The news of the death of Mithridates reached Pompey in 62 BC, whilst he was campaigning in Judea. His troops welcomed the occasion with rejoicing and sacrifices, for they were well aware that no-one would consider their campaign over whilst their inveterate enemy still lived. As it was, Pompey was now able to begin closing down military operations and preparing to return home in the secure expectation of a Roman triumph for a mission well accomplished.
As Mithridates had no doubt expected, his corpse was pressed into service by his son as a peace-offering to the Romans. Pharnarces, now ruling as Pharnarces II, was eager to be confirmed as ruler of the Bosporan kingdom, and enthusiastically surrendered himself, his kingdom and the mortal remains of Mithridates to the mercy of Pompey.
The embalmed body of Mithridates was conveyed to Sinope by trireme. Pompey was aware that although his battles in Asia Minor were finished, he had still other battles to fight in the political arena of Rome. Therefore, the better to show his accomplishment in bringing about the downfall of Mithridates, he ordered that his former opponent should receive funeral honours appropriate for a great king. Mithridates was given a royal burial, his remains being interred among the tombs of his ancestors.
Only now, as word of his death spread to the far corners of Mithridates’ former kingdom, did those holding the last Pontic castles and strongholds finally contact the Romans and make arrangements for their surrender. Pontus did not survive as an independent kingdom, but was annexed to Bithynia and administered as a joint province. Pharnarces was allowed to reign in his Bosporan kingdom (with the exception of the town of Phanagoria, which was made independent as a reward for being the first to rebel against Mithridates). Asia Minor itself was now firmly under Roman control.
It is fascinating, though fruitless, to speculate whether a different person in Mithridates’ place might have succeeded where Mithridates failed. The Roman political and military systems were at their weakest in decades, with political misgovernment leading to military overstretch and the constant danger of civil war. Nor should we forget how close Mithridates had come to success at Orchomenos in Greece, when a crushing victory over Sulla might indeed have united Rome’s enemies under the Pontic banner. Could a Pontic Alexander, with greater charisma and generalship have swept Sulla aside in Greece, re-ignited the embers of the Italian revolt and crushed Rome?
Or did Mithridates never have a chance? Certainly he always acted as if he did. Nothing in his conduct suggests that he saw himself as a plucky hero fighting a doomed battle against overwhelming odds. Mithridates regarded himself as a rival of Rome, not a victim. No-one now can know how firmly he believed that Rome had over-reached itself, and was about to be brought crashing down, undermined from within by rebellious subjects and seditious generals, and attacked from outside by kings such as himself and Tigranes. Mithridates’ best hope was that Rome had become as rotten as the Seleucid empire in its final days, and he worked tirelessly for himself and his kingdom to take maximum advantage should Rome begin to crumble, as for a while in the early 80s BC it looked as though it might.
The bumbling foreign policy of the senate, combined with the greed of its individual members, certainly showed Rome at its worst. Despite the experience of the Seleucid wars, Rome was still not fully capable of fighting overseas campaigns, and it was Rome’s flawed political system as much as Mithridates’ ability which allowed him to survive as long as he did. Nevertheless, the durability of Mithridates, in what could be mildly understated as trying circumstances, was truly remarkable. The fact that he was militarily defeated time and again meant that his political credibility was immensely damaged. Yet, right until the end, he remained firmly master of whatever dominions he controlled. At the same time, his constant probing for Roman weaknesses, be they military or political, meant that he was able to make the most of the few opportunities which he found. And even when down, he was never out, but was constantly seeking means - such as by subsidizing the pirates – of making his Roman enemies share his pain. It is quite possible that as the final levies went east to join the Pompeian army, some of the younger recruits were sped on their way by grandfathers reminiscing how they too had fought Mithridates when they were that age.
Also it was Mithridates’ misfortune that he was matched against some of the best generals of his day. Pompey, Lucullus and Sulla were generals of the first class – and they, like the soldiers under their command, had been hardened in combat against the finest troops in the world in the course of fighting civil wars against their own armies. Yet, when Mithridates fought these same troops under lesser generals such as Murena or Triarius, he defeated them handily. Also of course, it goes without saying, that in fighting the Roman army of the late republic, the forces of Pontus were comprehensively outmatched in terms of training, experience and (usually) morale.
