Kingdom of Pontus

A Black Sea kingdom whose last king fought Rome for a quarter of a century and nearly won. Pontus was founded around 281 BCE by a dynasty claiming Persian royal descent, in the aftermath of Alexander's empire breaking apart, and it governed a Greek coastal fringe and an Anatolian interior with different languages and institutions. Its wealth came from Black Sea grain, timber, iron and the harbour at Sinope. Mithridates VI, who took the throne around 120 BCE, expanded around the whole sea, absorbed the Bosporan kingdom in Crimea, and made himself the leader of Greek resentment against Roman tax farmers. In 88 BCE he ordered the Asiatic Vespers, the coordinated killing in one day of tens of thousands of Romans and Italians resident in Asia Minor, which made any settlement impossible. Three wars followed against Sulla, Lucullus and finally Pompey. Mithridates was famously afraid of poison and took small doses to build immunity, a practice named mithridatism after him; when he tried to kill himself in 63 BCE it reportedly failed and he had a guard do it. His physician's recipes were still being copied in the middle ages. Pontus became a Roman province. A Greek-speaking population remained on that coast until 1923. Sinope and later Amaseia served as capitals. The kingdom's rock-cut royal tombs survive at Amasya in northern Turkey. Mithridates was said to speak over twenty languages of his subjects. Pontic Greek is still spoken by small communities in Greece and the Caucasus. The name simply means the sea, from the Greek for the Black Sea.

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