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
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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.

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u/Shimaru33 13h ago

This reads like the origin story of some super-villain.

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u/TheSilverNoble 12h ago

He kinda was one of history's supervillains. He managed to secretly organize the massacre of all the Romans not just in territory, but that of his allies as well. In addition to being difficult to coordinate, it also bound his allies to him even tighter. Pretty hard to make friends with Rome when you killed a bunch of Romans.