Under these circumstances, the performance and tenacity of the Pontic troops was admirable, and certainly superior to that offered by the levies of Tigranes of Armenia. However, the Pontic infantry lacked both the ferocity and the staying power, not to mention the battle-hardened experience of the Roman legionaries; it was this, particularly in the crucial battles in Greece, which eventually turned the tide. Had Mithridates succeeded in his later idea of creating a force of pseudo-legionaries to match against the Romans, the results would have been interesting, though perhaps not in a way which the Romans would have appreciated.
It is difficult to evaluate Mithridates as a general. As a strategist he seems to have had both the vision to conceive of plans on a regional, or even Mediterranean-wide scale, and he had both the daring and the decisiveness to carry these plans out. This, and his characteristic ruthlessness, was seen in his order for the murder of tens of thousands of Romans and Italians in the First Mithridatic War. The massacre was intended to commit the cities of Asia firmly to enmity with Rome, but in the end the perpetrators made their peace with Rome, while Mithridates, the planner, committed himself to a lifelong war against an enemy which seldom forgave, and never forgot. Again we will never know if Mithridates ever regretted this.
During the same war, the king’s foresight in developing a navy gave him a major advantage over the Romans who had not done so, and who, indeed, only realized that one was necessary because of the use Mithridates made of his. Mithridates certainly botched the siege of Rhodes, but to be fair, this was his first experience of direct command of military operations. He learned fast, and by the time of the Armenian campaign against Lucullus, though his men were outnumbered and outclassed, Mithridates hardly put a foot wrong.
Strategically, Mithridates might be condemned for undertaking his Greek adventure and losing armies at Chaeronea and Orchomenos. But Mithridates was a gambler, and when he saw the tide turning against Rome he could hardly be expected not to see how far his luck would ride. Less excusable was his refusal to cut his losses at Cyzicus during his final push into Bithynia, when he should have abandoned the siege as soon as it became plain that his supply lines were endangered.
But abandoning the siege would have been totally contrary to the stubbornness which was ingrained into Mithridates’ character. Mithridates never gave up. At Cyzicus this was a fatal failing, but without his indomitablewill, he would not have been Mithridates, and he would not have been great.
As for Pontus, Pompey was only really interested in the seaboard between Heraclea and Amisus. This was annexed to Bithynia to become the province of Bithynia et Pontus, though by and large the Romans referred to the entire province simply as ‘Pontus’. Alex Pompeia provided a basic constitution by which the province was governed, and this, lasting for centuries, proved more durable than another of Pompey’s city foundations. This was called Neapolis, which shortly afterwards vanished without trace from history. Presumably the new city was in a district called Pompeopolis in coastal Paphlagonia, which was also made part of the new combined province. The founding of new cities, and the raising of towns or even villages to city status was needed to create new administrative districts in the Roman style. The devolved form of government favoured by the Romans contrasted sharply with the former centralization of power by the Mithridatid kings and was probably the main difference which the local people discovered in the change to Roman rule.
Deiotarus of Galatia gratefully received back those parts of his people’s former lands which Mithridates had annexed. Cappadocia, so long a victim of Pontic expansionism was also able to expand somewhat at Pontus’ expense. Ariobarzanes enjoyed his fifth and final restoration to the Cappadocian throne in 63 BC. Thereafter Cappadocia maintained a precarious independence by constantly switching sides to whoever looked as though he might come out on top in the next bout of Rome’s civil wars. Eventually Cappadocia was subsumed into the Roman empire in AD 17. Much of the remainder of what had been Pontus was lumped into an autonomous area called Pontus Galaticus, which was finally absorbed into the Roman empire when Galatia too became a province in 2 BC.
