The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy Book

Of all historic topics, ancient history holds my interest the least. The things I know about the ancient world could fit comfortably in the chest pocket of a pair of overalls. They also fit comfortably in my head, along with all the other neat stuff I got going on in there.

Most of what I know about Rome I learned from the movies. Thanks to Stanley Kubrick, I know that Kirk Douglas led a slave revolt that nearly toppled Laurence Olivier. But he was crucified along with all his men, and only Jean Simmons (not that Gene Simmons) survived. I also know that Gladiator defeated Joaquin Phoenix with the help of Amistad's Djimon Honsou. There ends most of my knowledge of the glory that was Rome.

The books I have read about Roman history are mostly told from the point of view of Rome's enemies. Thus, I've read about Spartacus and his slave revolt, and about Hannibal crossing the Alps and winning his stunning victory at Cannae. These are the kinds of stories that appeal, I suppose, to most red-blooded Americans: the story of a rag-tag band of freedom-fighters attempting to defeat a colonial oppressor. (In other words, those stories remind us a little bit of us).

Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King takes as its subject King Mithradates, another in a long line of thorns in the side of the Roman Empire. He was King of Pontus - a Hellenistic state on the southern coast of the Black Sea - and ruled from 119 BC to 63 BC. He claimed to have descended from Alexander the Great, fought a number of wars against Rome, tried to create a universal antidote to poison, and eventually committed suicide upon his ultimate defeat. His great distinction, as far as I can tell, is in having a kickass nickname.

Unfortunately, this was not the book to start my potential lifelong passion for ancient history. Despite some laudatory reviews, I was disappointed with The Poison King.

Part of this, I admit, stems from my sneaking suspicion that we just don't know what the heck happened back in those days before Christ. So much of our knowledge is based on the kind of hearsay that would be laughed out of any court in the land; even a court comprised entirely of kangaroos; even if those kangaroos were wearing wigs and black robes. Time and again when you read about these olden times, you discover that the source is a person who wrote down something based on what someone else wrote down based on what someone else wrote down. In other words, we don't really know who the direct eyewitness was to these events, or if one even exists. Maybe Thucydides was duped by an Anatolian prankster who concocted the tales of the Mithridatic Wars after a hot afternoon of wine-drinking and sheep-licking.

Adrienne Mayor is aware of these gaps, and she tries to stuff them with other evidence, such as the inscriptions on old statues, or the engraving on old coins. When that fails, though, she is left to her suppositions. These suppositions make up the bulk of the book. During the narrative sections, there are a lot of modifiers to the language. Since Mayor doesn't know what Mithradates was doing during most of his life, she simply guesses. Accordingly, you see a lot of phrases that cause historians to shudder, such as "may have", "one senses", "we can assume" and - this is the worst - "almost certainly."

Now, I'm all for educated guesses. At times, in history, it's all we have. And certainly, Mayor is well-educated. She is entitled to make these guesses; she is even entitled to make things up, as long as she provides full disclosure that she is making stuff up (at the end of the book, for instance, when she posits out of thin air that Mithradates might have escaped death and may still be living in Hoboken, she makes sure to let you know it's speculation).

The problem is that the structure of The Poison King is shoddy. The book starts with a massacre of Roman citizens in 88 BC that may have been orchestrated by Mithradates, goes back in time to cover the uncertain time-period of his birth and early life, and lurches forward with a gap-ridden description of his rise to power. (His father was murdered, possibly by his mother, and Mithradates was exiled; he later returned to murder his mother and take the throne). The known-history and the reasonably-guessed-at-history do not fit together well. The transitions between straightforward narrative, where the author is telling a story, and analysis, where the author attempts to weigh evidence, are jarring and often involved long, meaningless digressions that tended to trail away from the book's substance. The result is book that seems mostly filler, like bread made of flour and sawdust.

I sensed a lot of padding in The Poison King. This wasn't helped by Mayor's constant repetition of potential ingredients for Mithradates' legendary universal antidote, or her constant listing of all the types of poisons that Mithradates might have used (Mayor is a scholar of ancient science, so poison is a specialty of hers. I'd sure like to be invited to one of her cocktail parties…but I probably won't be, now). She is obsessed with the notion of poisoning, and does not pass up the opportunity to speculate on how Mithradates killed his scheming mother:

Arsenic…was almost certainly the secret ingredient. Colorless, odorless, flavorless, arsenic could be added to any drink or dish. Mithradates knew that just sixty parts per million, or less than a tenth of an ounce, would be deadly in a goblet of rose-perfumed water or red wine…Mithradates, recalling the paradox of poisonous honey, savors the irony of creating a bittersweet treat. He stirs the arsenic powder into a pot of honey and drizzles it over the syrupy-sweet cakes…After dessert, the guests withdraw to admire the sunset. Within half an hour, the queen and her son sense a faint, metallic taste on their tongues. Beads of sweat glisten on their clammy brows as they become aware of impending nausea and stomach cramps. Saliva fills their mouths, but it is impossible to swallow. Their eyes take on an uncanny reddish sparkle. Suddenly the royal pair begin clawing at their throats, drooling and moaning. After an hour or so of vomiting and diarrhea, Mithradates' mother and his only rival are writhing in convulsions…By midnight, both are dead.

This excerpt, which is admittedly interesting, encapsulates what I didn't like about The Poison King, with the uncomfortable segues between known facts and speculation, and the way Mayor attempts to mount a present-tense narrative onto this shaky foundation.

The difficulty in any biography is capturing the essence of a human life with the written word. Even biographers with unfettered access to a subject's papers, diaries, and the subject himself struggle to translate a person onto paper. Mayor has a tougher task, since a couple thousand years separate her from the bearded whack-job she decided to write about.

Still, she doesn't really try to overcome this hurdle. We never really learn anything about the man: what he thought, or felt, or believed. The only thing Mayor tells us is that Mithradates spent a lot of time poisoning himself in small doses, sort of like Westley from The Princess Bride. Here, I can only speculate that he was preparing to beat Pompey in a battle of wits, much as Westley defeated Vizzini.

The Poison King's major failing, however, is that it failed to prove its own subtitle: that Mithradates really was Rome's deadliest enemy. Mayor neglects to prove that Mithradates was a great general, an inspiring leader, a threat to the Roman republic. I mean, you've called him Rome's deadliest enemy! That's a big claim. Deadlier than Hannibal, who crossed the Alps and invaded Italy proper? Hannibal, whose double envelopment at Cannae is still drooled over by military professionals?

When Mayor steps away from listing poisons long enough to describe a few battles, they are all crushing defeats. Mithradates, you see, got his butt kicked by three - count 'em - Roman generals: Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey the Great. He lost his kingdom, lost his armies, and resorted to mercy-killing his remaining family. Mayor even admits that Mithradates' "plan" to invade Italy was chimerical. He never took the first step towards actually threatening Rome's existence. In other words, he was a lot of talk and a beard.

This is, simply put, a weird book. It was clunky, scattershot, and surprisingly slow-moving for a story that includes a prisoner executed by having molten gold poured down his throat. (Probably where George R.R. Martin got that scene for A Game of Thrones!) There is an entire chapter speculating that its subject actually survived his own death. At one point, Mayor even includes a screenshot from a videogame to illustrate the concept of sea warfare. By the last page, I was not convinced that Mithradates was ever a big a danger to Rome as slow GDP growth, laziness or Silvio Berlusconi.

UPDATE: I've discovered that ancient history fans are among the most persistent trolls on the internet. I didn't like your book. Get over it. If you want to discuss the merits of the book, let's discuss. If you want to tell me to shut up, let me save you the time: I won't.