Mithridates & Mad Honey
- sulla80
- Mar 21
- 10 min read
Updated: Mar 21
Over the last decade or so my collection has grown from an interest in the late Roman Republican period, with Sulla and the events of the 80s BC as the seed for the collection. A portrait coin of Mithridates had been on my list for most of that time, but I had not been willing to commit to the price of a tetradrachm of Mithridates VI. Mithridates VI ruled Pontus from 120 to 63 BCE and built a power that, for a time, posed a significant challenge to Roman dominance in Asia Minor.
This coin fills that gap. This is not simply a portrait of Mithridates. It is a civic bronze of Smyrna, struck in the years around the First Mithridatic War, and it preserves a brief moment when one of the great cities of Roman Asia acknowledged the authority of Rome’s most dangerous eastern rival.
The Coin
Ionia, Smyrna Bronze circa 88-85, Æ 25.00 mm., 13.28 g. Hermogenes and Phrixos magistrates.
Obv: Diademed head of Mithridates VI right
Rev: ZMYPNAIΩN right, ERMOGENHΣ ΦPIXOΣ left, Nike walking right, holding wreath in right hand, palm over left shoulder
Ref: de Callatay 293. Milne 340.
Notes: Very rare. Good Very fine. From the Dr. W. R. collection (a large collection auctioned by Kuenker). Here are some past auction photos for this coin.
You say "Mithri" I say "Mithra": a note on spelling before going further. There are many references using Mithradates, and I will consistently use Mithridates, influenced by the Greek spelling Μιθριδάτης, though both are interchangeable. The name is not originally Greek but Persian, Miθra-dāta, meaning “given by Mithra,” the Persian solar deity. Auction catalogues typically use Mithradates; most historians writing in English prefer Mithridates.
This coin comes with a story of Smyrna caught between empires: Rome, and the Pontic king who presented himself as a liberator.
The Setting
Smyrna occupied an advantageous position in the ancient Aegean. On the slopes and shoreline near Mount Pagos, at the head of the Smyrnaean Gulf, the city was the principal port for the Hermus valley, from which the wealth of Lydia descended to the sea.
Strabo, writing in the following century, described Smyrna as among the finest cities of Asia Minor:
"After Smyrna had been rased by the Lydians, its inhabitants continued for about four hundred years to live in villages. Then they were reassembled into a city by Antigonus, and afterwards by Lysimachus, and their city is now the most beautiful of all; a part of it is on a mountain and walled, but the greater part of it is in the plain near the harbour and near the Metroüm and near the gymnasium."
-Strabo, Geography, 14.1.37In 133 BC, when the last Attalid king, Attalus III, died and bequeathed his kingdom to Rome, Smyrna became part of the new Roman province of Asia. For roughly forty years before this coin was struck, the city had lived under Roman provincial administration. Those decades were profitable for Roman creditors and the tax-farming publicani, operating on five-year contracts. The province of Asia was systematically exploited; the burden of taxation and debt created anger that would eventually have consequences.
It is this local background that gives the coin its force. A portrait of Mithridates on a civic coin of Smyrna was not decorative - it was political.
The Expansion of Pontus
Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Mithridates VI of Pontus had already clashed over Cappadocia in the 90s BC. A few years later, in 89 BC, Rome was preoccupied with the Social War against its Italian allies. Its military resources were strained and its attention divided. Mithridates VI, who controlled a formidable army and a sprawling kingdom around the Black Sea, took advantage of that distraction. He swept through Bithynia and Phrygia, defeated the outnumbered Roman forces in Asia, and by early 88 BC had extended his control to the Aegean coastline.
This is the context in which Smyrna found itself recalculating its loyalties.
The Asiatic Vespers
What followed reshaped the history of Rome and Asia. At a prearranged signal, on a single day in 88 BC, communities throughout the Roman province of Asia turned on their Roman and Italian residents. Appian, writing more than two centuries later but drawing on earlier sources, gives the number of dead as 80,000; Plutarch gives the still higher figure of 150,000. Modern historians have questioned both figures, but not the magnitude of the event itself. Whatever the precise death toll, the massacre marked a decisive break. Smyrna, like most of the Ionian cities, came under Pontic control in the aftermath.
The animosity toward Rome had been building for years. The Roman publicani were notorious for corruption and extortion, plundering the region’s wealth and driving many into poverty or debt slavery. Roman merchants and moneylenders often worsened the situation with predatory loans. Mithridates established Pergamum as his headquarters. Appian says that he offered Greek cities freedom, cancelled debts in some places, granted citizenship to resident foreigners, and freed slaves. He presented himself as the champion of Greek freedom against Roman exploitation.
