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Argonauts; and Xenophon, who passed along its coast on his celebrated retreat, was the first to compare these legends with the actual state of things. He found the country peopled, like the adjoining table-land, by the Cappadocians or "White Syrians"so called to distinguish them from the swarthy inhabitants of Syria, Assyria, and Babylonia-who, the extreme outpost of the Semitic race towards the west, were among the most hardy of the whole family. The land, thus rich in its own resources, was placed between the more fertile and civilized regions in the west of the peninsula, whose boundless wealth invited the enterprise of the conqueror, and the mountains of Armenia and the coasts of the eastern Euxine, which offered temptations to hardy adventure and refuge in case of adversity. About the very time when Xenophon visited the country-the beginning of the fourth century B.C.-its independence was won by the satrap Ariobarzanes, a lineal descendant of Darius Hystaspis, and the kingdom is considered to have been founded by his son Mithridates I.,† from whom the sceptre descended through eight generations to MITHRIDATES VI., surnamed EUPATOR and the GREAT. The family, which was thus of the purest Persian blood, formed marriage alliances with the Greek kings of Syria, and adopted much of the mixed Hellenic civilization which prevailed in Western Asia.

Mithridates was a boy in his twelfth year, when his father, Mithridates V. Euergetes, who has been mentioned as an ally of Rome, was cut off by the dagger of an assassin; but his natural powers and his early training had already prepared him to cope with the dangers that at once beset him. "His guardian, and even as it would seem his own mother, called to take a part in the government by his father's will, conspired against the boy-king's life. It is said that, in order to escape from the daggers of his legal protectors, he became of his own accord a wanderer; and, a fugitive in his own kingdom during seven years, changing his resting-place night after night, he led the life of a homeless 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 a Samson and a Rustem. These traits, * Some ethnographers contend for a mixture of Aryan blood in the peoples of the north and east of Asia Minor.

This name, more correctly spelt Mithradates, is a sacred appellation belonging to the royal family of Persia, and signifying "given by the Sun" (from Mithra, the Sun, and the root da, give).

however, belong to his character just as the crown of clouds belongs to the character of the highest mountain-peaks; the outline of the figure appears in both cases only more coloured or fantastic, not disturbed or essentially altered. The armour 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 wild steed, and was able by changing horses to accomplish 120 miles in a day; as a charioteer, he drove 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 table also-he arranged banquetting 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 the Greek mysteries occupied not a few of the king's hours-and by a rude adoption of Hellenic civilization. He was fond of Greek art and music; that is to say, he collected precious articles, rich furniture, old Persian and Greek objects 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. He prosecuted the experimental study of poisons and antidotes as an important branch of the business of government, and tried to inure his body to particular poisons. What really distinguishes Mithridates amidst the multitude of similar sultans is his boundless activity. He disappeared one 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 Asia Minor, and reconnoitred everywhere the country and the people. 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. *** 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 Mahomet II. and Suleiman. Notwithstanding his Hellenic culture, which sat on him not much better than the Roman armour 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 looked like genius. *. He was the only enemy, before the Parthian wars, who gave serious trouble to the Romans in the East. The Mithridatic wars formed at once the last movement of the political opposition offered by Hellas to Rome, and the beginning of a revolt against the Roman supremacy resting on very different and far deeper grounds of antagonism-the national reaction of the Asiatics against the Occidentals." * The peninsula of Asia Minor, peopled by the two great races, the Semitic and Indo-European, in a mixture which has not yet been satisfactorily analyzed, and overlaid with a network of Greek cities which groaned under the oppression of the Roman proconsuls and publicans, offered a fit theatre for the enterprize which Mithridates spent the first years of his reign in strengthening himself to undertake.

From his very accession, he had a special ground of quarrel with the Romans, who had resumed during his minority the gift of Lesser Phrygia, with which his father's alliance had been rewarded. But, instead of making any premature attack, he sought first those accessions of empire to the East and North, which he steadily pursued during the greater part of his reign. Gradually extending his power over Colchis and the Caucasian region on the eastern and northern shore of the Euxine, he came into contact with the kingdom of BoSPORUS, which had risen out of the old Greek settlements in the neighbourhood of the Cimmerian Bosporus, with a capital at Panticapæum (Kertch) in the Tauric Chersonese (Crimea). This kingdom was founded as early as the time of the battle of Salamis (B.c. 480) by the Archæanactidæ, who were succeeded, about B.C. 438, by the line of Spartacus. These reigned down to Parisades, who was glad to purchase protection from the Sarmatians, Roxolani, and other barbarous tribes of the steppes about the sea of Azov, by becoming the tributary of the king of Pontus. After his death Mithridates incorporated the kingdom in his dominions; he made its capital a favourite residence, and found a refuge in the Crimea when he was driven by the Romans out of Asia.† On the East of Pontus, Mithridates subdued the

* Mommsen, History of Rome, Vol. III. pp. 275-8.

