Kingdom of Pontus

Two descents

formationDrafted from McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986)

The kings of Pontus claimed descent from Darius I on one side and from Alexander and Seleucus on the other, and they said so publicly and continuously for two hundred years.

The Persian claim is the older and probably the real one: the dynasty descends from a family of Persian nobles who held Kios in Mysia under the Achaemenids and who came out of the collapse of Lysimachus's kingdom in the 280s with a principality in northern Anatolia. The name Mithridates is Iranian, the dynastic cult was Iranian, and the fire-worship and the Persian aristocracy of the interior were still there when Strabo, who was born at Amaseia, described it two centuries later.

Persepolis, Iran · McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

The Macedonian claim is the useful one. A Persian dynasty ruling Greek cities on the Black Sea in a world of Hellenistic monarchies needed to be a Hellenistic monarchy, and by Mithridates VI's time the coins are Greek, the court is Greek, the propaganda is Greek, and the king is on the coinage with the flowing hair of a Hellenistic ruler and the aegis of Alexander.

McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

The count on the Achaemenid record

Three later dynasties claimed the Achaemenids publicly, and this is the earliest of them by a century and a half; the other two are the Parthians and the Sasanians.

Being descended from a house is one thing and claiming it is another, and the Mithridatids did the second as loudly as anyone ever has. The descent is on the coinage. Mithridates VI used the Achaemenid royal title, king of kings. And when he went to war with Rome, the argument he put to the Greeks of Asia was that he was liberating them from tax farmers, in the tradition of both his lineages at once — the Persian kings who had ruled Asia and the Macedonian one who had taken it from them.

Musée du Louvre, Ma 2321 · McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986) · Photograph: Shonagon · CC0

Sinope

The kingdom spent its first century as an inland Anatolian principality of no particular consequence, and then in 183 Pharnaces I took Sinope — the largest Greek city on the southern Black Sea, a colony of Miletus with a harbour on both sides of an isthmus — and moved the royal seat there from Amaseia.

That is the hinge of everything after. An inland kingdom of Anatolian valleys became a maritime power with a fleet and access to a closed sea; the grain of the Crimea, the fish of the Bosporus and the traffic of the whole Black Sea littoral came within reach; and the dynasty committed to presenting itself in Greek to a Greek coastal population. From 183 the kingdom lived on its valleys and on the sea in roughly equal measure.

Sinop, Turkey · McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986) · Photograph: Babbsack · CC BY-SA 3.0

Mithridates VI inherited that position, took the Bosporan kingdom in the Crimea, made the Black Sea effectively a Pontic lake, and then used it to fight Rome for twenty-five years.

A boy king and a famine

formationDrafted from Bevan, Vol. I (1902)

Mithridates I Ktistes died around 266, in his eighties, and left the kingdom to a son, Ariobarzanes, about whom almost nothing survives beyond the fact that he struggled to control the Galatian mercenary bands his father had relied on and left no coinage behind him. Ariobarzanes died around 250 and passed the throne to his own son - another Mithridates - while the boy was still a minor.

A kingdom harried by its own mercenaries

The regency years were harsh. With no adult king to hold them, the Galatian war-bands that had served the dynasty as hired muscle turned on the Pontic countryside instead, harrying it so thoroughly that famine threatened the population outright. Heraclea Pontica, a Greek city that had kept friendly relations with the Mithridatid house since its founding, sent what relief it could - and was attacked by the same Galatian bands in consequence, the price of loyalty to a client dynasty too weak to protect its own friends.

Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara · Bevan, Vol. I (1902) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

A battle that decided who ruled the Seleucid world

Mithridates II came of age into exactly the kind of crisis his family specialized in exploiting. When the Seleucid brothers Seleucus II and Antiochus Hierax went to war over the throne in the late 230s, Mithridates married Seleucus's own sister - reportedly receiving Greater Phrygia as her dowry - and then threw his support behind her younger brother Antiochus instead, leading a large Galatian army into the field on Hierax's behalf. At the Battle of Ancyra the combined Pontic-Galatian force shattered Seleucus's army outright; twenty thousand were said to have died, and word spread through the victorious camp that Seleucus himself had been killed. He had not - he escaped in the disguise of a common cavalry trooper's armor-bearer and made it safely across the Taurus into Cilicia, while his own concubine Mysta, dressed down as a serving-maid to avoid recognition, was sold into slavery at the Rhodian market before the friendly Rhodian state identified and ransomed her back to him.

