Mithridates VI Eupator ‘the Great’ was to become a byword for his hatred of Rome and his atrocities in Asia. At the end of his life, in 63 B.C., rumour had it that he was still planning to march on Italy, like an eastern Hannibal, via Scythia, Thrace and the Illyrians. Many myths arose about him during his fifty-seven-year reign and his more than forty years of confrontation with Rome. By the end of the Roman Empire he was one of her few former enemies, alongside Pyrrhus, Hannibal and Cleopatra, to be canonized among the eighty notable ancient Romans. As one who died aged sixty-nine (some said seventy or seventy-two), he almost qualified to be one of the ‘Macrobioi’, the ‘long-lived’, of the ancient world. During all but his first thirteen years of life he ruled a kingdom, Pontus, which took its name from the ‘Deep Sea’ itself. It lay almost beyond the world known to Rome, and had beneath its sway Thracians, Scythians, Sarmatians, the Cimmerian Bosporus and Colchis, the legendary land of gold, poisons and witchcraft. The king himself was immensely gifted as well as resourceful. He was said to speak twentytwo, twenty-five, fifty languages; and during his ‘heroic’ first seven years as king, as a fugitive in the interior of Pontus, he had trained his physique to great endurance and to a high resistance to poisons:

He bore a noble Persian name, and his family claimed descent from either Darius himself or one of his associates in the rebellion against the Median Magi. Small wonder that, in Persian-Parthian fashion, he claimed at the height of his success to be ‘Great King’ and ‘King of Kings’.

The extant ancient sources for Mithridates and his kingdom are numerous, and varied in length and detail. Some fifty ancient writers contribute, ranging from fragments of works by his courtiers and by contemporary scholars to late Roman breviaria and vitae which derive much of their material from the now lost books of Livy.