The beautiful Greek temple at Kertch, ascribed to Mithridates, with its fine museum of local antiquities, was wantonly destroyed during the Crimean War.

mountain tribes on the borders of Armenia, added Lesser Armenia to his kingdom, and cemented by the hand of his daughter an alliance with Tigranes, king of Great Armenia. These conquests provided an unlimited supply of hardy soldiers, and gave him the maritime command of the Euxine.

Mithridates now felt himself strong enough to attempt schemes of aggrandizement in Asia Minor. Claiming the principality of Paphlagonia under the will of the last of those native rulers, who boasted their descent from that Pylæmenes who had led the Paphlagonians to the aid of Troy, Mithridates formed an alliance with Nicomedes II., King of Bithynia, for the partition of the country. It was the greater object of his ambition to bring again beneath his rule the large region of Cappadocia, to which Pontus itself had originally belonged, and whose satraps had achieved their independence in the wars that followed the death of Alexander. About B.C. 96, the reigning king, Ariarathes VI., was killed by an assassin named Gordius, who was no doubt instigated by Mithridates, the king's own brother-in-law. A contest ensued between rival claimants set up by Mithridates and Nicomedes and the sons of the late king, one of whom was killed and another expelled by Mithridates. The Romans now thought it time to interpose, and Sulla, who was proprætor in Cilicia, received orders to march into Cappadocia. Mithridates was still so cautious of a direct collision with Rome, that he left the defence of the province to Gordius and an Armenian contingent sent by Tigranes, whom Sulla with his small force drove out of the country. It was in following up this success that the Roman eagles first appeared on the Euphrates, which was destined soon to be once more "the bordering flood," dividing the Eastern Empire of the Parthians from the Western Empire of the Romans. As yet, however, neither was content to own such a divided dominion. Sulla doubtless looked across the stream to the lands overrun by Alexander, in the assurance that their reconquest would be a matter of course when the time should come, while the Parthians anticipated their victories over Crassus and Julian. So, when the Parthian king Arsaces IX., surnamed Mithridates II., who was then at variance with Tigranes, sent an embassy to meet the Roman general on the Euphrates, there was a contest for the precedence due to the master of the world. Sulla was more exalted in the eyes of his countrymen by his persistence in assuming the place of honour between the king of Cappadocia and the Parthian envoy than by the check he had given to Mithridates, and the Parthian was put to death by his offended

hood;-of Q. Catulus, who at last atoned for the distinction of sharing in the triumph of Marius over the Cimbri by obeying the stern command to die. Nor was the death of the noblest Romans enough to slake the thirst of Marius for revenge. They might have said with the victims of Domitian, "præcipua miseriarum pars erat, videre et aspici, cum suspiria nostra subscriberentur." Many who came to salute him, doubtful of their reception, read their sentence in his silence or his averted look. The bodies of the murdered were denied burial, and in some cases dragged with insult through the streets. Sulla had set the example of affixing the heads of his victims to the Rostra; but we do not read of his rising from table to salute the assassins who brought the ghastly offerings. In short, Marius was possessed with a frenzy of destruction, to which there is scarcely a parallel in history except Marat, and which Sertorius and the few moderate men of the party in vain entreated Cinna to check.

On these waves of blood Marius was at length borne forward to the seventh consulship he had so long expected; but still it needed a contempt for all constitutional forms to fulfil the prophecy. Without even the show of an election, Cinna reappointed himself as consul for the ensuing year, and named Marius as his colleague. But when, after those long years of waiting which had hardened his heart and envenomed his revenge, he attained the summit of his wishes, not as the chosen head of a free state but as the usurping chief of a band of assassins, his hope seemed to have been granted but in mockery. After twelve days spent in a delirium alternately of fever and drunkenness, he expired on the 13th of January, B.C. 86. "He died, more than seventy years old, in the full possession of what he called power and honour, and in his bed; but Nemesis assumes various shapes, and does not always expiate blood with blood. Was there no sort of retaliation in the fact, that Rome and Italy now breathed more freely on the news of the death of the famous deliverer of the people, than at the tidings of the battle on the Raudine plain ?" (Mommsen). The organized system of murder was at once put down by the energy of Sertorius, who found a pretext for calling 4000 of the bandits together, and then cut them down with the swords of his trusty Celts. But the government, or rather tyranny, remained in the hands of Cinna, till he was overthrown in his fourth consulship (B.c. 84) by the return of Sulla. Meanwhile, L. Valerius Flaccus was ap* It is recorded that Marius thus showed his delight at receiving the head of the orator Antonius.

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