Bevan, Vol. I (1902) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

Bevan, Vol. I (1902) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

What one battle bought a minor dynasty

Ancyra broke Seleucus's authority across most of Asia Minor for years and left Antiochus Hierax the dominant figure in the region - a position Hierax could not actually hold without the same Galatian muscle that had won it for him, and one that collapsed into fresh anarchy within a few years regardless. For Mithridates II, though, the alliance had already paid for itself: a Seleucid marriage, a claim on Phrygian territory, and proof that a kingdom too small to defend its own harvests from mercenary bands could still tip the balance of power between two much larger states, simply by choosing which Galatian horde to point at whom.

Library of Congress · Bevan, Vol. I (1902) · Matson Photograph Collection · Public domain

Forty-two years

expansionDrafted from Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899)

The best summary of what Mithridates VI built is the list Rome read out in the street when it was over.

Pompey's triumph in 61 BC carried a tablet with an inscription recording what the eastern campaign had produced, and it is a strange document: eight hundred ships with bronze beaks captured; eight cities founded in Cappadocia, twenty in Cilicia and Coele-Syria, one in Palestine; and six kings conquered by name — Tigranes of Armenia, Artoces of Iberia, Oroeses of Albania, Darius the Mede, Aretas the Nabataean, Antiochus of Commagene.

National Maritime Museum, Haifa · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Bukvoed · CC BY 3.0

Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 3.0

Mount Nemrut, Turkey · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0

Not one of those six is Mithridates, because he was not conquered. He was the reason all of them were.

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Richard Mortel · CC BY 2.0

What forty-two years of war implies

Appian's summing-up is the sentence that gives the scale: the Romans conquered King Mithridates at the end of forty-two years, and in doing so reduced Bithynia, Cappadocia and the other peoples living round the Black Sea; and in the same war took the part of Cilicia not yet theirs, together with Syria, Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, Palestine and everything between them and the Euphrates.

Read that backwards and it describes the Pontic achievement. A kingdom on the northern edge of Anatolia obliged the Roman Republic to spend four decades and three of its best commanders in the East — and the map Rome drew when it finally finished, from the Caucasus to the Egyptian border, is the map of everything it had to take in order to get at one king.

That is expansion measured in the size of the response.

What he actually held

The kingdom itself grew round the Black Sea rather than into Anatolia at first. Colchis and the Crimean Bosporus came in early — Greek cities on the northern shore that wanted protection from the steppe peoples and got a Pontic garrison with it — and gave him grain, tribute and a recruiting ground outside anybody else's reach. Then Cappadocia and Bithynia by intervention in their succession quarrels, which is what finally brought Rome.

By 88 he had the resources to put a fleet at sea, an army into Greece, and a letter into every city of Roman Asia at once. What he did with that is the next chapter, and it is the reason the forty-two years were forty-two rather than five.

One day

peakDrafted from McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986)

In 88 BC Mithridates VI sent letters to the cities of Roman Asia instructing them that on a named day, thirty days after the letters were written, they were to kill every Roman and Italian in their territory — men, women, children and freedmen — leave the bodies unburied, and take their property, half of which would go to the killers and half to the king. Debtors who killed their creditors were released from the debt. Anyone who hid a Roman was to be punished.

The cities did it. The figures the sources give are eighty thousand from one and a hundred and fifty thousand from another and neither is checkable. Appian names the cities and describes what happened at Ephesus, Pergamon, Adramyttium, Caunus and Tralles: people dragged from the temples they had taken refuge in, killed at the altars, drowned, thrown from the walls.

Selçuk, Turkey · McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986) · Photograph: Dguendel · CC BY 3.0

Why they did it

It is filed here as a catastrophe rather than as a victory, and not because of the morality. It acted on the kingdom the way a disaster does: after it, there were no options left.

Why the cities complied is the part worth dwelling on. Rome had held Asia as a province for forty-five years, since the Attalid king left it by will, and had farmed its taxes to companies of publicani who bid for the contract at Rome and recovered the bid with interest from the province. Cities borrowed to pay, at rates that compounded, from the same men. Communities were selling public buildings, temple property and their own citizens into slavery to service the debt.

McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

Mithridates arrived as a liberator with a Persian and a Macedonian lineage, and what he offered was the cancellation of the debt by the removal of the creditor. The cities were not misled about what he was; they wanted the thing he was offering.

McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

What it foreclosed

It made the war unendable by negotiation, which McGing takes to be at least partly the point. A city that has massacred every Roman in it cannot make a separate peace, and a king who has organised it cannot be reconciled with. Sulla made a settlement at Dardanos in 85 anyway, because he had a civil war waiting in Italy and needed his army there, and it left Mithridates his kingdom and his fleet and settled nothing at all.

The Roman punishment of the cities fell mostly on the cities. Sulla fined the province twenty thousand talents, quartered troops on it, and required it to pay the arrears of five years of tribute; the debt problem that produced the massacre was made several times worse by the response to it, and was still producing crises when Lucullus tried to restructure it a decade later.

Two further wars followed. Everything after 88 is a consequence of an act designed to make retreat impossible for everybody involved, including the man who arranged it.

The terms he was given

contractionDrafted from Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899)

The cities of Asia had opened their gates to Mithridates because he was not Rome. Within three years he was doing to them what Rome had done, and the clearest case is Chios.

Glasgow Museums · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · William Simpson · CC BY 4.0

A letter arrived from the king. Appian gives it in full and it reads like a schedule of grievances from a landlord. You still favour the Romans. Many of your citizens are still living among them. You are enjoying the profits of Roman property and not accounting to me for it. Your trireme ran into my ship at the battle off Rhodes — I chose to blame the pilots, hoping you would observe the rules of safety and remain my submissive subjects. Now you have secretly sent your leading men to Sulla and never denied doing it publicly, as people not cooperating with him ought to have done.

Then the sentence. My friends think that those who conspire against my government, and intend to conspire against my person, deserve death. I will let you off with a fine of 2000 talents.

The theatre

The Chians wanted to send envoys. The king's officer would not permit it. They had already been disarmed, the children of their leading families had already been handed over as hostages, and a barbarian army was in the city.

So they groaned aloud, and collected the temple ornaments and the women's jewellery until they had made up the 2000 talents.

The officer then accused them of giving him short weight, and summoned the whole population to the theatre. He posted troops with drawn swords around the theatre and along the streets leading down to the sea. He brought the Chians out one at a time, put them into ships — men separate from women and children, all handled with contempt — and shipped the entire citizen body to Pontus.

Priene, Turkey · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Christopher de Lisle · CC BY-SA 4.0

What it cost him

That is the moment the war changed, and it did not change because of a battle.

Mithridates' whole position in Asia rested on being the alternative to Roman tax farmers. A province that had killed eighty thousand Romans in one day had committed itself completely and had nowhere else to go — which is enormous leverage, and he spent it. After Chios, and after Ephesus and the other cities found out what had happened at Chios, the cities began going back to Rome, and the king who had been let in started having to besiege the places that had welcomed him.

The peace

The end of the first war was correspondingly cheap and correspondingly final.

Sulla had to get to Italy, where his enemies held Rome. So he made terms: Mithridates gave up everything he had taken and went back to his paternal kingdom of Pontus as his sole possession, and remained king of it.

Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

Nobody was tried for the massacre. The man who ordered it kept his throne and his title by treaty. What he had lost was the thing the treaty could not restore — any prospect that a Greek city in Asia would ever open its gates to him again. He spent the remaining twenty-two years of the war being pushed north and east, and at every stage the question was whether he could find anyone to take him in.

The long retreat

endDrafted from McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986)

Lucullus broke the Pontic army at Cyzicus and Cabira in the 70s and Mithridates fled to his son-in-law Tigranes of Armenia — the Greater Armenia carries the same episode from the other end, and says that sheltering him is what gave Lucullus a reason to destroy Tigranocerta in 69. Then Lucullus's own troops mutinied, and Mithridates came back and reoccupied his kingdom.

Pompey replaced him in 66, destroyed the last army in a night attack at Nicopolis in the upper Euphrates country, and Mithridates went the other way: north-east across the Caucasus to the Crimea, through territory held by people who had no particular reason to let him pass, more than a thousand kilometres, in his mid-sixties.

