It is true that the Asiatic bore even this torture with his inexhaustible passive endurance; but it was not patience or reflection that made him bear it peacefully. It was rather the peculiarly Oriental want of power to take the initiative; and in these peaceful lands, among these effeminate nations, strange and terrible things might happen if once there should appear among them a man who knew how to give the signal for revolt.
There reigned at that time in the kingdom of Pontus Mithridates VI, surnamed Eupator, who traced back his lineage on the father’s side, in the sixteenth generation to King Darius, son of Hystaspes, in the eighth to Mithridates I, the founder of the Pontic Empire, and was on the mother’s side descended from the Alexandridæ and the Seleucidæ. After the early death of his father, Mithridates Euergetes, who fell by the hand of an assassin at Synope, he had received the title of king when a boy of eleven years old; but the diadem had only brought to him trouble and danger. It is said that in order to escape from the daggers of his legal protectors, he became of his own accord a wanderer; and during seven years, changing his resting-place night after night, a fugitive in his own kingdom, led the life of a lonely hunter.
Thus the boy grew into a mighty man. Although our accounts regarding him are in substance traceable to written records of contemporaries, yet the legendary tradition, which is generated with the rapidity of lightning in the East, early adorned the mighty king with many of the traits of its Samson and Rustem. These traits, however, belong to his character just as the crown of clouds belong to the highest mountain peaks; the outline of the figure appears in both cases only more colored and fantastic, not disturbed or essentially altered.
The armor which fitted the gigantic frame of King Mithridates excited the wonder of the Asiatics, and still more that of the Italians. As a runner he overtook the swiftest deer; as a rider he broke in the wildest steed, and was able by changing horses to accomplish one hundred and twenty miles in a day; as a charioteer he drove with sixteen in hand, and gained in competition many a prize—it was dangerous, no doubt, in such sport to carry off victory from the king.
In hunting on horseback he hit the game at full gallop, and never missed his aim. He challenged competition at the table also; he arranged banqueting matches and carried off in person the prizes proposed for the most substantial eater and the hardest drinker. His intellectual wants he satisfied by the wildest superstition—the interpretation of dreams and of the Greek mysteries occupied not a few of the king’s hours—and by a rude adoption of the Hellenic civilization. He was fond of Greek art and music—that is to say, he collected precious articles, rich furniture, old Persian and Greek articles of luxury—his cabinet of rings was famous—he had constantly Greek historians, philosophers, and poets in his train; and proposed prizes at his court festivals, not only for the greatest eaters and drinkers, but also for the merriest jester and the best singer.
Such was the man; the sultan corresponded. In the East, where the relation between the ruler and the ruled bears the relation of natural rather than of moral law, the subject resembles the dog alike in fidelity and in falsehood, the ruler is cruel and distrustful. In both respects Mithridates has hardly been surpassed. By his orders there died or pined in perpetual captivity, for real or alleged treason, his mother, his brother, his sister espoused to him, three of his sons, and as many of his daughters. Still more revolting, perhaps, is the fact that among his secret papers were found sentences of death, drawn up beforehand, against his most confidential servants.
In like manner it was a genuine trait of the sultan that he afterward, for the mere purpose of depriving his enemy of trophies of victory, caused his whole harem to be killed, and distinguished his favorite concubine, a beautiful Ephesian, by allowing her to choose the mode of death. He prosecuted the experimental studies of poisons and antidotes as an important branch of the business of government, and tried to inure his body to particular poisons. He had early learned to look for treason and assassination at the hands of everybody, especially his nearest relations, and he had early learned to practice them against everybody, and most of all against those nearest him; of which the necessary consequence—attested by history—was that all his undertakings finally miscarried through the perfidy of those whom he trusted.
At the same time we meet with isolated traits of high-minded justice. When he punished traitors, he ordinarily spared those who were involved in the crime solely through their personal relations with the leading culprits; but such fits of equity are to be met with in every barbarous tyrant. What really distinguishes Mithridates amid the multitude of similar sultans is his boundless activity. He disappeared one fine morning from his palace, and remained unheard of for months, so that he was given over as lost; when he returned, he had wandered incognito through all anterior Asia, and reconnoitered everywhere the country and the people.
In like manner he was not only generally fluent in speech, but he administered justice to each of the twenty-two nations over which he ruled in its own language, without needing an interpreter—a trait significant of the versatile East. His whole activity as a ruler bears the same character. So far as we know, his energies, like those of every other sultan, were spent in collecting treasures, in assembling armies—which were usually, in his earlier years at least, led against the enemy not by the king in person, but by some Greek condottiere—in efforts to add new satrapies to the old.
Of higher elements—desire to advance civilization, earnest leadership of the national opposition, special gifts of genius—there are found, in our traditional accounts at least, no distinct traces in Mithridates, and we have no reason to place him on a level even with the great rulers of the Osmans, such as Mohammed II and Suleiman. Notwithstanding his Hellenic culture, which sat on him not much better than his Roman armor on his Cappadocians, he was throughout an Oriental of the ordinary stamp, coarse, full of the most sensual appetites, superstitious, cruel, perfidious, and unscrupulous, but so vigorous in organization, so powerful in physical endowments, that his defiant laying about him and his unshaken courage in resistance frequently look like talent, sometimes even like genius.