That claim was propaganda, but it was effective propaganda, and for a time it worked.
It was within this political atmosphere that Smyrna issued the coin with the Pontic king’s portrait.
The Poison King
Mithridates’ later reputation has always made him larger than life. Even before considering the wars, there is the question of poison.
Where does the epithet “Poison King” come from, beyond Adrienne Mayor’s memorable title? Mithridates’ father died by poisoning at a banquet, and Laodice VI, his mother, was suspected. From an early age Mithridates had reason to fear poison, and ancient tradition presents him as studying poisons for both defensive and offensive use.
Mayor calls him the first experimental toxicologist for his investigations into poisons and antidotes:
Mithridates is recognized as the first experimental toxicologist for his extensive investigations into a vast number of poisons and antidotes. Fearing assassination by poison, he gathered a team of botanists, physicians, and shamans seeking to create a “universal antidote” that would protect him from all poisons.
-Mayor, Adrienne. Mithridates of Pontus and His Universal AntidoteThe modern explanation sometimes offered for acquired resistance to poisoning is enzymatic activation or other metabolic adaptation. Today this is called mithridatism.
Poison belonged not only to Mithridates but also to the wider regions from which he drew power. Strabo preserves a striking example from the campaigns of Pompey in Pontus, when the Heptacometae, a mountain people of the densely forested highlands, used what is now called “mad honey” against Roman soldiers. This honey, produced by bees feeding on rhododendron, contains grayanotoxins that interfere with sodium channels and can cause dizziness, disorientation, nausea, vomiting, bradycardia, hypotension, hallucinations, and in severe cases death.
Strabo’s account is vivid:
The Heptacometae cut down three maniples of Pompey's army when they were passing through the mountainous country; for they mixed bowls of the crazing honey which is yielded by the tree-twigs, and placed them in the roads, and then, when the soldiers drank the mixture and lost their senses, they attacked them and easily disposed of them.
Strabo, Geography, XII.3Whether or not Mithridates himself directed such tactics, the anecdote is a useful reminder that toxic substances were not merely the stuff of royal paranoia or later legend. In the Pontic world they could form part of practical warfare as well.
The legend of Mitridates was put into verse by A. E. Housman in “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff,” from A Shropshire Lad (1896), where the king’s habitual dosing becomes a metaphor for preparing oneself for life’s bitterness.
Still, for this coin the poison lore matters chiefly because it reminds us that the portrait is not that of a minor local dynast. On the bronze coinage of Smyrna is the image of a figure of continental scale and legend.
The First Mithridatic War
Preparing for war in the East, Sulla and Marius clashed in Rome, and Sulla ultimately led the Roman response, leaving behind a political catastrophe at home. In Greece he defeated Mithridatic forces at Chaeronea and Orchomenus. Yet his need to return to Italy and confront his domestic enemies pushed him toward negotiation, and in 85 BC he concluded the Treaty of Dardanus. The treaty restored Roman control in Asia Minor while allowing Mithridates to remain king of Pontus.
Sulla’s own soldiers were not pleased with the settlement. Plutarch says:
"But Sulla perceived that his soldiers were incensed at the peace which he had made; they thought it a terrible thing to see the most hostile of kings, who had caused one hundred and fifty thousand of the Romans in Asia to be massacred in a single day to go sailing off with wealth and spoils from Asia, which he had for four years continued to plunder and levy taxes on. He therefore defended himself to them by saying that he would not have been able to carry on war with Mithridates and Fimbria too, if they had both joined forces against him."
Plutarch, Life of Sulla, 24.4Sulla defended himself by arguing that he could not wage war effectively against Mithridates abroad while facing Fimbria and civil enemies elsewhere. Appian likewise preserves Sulla’s speech at the conclusion of the treaty, listing the crimes of Mithridates against Rome.
For Smyrna this bronze is from an unstable period. The city lived through the sudden collapse of Roman authority, the arrival of Pontic power, and then Rome’s return.
The Bitter End
The story of Smyrna under Mithridates did not end comfortably for the king. Later in the war, Smyrna was among the Ionian cities that revolted against Pontic control. After the Roman province of Asia was re-established, Smyrna was granted privileges and honors for having sided with the Romans against Mithridates.
