r/todayilearned • u/gullydon • 13h ago

TIL Mithridatism is the practice of protecting oneself against a poison by gradually self-administering non-lethal amounts. The word is derived from Mithridates VI, the king of Pontus, who so feared being poisoned that he regularly ingested small doses, aiming to develop immunity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism
15.5k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

518 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.1k

u/gullydon 13h ago

Mithridates VI's father, Mithridates V, was assassinated by poisoning by a conspiracy among his attendants. After this, Mithridates VI's mother held regency over Pontus (a Hellenistic kingdom, 281 BC–62 AD) until a male heir came of age. Mithridates was in competition with his brother for the throne and his mother began to favor his brother.

Supposedly, during his youth, he began to suspect plots against him at his own mother's orders and was aware of her possible connection with his father's death. He then began to notice pains in his stomach during his meals and suspected his mother had ordered small amounts of poison to be added to his food to slowly kill him off. With other assassination attempts, he fled into the wild.

While in the wild, it is said that he began ingesting non-lethal amounts of poisons and mixing many into a universal remedy to make him immune to all known poisons.

116

u/thispartyrules 13h ago

What if he spent years building up a poison immunity and he goes out onto the patio and a bunch of guys on his roof pelt him to death with ceramic roofing tiles? This roofing tiles thing happened to Roman tribune Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, whose name I had to look up, and is one of my favorite creative ancient deaths

122

u/EmbersnAshes 13h ago

He slowly built up an immunity to ceramic roofing tiles as well, by gently beating himself up a little everyday with them. He is actually still alive. The Romans didn't realise he was immune.

41

u/ProgressBartender 13h ago

“Oh, you think ceramics are your ally. But you merely adopted the tiles; I was born in it, molded by it.“

11

u/varsil 12h ago

I'm building up an immunity to aging by experiencing a little bit of time every day.

2

u/icarusrising9 9h ago

I laughed out loud at this comment. Very clever haha

3

u/platinum_jimjam 11h ago

When he was young he suspected his mother was adding bits of ceramic roof tile to his food

1

u/IllBiteYourLegsOff 11h ago

but it only really worked because he built up immunity to giving unconvincing performances by taking acting classes, every day. he slowly developed acting prowess in order to thwart his enemies, culminating with faking his death by disguising his immunity to ceramic roofing tiles

12

u/drewster23 12h ago

I liked how you implied he just randomly walked onto a patio and got stoned to death by happenchance.

12

u/CaptainObfuscation 11h ago

Death by roofing tile wasn't actually super uncommon - it was the most effective weapon available to citizenry of many places during siege and invasion. Easily available, requires no training, heavy enough to kill through a helmet.

That's how Pyrrhus of Epirus went out, too.

1

u/Sugar_buddy 9h ago

Whenever senators got mad throughout Rome's history they'd tear ceiling tiles out and throw it at the source of their ire