and Bituitis, an officer in the Gallic bodyguard who had remained with his master.
Even the indomitable Mithridates could see that his long war was over. For years he had carried in the sheath of his sword the potions with which to meet such an eventuality. As he mixed the concoction which would bring his life to a swift and painless end, his daughters insisted that they be allowed to share their father’s fate. Either they believed that Pharnarces had planned for them a fate literally worse than death, or they were driven by the powerful loyalty which Mithridates seems to have been capable of inspiring. In either case, they physically prevented Mithridates from taking the poison until they were allowed their share.
The poison slew the girls as quickly and easily as intended, but not the stubborn body of Mithridates. Years of taking antidotes had hardened his system to the extent where he could withstand potions which would kill three normal men, and he had already given a fatal dose to each of his daughters. Not enough remained to kill, or even seriously inconvenience him. Mithridates took a brisk walk about the borders of what remained of his kingdom in the hope that exercise would encourage the poison to work, but he finally had to accept that more direct action would be required.
It is highly probable that the eloquent farewell speech preserved in Appian is the historian’s own invention, but it would be remarkable if Mithridates did not comment bitterly on the irony of his precautions being so thorough that he was unable to kill himself even when he wanted to. He might well have included a few choice remarks on ungrateful sons, but the only witness was the faithful Bituitis, of whom Mithridates asked one last service. He, who had been monarch with absolute power over a great kingdom, now needed the help of his bodyguard to die and be saved from the disgrace of appearing as a captive in a Roman triumph. Bituitis did his king the service he requested.
Cassius Dio offers an alternative ending to the story, which is that Mithridates was not killed by the poison, but seriously incapacitated. Consequently he was helpless when followers of his son finally broke into his rooms, and killed him. Whichever version is correct, it seems certain that at the end Mithridates, the warrior king, died by the sword.