Mithridates himself would survive the First Mithridatic War, but only to fight Rome again. In the third and final conflict, Pompey routed what remained of his army at the Battle of the Lycus River in 66 BC, inflicting a defeat from which Pontus never recovered. Mithridates fled across the Black Sea to the Bosporan Kingdom, ruled by his son Machares. He killed Machares, who had allied with Rome, and seized the throne.
Pharnaces II, another son of Mithridates, judged that submission to Rome offered a more viable future and rebelled. Mithridates was eventually cornered with no remaining support and, poetically enough, failed to kill himself with poison. When poison failed, he prevailed upon his trusted officer Bituitus to kill him, and Bituitus ended the life of Mithridates VI.
Appian gives him these last words:
Although I've kept watch and ward against all the poisons that one takes with his food, I have not provided against that domestic poison, always the most dangerous to kings, the treachery of army, children, and friends."
-Appian, Mithridatic Wars, XXIII 111The civic issue from Smyrna, struck when the balance of power in Asia Minor briefly seemed reversible. Rome would return. Mithridates would fall. Smyrna would reposition itself and be rewarded for its later loyalty. But for a short period, this coin announced a different order. That is what makes it compelling.
References
Appian. Roman History: The Mithridatic Wars. Translated by Horace White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912.
Badian, Ernst. "Rome, Athens, and Mithridates." American Journal of Ancient History 1.2 (1976): 105–128.
Carbone, Lucia F. “Roman Taxation and Monetary Production: The Case of the Provincia Asia up to 48 BC.” In Capitalism’s Past: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Pre-Modern Capitalism, edited by M. Kelly and P. Pachà, 1–36. 2021.
Carbone, Lucia F. “The Introduction of Roman Coinages in Asia (133 BC – 1st Century AD).” In Graecia Capta? Rome et les monnayages de l’Egée aux IIe–Ier s. av. J.-C., edited by R. H. J. Ashton and N. Badoud, 233–293. Basel: Schwabe, 2021.
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de Callataÿ, François. L’histoire des guerres mithridatiques vue par les monnaies. Numismatica Lovaniensia, vol. 18. Louvain-la-Neuve: Département d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, Séminaire de numismatique Marcel Hoc, 1997.
Gunduz, A., Turedi, S., Russell, R. M., & Ayaz, F. A. (2008). Clinical review of grayanotoxin/mad honey poisoning past and present. Clinical Toxicology, 46(5), 437–442.
Hind, John G.F. "Mithridates." In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. IX, 2nd ed., edited by J.A. Crook, Andrew Lintott, and Elizabeth Rawson, 129–164. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Lewis, R. G. “Sulla and Smyrna.” The Classical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1991): 126–129.
Mayor, Adrienne. "Mithridates of Pontus and His Universal Antidote." In Toxicology in Antiquity, edited by Philip Wexler, 21–34. History of Toxicology and Environmental Health, vol. 1. Academic Press, 2014.
Mayor, Adrienne. The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Madsen, Jesper Majbom. “The Ambitions of Mithridates VI: Hellenistic Kingship and Modern Interpretations.” In Mithridates VI and the Pontic Kingdom, edited by Jakob Munk Højte, 191–202. Black Sea Studies 9. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009.
McGing, Brian C. The Foreign Policy of Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus. Mnemosyne Supplement 89. Leiden: Brill, 1986.
McGing, Brian C. “Mithridates VI Eupator: Victim or Aggressor?” In Mithridates VI and the Pontic Kingdom, edited by Jakob Munk Højte, 203–216. Black Sea Studies 9. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009.
Milne, J. "The Autonomous Coinage of Smyrna" in NC 1927, pp. 1-107, pls. 1-5. (nos. 67 - 358)
Plutarch. Life of Sulla. In Parallel Lives. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916.
Gunduz, A., Turedi, S., Russell, R. M., & Ayaz, F. A. (2008). Clinical review of grayanotoxin/mad honey poisoning past and present. Clinical Toxicology, 46(5), 437–442. https://doi.org/10.1080/15563650701666306
Sherwin-White, A.N. Roman Foreign Policy in the East, 168 BC to AD 1. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984.
Strabo. Geography, 14.1.37. Translated by H.L. Jones. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929.
Thonemann, Peter. The Hellenistic World: Using Coins as Sources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Wroth, Warwick. A Catalogue of the Greek Coins in the British Museum: Pontus, Paphlagonia, Bithynia and the Kingdom of Bosporus. London: British Museum, 1889.
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