Rome’s Most Wanted Enemy – Poison King Mithradates Murdered 80,000 Roman Civilians

Ellen Lloyd - AncientPages.com - In the autumn of 88 B.C., more than 80,000 Roman civilians were murdered. The "mastermind" behind this gruesome attack was Mithradates VI Of Pontus (120-63 BCE), the Poison King.

When news about the horrible massacre reached the Roman Republic, King Mithradates was declared Rome’s ‘most wanted enemy. General Sulla  (138 B.C. -79 B.C.) was ordered to seek and destroy the man who was considered a considerable threat to the Roman Republic. However, this was not an easy task, and the wars between King Mithradates and Rome would drag on for decades, spanning two continents.

Left: King Mithradates. Credit: Public Domain - Right: Roman army. Credit: yeowatzup - CC BY 2.0

As Ancient Pages wrote earlier, King Mithradates was often referred to as the Poison King because he was a brilliant toxicologist. He was obsessed with poison and took small doses of a specially prepared poison to help him develop resistance if some should try to poison him.

King Mithradates Wanted To Create An Empire As Powerful As Rome

Mithradates ruled a small but wealthy kingdom on the Black Sea, but his goal was to create a powerful empire to rival Rome’s expanding dominions. Mithradates, who had murdered his own mother to become king, hated the Roman Empire. He regarded “Romans as the enemy of all humanity.”

He recruited ethnically diverse armies from distant lands and carefully looked for weaknesses in the Roman Republic. Perfectly aware of peoples’ dissatisfaction with the expansion of the Roman Empire and the tax burden, King Mithradates used the opportunity to strike back.

In 146 B.C., the Western part of the Mediterranean region and Greece were already under the control of the Roman Empire. In 133 B.C., the Roman Empire expanded and seized Pergamon in the western part of Asia Minor.

Unfair Taxes Ruined Peoples’ Lives

It was not long before Roman colonizers, traders, and tax collectors moved into the province.

The tax collectors were private individuals who demanded huge sums from locals. With the Roman Empire's support, these tax collectors ruined the lives of many poor people. Some families who could afford the demanded tax had to sell their children to pay. Things went so far that even the Romans acknowledged that they had lost control of the tax collection in the new province. People had many reasons to hate Roman rule.

Map of the Kingdom of Pontus, Before the reign of Mithridates VI (dark purple), after his conquests (purple), his conquests in the first Mithridatic wars (pink), and Pontus' ally, the Kingdom of Armenia (green). Credit: Wikipedia

In 88 B.C., a massacre of more than 80,000 unsuspecting civilians took place in Anatolia (western Turkey). The victims were Roman and Italian merchants, slave traders, and tax collectors, the deeply detested settlers in Rome’s new province of Asia. The massacre, carried out by ordinary Anatolians, Greeks, Jews, and other citizens of more than a dozen cities, wiped out the Roman presence in the region.

The organizer of the massacre was King Mithradates. This was the beginning of a long war between the Roman Empire and King Mithradates, legendary ruler of Pontus and creator of a formidable Black Sea Empire.

It took a long time, but finally, Mithridates and his troops were defeated by the Romans, and the king had to go into exile

Written by  Ellen Lloyd – AncientPages.com

Updated on Septermber 18, 2022

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