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I knew of Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus on the Black Sea in the first century BC, but I didn't know much. He might appear in a brief sentence or two or as a footnote in a chapter in a history book on Sulla, Lucullus, or Pompey. A bit of amplification occurs in H H Scullard's FROM THE GRACCHI TO NERO. After noting that the Pontian royal house descended from the nobles of Persia and had acquired a tincture of Hellenistic civilization, and that Mithridates had imprisoned his mother and murdered his brother, Scullard goes on to describe him: "He was a man of exceptional physical strength and force of character, of whose energy and exploits many a tale was told. Imbued with a real admiration for Greek culture and art, he yet retained some of the attributes of an oriental despot. His ambitions were great . . . . within a few years he became one of the most powerful rulers in Asia." And also a great menace to the Romans. Try as they might with their well-trained armies, the Romans took years and years to achieve his final defeat, with battles that sometimes went one way and sometimes the other. Michael Curtis Ford in THE LAST KING has given us a whole book on the life and times of Mithridates VI, and a fascinating life it was, as well as a dangerous one. Mithridates took doses of poisons daily to build up immunities so as to escape the assassination attempts that were part of being a ruler in this time and place. He carried a dagger in a sheath attached to his penis so as to have an emergency weapon for self-defense. He was a giant of a man, and his armor alone was said to weigh 100 pounds. He was a natural tactician and strategist who saw the need to convert his Greek phalanx-organized army into one using Roman maneuvers with cohorts and legions, and he even used renegade Roman officers and men to fight side by side with his Asian armies. The story is told by Mithridates's bastard but favored son Pharnaces, and it thus requires some necessary back-story telling to cover Mithridates's own early years. Following the death of his father when Mithridates was just approaching teenage, he found his inheritance of the kingship to be circumscribed by his mother. Escaping palace jealousies, the young warrior and some trusted friends fled to the mountains and built up both an acquaintance and a strong degree of loyalty with the isolated tribes. When he was 21, he returned and took over as king in fact as well as name. After consolidating his power within his kingdom, he began a conquest of neighboring countries, some of which were client states of Rome. A 40-year conflict with Rome resulted. Rome's best generals tried to subdue him, and sometimes succeeded, but he was a master of retreat, re-group, and resume. He was merciless to his enemies or to anyone, including family, who attempted to betray him, but he admired the quality of loyalty so much that he freely forgave those he had defeated in battle who showed continued attachment to their leaders. The size of the armies he could quickly raise, sometimes in numbers like 300,000, was amazing. He could take punishment in battle that would kill a dozen other men, and he had the scars and deformities to prove it. He should have been called Mithridates the Relentless. Rome at this time had already defeated Hannibal and other generals in the Punic Wars, had unified the Italian Peninsula, and was in effective control over most of the Mediterranean, but it had not yet penetrated far into the East. Pontus and the other Hellenistic countries in what is known today as Turkey were stepping stones to oriental riches, but it was not yet certain that the Roman advance could continue with ultimate and permanent invincibility. Mithridates gave Rome pause to wonder, and the world wondered with it whether it could continue like an amoeba enveloping all the consumables in its surrounding space. It seemed possible at various times that Mithridates might win and that Rome might have to settle for retrenchment, still a world power but not the absolute enforcer of a pax romana that it eventually became. The permanent defeat of Mithridates was a necessity. Of course in retrospect we know he was defeated, and Ford in this historical novel paints vivid pictures of how the end came. This is historical fiction dealing throughout with thunderous events on the world stage, and as such it's among the best of its genre. However, while I believe that historical fiction must give equal prominence to its fictional aspect (if you want accurate history, or at least an asymptotic approach to it, read the most authentic non-fiction you can find), I would appreciate some endnotes describing the greatest inventions used in an historical novel to maintain the reader's interest in the fiction. An author cannot write a story like this without continual resort to primary and secondary reference sources, and these sources are almost bound to have large and small gaps that interrupt the fictional approach. A creative author will fill in these gaps with imagination. I'd like to know when such imagination is used. Ford does in the end give us a postscript summarizing what happened after the death of Mithridates, and I'm thankful for that, but I'd appreciate more elucidation on the known facts of his life while he lived. There is much to praise in this book. Not the least is the inside cover map of Rome and Asia in the 1st century BC, one of the best I've seen for delineating the countries into which present-day Turkey used to be divided, and going beyond that to include such areas of interest as Scythia, Colchis (of Argonaut fame), Armenia, Syria, and others. The great strength of Mithridates is made clear, and we can easily envision his great thirst for conquest. The battle scenes, the description of various territories, and the Roman aspects of the story all seem well-researched and true. On the other hand, I'd give a small demerit or two to the author for use of language -- it's a bit of a jolt finding in several places, including as early as page three, our protagonist using expressions such as "Not to worry." And later, what is "Pompey . . . was caught with his loincloth at his ankles" but an evocation of the trite expression "caught with his pants down" -- and for that matter, did the cultured Pompey wear a loincloth in the first place? There are inconsequential errors such as mention of the "small coastal city of Mytilene," since I don't think one would normally refer to the main city of an island (in this case the island of Lesbos) as a coastal city. There are several other cases of writing that may momentarily slow the reading, but they are not too common or egregious. More serious to my mind is the author's attempt to appeal to modern readers through the use of erroneous and distorted assertions, such as building up Greece to be something in ancient times that it never was. One of Mithridates's lieutenants is wrong when he says Greece's capital is Athens. Greece was composed of independent city states and was never unified except when it was uniformly conquered by Macedon's King Philip (father of Alexander). Later another lieutenant says: "If you wish to gain the loyalty of the common people, you must give them more power . . . . implement true Greek democracy." It would take too much space to explain the real concept of "Greek democracy" as it was practiced, but even if it were understood in the sense of today's completely wrong idea, giving more power to the common people would be the last thing that an oriental despot such as Mithridates would want to hear or put in effect. Rome, on the other hand, is portrayed as pure evil. The author continuously imputes to Mithridates some vague motivation of wanting to be a selfless savior of the world from Rome when he was actually, as shown impressively throughout the story itself, hell-bent on his own power, glory, and unopposed dominance over all others. It's a good story. Buy it, read it, and enjoy it, but ignore the attempts to impose political correctness on the ancient world.
Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, May 2004
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