New York Public Library · McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986) · Photograph: George Kennan · Public domain

He spent three years there raising another army and planning to march on Italy by land around the Black Sea and through the Danube country. His son Pharnaces revolted, the army went over, and Mithridates went up into a tower and tried to poison himself and his daughters. The daughters died. He did not, having spent a lifetime taking prophylactic doses against exactly this, and had to ask a Gallic officer of his guard to do it with a sword.

Kerch, Crimea · McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986) · Photograph: Kurgus · CC0

What Rome did with the kingdom

Not what it had done to Macedon and not what it had done to Pergamon, which is the argument for entering these three records together.

The Antigonid record ends with a monarchy abolished outright and the country cut into four republics forbidden to trade with each other. The Attalid record ends with a will accepted and a province organised. Here Pompey took the coast and the western part as the province of Bithynia et Pontus, gave the interior and the mountain country to a set of client rulers and priest-dynasts, and left Pharnaces the Bosporan kingdom in the Crimea because it was too far away to be worth holding.

Chersonesos, Crimea · McGing, Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (1986) · Photograph: Dmitry A. Mottl · CC BY-SA 3.0

Three kingdoms wound up by the same republic within a century, and three different instruments. Rome had no policy about kings; it had a series of decisions, each taken on what was cheapest at the time.

The dynasty afterwards

Pharnaces II tried to take his father's kingdom back while Caesar was occupied with Pompey, and was beaten at Zela in 47. The Bosporan kingdom in the Crimea, ruled by his descendants and their successors, lasted another four hundred years as a Roman client on the edge of the steppe — longer than the Pontic kingdom itself, and almost entirely unremarked.

What the dynasty transmitted was one claim, and it was a claim about somebody else. The Mithridatids asserted descent from Darius, publicly and on the coinage, which puts a Black Sea kingdom that fought Rome for forty years in the same company as the Parthians and the Sasanians — the two empires that actually ruled Iran — on the strength of having said the same thing they said.

Rule 1 counts whose legitimacy was worth claiming and does not filter on recognition, and that is the rule producing exactly the result it was written to produce.

The domestic poison

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899)

Appian stops at the end of the Mithridatic Wars to write an obituary, and it is the fullest ancient account of what an enemy of Rome looked like from the inside of the Roman tradition.

The last words come first. Mithridates, having decided to die, found that he could not: he had spent his life dosing himself against assassination and the poison would not work. Appian gives him the line. Although I have kept watch and ward against all the poisons that one takes with his food, I have not provided against that domestic poison, always the most dangerous to kings, the treachery of army, children, and friends. A Gaulish officer named Bituitus then did what was asked.

J. Paul Getty Museum · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Annibale Fontana · CC0

Then the catalogue. He was sixteenth in descent from Darius son of Hystaspes, and eighth from the Mithridates who left the Macedonians and took Pontus — a figure Appian gives as sixth elsewhere in the same book, which his translators note has caused some controversy in the learned world. He lived sixty-eight or sixty-nine years and reigned fifty-seven of them, having come to the throne an orphan. He fought Rome for forty years. He was beaten by Sulla, Lucullus and Pompey, and beat each of them at times; he captured three Roman commanders and carried them about with him, killing one because the war had been his doing; he defeated five more by name. He made alliances with the Samnites and the Gauls and sent envoys to Sertorius in Spain, and left no avenue of attack against Rome untried.

Wellcome Collection, London · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Wellcome Collection · CC BY 4.0

Then the body, itemised with an antiquarian's interest in physical evidence. He had a large frame, as the armour he sent to Nemea and Delphi shows. He was strong enough to ride and throw the javelin to the end of his life. He could cover a thousand stades in a day, changing horses. He drove a chariot with sixteen horses at once.

Delphi, Greece · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Modussiccandi · CC BY-SA 4.0

Then the mind. He cultivated Greek learning and through it the religious observances of Greece, and was fond of music. He was abstemious and patient of hard work for the most part, and gave way only to women.

And then, without a change of tone, the rest of it. He was bloodthirsty and cruel to everyone — the slayer of his mother, his brother, three sons and three daughters.

