Rome's Bogeyman

KING OF PONTUS (208 pp.)--Alfred Duggan--Coward-McCann ($3.95).

"Mithridates, he died old," sang A. E. Housman in A Shropshire Lad--leaving it largely up to his readers to know who Mithradates was and why his longevity was worthy of note. In this book, able and highly readable, Historian Alfred (Julius Caesar) Duggan writes the first full-dress account of Mithradates' amazing life. Deftly stitched together from sundry classical sources (Plutarch, Appian, Strabo), King of Pontus is not only an excellent piece of history but a first-rate tale of war and adventure whose hero is never more heroic than in the closing years of a long and lusty life.

Mithradates Eupator claimed to be 16th in line of descent from that renowned foe of the Greeks, the great King Darius of Persia. The world he entered in 132 B.C. was one in which royal parents freely poisoned their growing sons to prevent them growing too big--and with reason. At the age of 21, Prince Mithradates of Pontus imprisoned his mother, executed his brother, married his sister and mounted the throne.

Concubines & Captives. The kingdom on the shores of the Black Sea was nothing special--a minor satellite of the Roman Empire, to which it paid tribute in return for protection. But its young king had grand ideas, first of an independent state, then of empire. Choosing a moment when Rome's legions were preoccupied in Africa and in Gaul, Mithradates built a fleet, gathered an army, and in ten years swept from the northern shore of the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and the fringe of ancient Greece. Naturally enough, the conqueror was indignant when his wife-and-sister, the queen, tried to poison him. Mithradates, who had foresightedly taken small daily doses of poison to build up an immunity, executed her without delay and, for the remainder of his long life, stuck conscientiously to concubines.

As he approached middle age, the self-styled "Liberator King" was master of an empire stretching from the Sea of Azov to the Aegean. Roman magistrates and military officers found themselves held captive in the king's dungeons, and finally, by order of Mithradates, some 80,000 Romans and Italians were massacred. It was too much. In 87 B.C. the renowned General Sulla set out with five legions to pull the thorn.

Emissaries from Rome. The battles known to history as "The Mithradatic Wars" went on for a quarter of a century. First Sulla, then Fimbria, and finally Lucullus smashed Mithradates' armies; the earlier massacre was repaid with the massacre of 300,000 of Mithradates' people. Mithradates flew for refuge to his son-in-law, King Tigranes of Armenia. A few years later, Tigranes marched forth at the head of 250,000 foot soldiers and 55,000 horsemen. To meet him went Rome's Lucullus with a mere handful of men--causing Tigranes to remark: "If these men have come as an embassy they are too many; but if they come as an army they are too few." The words had scarcely left the royal lips when Lucullus attacked and, at the reported cost of five Romans, destroyed "100,000 barbarians."

Whatever the quality of Mithradates' armies, he himself was such a tough old warrior that, at the age of 68, he still could throw a javelin as well as any of his soldiers and produce from his numerous harem an annual crop of royal children. Defeat only seemed to stimulate his ambition, and in 64 B.C. he was planning to realize a stupendous fantasy--an invasion of Italy from the north, while the main Roman army hunted him in the east.

The Last Order. The immensity of this project, says Author Duggan, makes us "inclined to dismiss it as absurd." But the Romans were "genuinely afraid" of it. Before Mithradates could attempt his march on Italy, his son Pharnaces II led a revolution to overthrow him. Trapped in his own palace, the 69-year-old despot barked his last order--and was obediently stabbed to death by a trusted follower. Many a decade would pass before the memory of the King of Pontus faded from Roman minds--and still more decades before the brutish campaigns of the victors were forgotten by the ruined populace of Asia Minor.

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