Nevertheless, to a large extent these changes in borders were purely nominal. Rome was now the unchallenged hegemonic power in the entire region, whether its rule was direct or indirect. Furthermore, for majority of the people of Mithridates’ kingdom life continued as it had before, under the rule of local dynasts, and changed little because these dynasts answered to a different authority.1
As for Pharnarces, he remained quietly in his Bosporan realm. As soon as he decided that the Romans were sufficiently distracted by their increasing political strife, he overran and reabsorbed Phanagoria into his domains. After a reign of sixteen years, he eventually proved too much a son of Mithridates to sit quietly in the north while his ancestral kingdom remained under Roman control just across the Black Sea. During the great Roman civil war of 49-45 BC he pushed his luck further and took control of Colchis and Armenia Minor. The latter was now part of the kingdom of Deiotarus, and the Galatian king appealed to the local Roman authority, a Caesarian general called Domitius Calvinus. Mithridatid and Roman armies met once again in 48 BC, near Nicopolis, where Pompey had driven Mithridates from his kingdom. This time the result went the other way, not least because the Galatian forces fled after a mere show of resistance. On the strength of this victory Pharnarces was able to reconquer all of Pontus at least as far as his father’s former capital of Amisus.
This brought none other than Julius Caesar himself to the region where he had last campaigned as a callow ex-student who had gleefully dropped his scrolls to help organise the defence of Asia against the second attack of Mithridates in 74 BC. The final confrontation came on 2 August 47 BC. Pharnarces was distracted by rebellion in his new conquests and had Caesar approaching with his usual disconcerting speed from the south. In an effort to outstrip even Caesar’s alacrity, Pharnarces launched an all-out attack on the Romans as they were entrenching their camp. This unexpected manoeuvre might have worked with the unskilled levies of Calvinus, but the startled veterans of Caesar’s army simply closed ranks and began to drive the Pontic army from the disadvantageous position on the hillside in which their attack had left them.
The Pontic army collapsed and dissolved, leaving Pharnarces to struggle back to the Bosporus. Like his father, Pharnarces was killed when even that last refuge revolted against him. Caesar disparagingly remarked that Pompey had been lucky to make his reputation by fighting against such poor stuff, and reported his victory to Rome with the famously laconic quote ‘veni, vidi, vici’ (I came, I saw, I conquered).2
It took over a century for the region to recover from the devastation of the Mithridatic wars and the exactions of the Roman taxmen. Even after the final Roman conquest, Roman aristocrats continued to bleed the eastern provinces dry to support their massive expenses. Relief only came when the Republican publicani were replaced in their tax-gathering by more responsible imperial officials. We have a comprehensive report of Pontus as a province of Rome’s empire at its peak. This comes from Pliny the Younger, who corresponded frequently with the Emperor Trajan whilst he was governor from AD 109-111. Pliny was sent to sort out a financial crisis, but his letters show that much of his time was spent in the un-dramatic minutiae of civil administration. Ironically, the complete integration of his former kingdom into the Roman empire shows the fatal flaw in Mithridates’ assumption about the nature of Roman power. Rome did not just rule her conquests, but made them Roman, and the edifice of Rome’s empire was far more stable than Mithridates imagined.
On his death, Mithridates passed into legend. The Romans remembered him for his indomitable stubbornness but also for his pharmaceutical skills. These became exaggerated with the passing centuries until, by the Middle Ages, there was a whole catalogue of potions allegedly drawn from his pharmacological researches.
Mithridates, who had loved music, found fame almost two millennia after his birth in an opera, Mithridate, written in 1770 by the young Austrian musical prodigy, Mozart. Undoubtedly, Mithridates would have been delighted so see himself on stage (sung by a tenor) and defeating the scheming Roman tribune Marzio (tenor). He might have winced slightly as his character tries to poison his fiancée Aspasia (soprano) and at his final theatrical reconciliation with his son Farnace, though he would have been grimly delighted that the latter’s role was written for alto castrato. Something about the combination of warrior king and poison specialist has constantly intrigued later generations, and it is somehow appropriate that the legend of Mithridates, like the man himself, refuses to die quietly.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.