Appian puts that sentence between the horses and the Greek learning, which is the reason to read the passage as a whole rather than to quote the good parts. It is not a defence and it is not a denunciation; it is a list of the things a king was supposed to be able to do, compiled by a man who thought the answer was genuinely impressive, with the murders entered in the same column as the chariot teams.

The other sentence worth keeping is the one about the end. None of the conspiracies against him ever escaped his detection, Appian says — not even the last one; he simply chose to overlook it, and died of it. So ungrateful is the wickedness that has been once pardoned.

Musée des Hospices civils de Lyon · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Aurélie Troccon and Manon Mauquin · CC BY-SA 4.0

The tombs of the kings

afterlifeDrafted from Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899)

Cornered in the Crimea by his own son's revolt, Mithridates took out the poison he carried next to his sword and mixed it.

Two of his daughters were with him, Mithridatis and Nyssa, girls growing up together, betrothed to the kings of Egypt and of Cyprus. They asked for some first, insisted, and would not let him drink until they had swallowed theirs. It worked on them at once.

It did not work on him. He had spent his life taking small doses of everything as a defence against poisoners — the compounds are still called Mithridatic — and now he walked about rapidly trying to make it act, and it would not.

So he turned to a Gallic officer named Bituitus who was standing there, and asked him to do it. Appian gives the speech. I have profited much from your right arm against my enemies; I shall profit most of all if you kill me now, and save from a Roman triumph a man who has been an autocrat so many years and ruler of so great a kingdom, and who cannot now die by poison because, like a fool, he fortified himself against the poison of others. Although I have kept watch and ward against all the poisons that one takes with his food, I have not provided against that domestic poison, always the most dangerous to kings, the treachery of army, children, and friends.

Bituitus did as he was asked.

Amasya, Turkey · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Szgin · CC0

What Rome did with the body

The news reached Rome and the city held a festival, being rid of a troublesome enemy.

Pharnaces — the son whose revolt had cornered him — sent his father's corpse to Pompey at Sinope in a trireme, along with the men who had captured a Roman officer and a quantity of Greek and barbarian hostages, and asked to be allowed to rule either his father's kingdom or the Bosporus alone.

Pompey paid for the funeral. He instructed the king's own servants to give the remains a royal interment and to place them in the tombs of the kings at Sinope, because he admired his great achievements and considered him the first of the kings of his time.

Amasya, Turkey · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Michael F. Schönitzer · CC BY-SA 4.0

Amasya, Turkey · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Zeynel Cebeci · CC BY-SA 4.0

Pharnaces was inscribed a friend and ally of the Roman people, for having delivered Italy from much trouble, and was given the Bosporus — except Phanagoria, whose people were made free and independent because they had been the first to resist Mithridates when he was rebuilding, and had led the others into the revolt that finished him.

Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Edmond Guillaume, for G. Perrot, 1872 · Public domain

The triumph

Two years later Pompey brought the war home.

The procession carried images of the men who were not there to be led in it: Tigranes and Mithridates, shown fighting, shown beaten, shown fleeing. The siege was represented, and the silent flight by night. Finally the death was shown, with the daughters who died beside him, and figures of the sons and daughters who had died before him, and the barbarian gods in the dress of their own countries.

Amasya, Turkey · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Zeynel Cebeci · CC BY-SA 4.0

Pompey rode in a chariot studded with gems, wearing — it was said, and Appian adds that the reader may believe it if he can — a cloak of Alexander the Great, supposed to have been found among Mithridates' possessions, which the people of Cos had received from a Ptolemaic queen.

At the Capitol he broke with custom and killed none of the prisoners, sending them home at public expense.

What the kingdom became

Pontus was divided. The western part went into a province with Bithynia; the interior was parcelled out among client dynasts and cities. The Bosporus went to the son.

Pharnaces waited fifteen years and then, while Rome was busy with its own civil war, came back over the sea to take his father's kingdom. Caesar beat him, and he fled to Sinope with a thousand cavalry and surrendered the city on terms.

Zile, Turkey · Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

So the dynasty's afterlife is three things: a body buried with royal honours at Rome's expense by the general who destroyed it; a painted image of a man's own death carried through a foreign city; and a son who reproduced the whole enterprise in miniature and was disposed of in an afternoon.