Mithridates VI Eupator

Mithridates VI of Pontus fought Rome for forty years and is said to have made himself immune to poison. Born around 135 BC, he came to the throne at about eleven, and the tradition has him flee into the wilderness for years to escape his mother's regency and take small doses of every known poison to build tolerance. He built a kingdom around the Black Sea, absorbing Colchis, the Crimea and much of Anatolia, and presented himself as both a Persian king and a Greek liberator. In 88 BC he overran the Roman province of Asia and ordered the killing of every Roman and Italian resident on a single day — the Asiatic Vespers. Ancient sources give figures of eighty thousand or more, and the number is doubtful; the intent was to make reconciliation impossible and to bind the Greek cities to him by shared guilt. Sulla defeated his armies at Chaeronea and Orchomenus in 86 BC, and made a lenient peace so as to return to the civil war in Rome. The second and third wars followed. Lucullus drove him out of Pontus and pursued him into Armenia, and Pompey completed it, defeating him at the Lycus in 66 BC. He fled to the Crimea and was planning to invade Italy overland through the Danube when his son Pharnaces revolted. Besieged in his own citadel at Panticapaeum in 63 BC, he tried to poison himself and it failed — the tradition attributes it to his tolerance — and he ordered a Gallic bodyguard to kill him with a sword.

• Lived: 134 BCE – 63 BCE
• Nationality: Pontic
• Roles: king, military_leader