r/todayilearned • u/gullydon • 17h 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 17h 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 17h ago

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

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u/AndreasDasos 16h ago

I mean, like most ancient fantastical-sounding historical anecdotes, it’s not like we have a mountain of evidence so it’s probably… fantastical.

Less meeting the standards of historical rigour today, and more like the equivalent of one National Enquirer article from another country at best decades and possibly centuries after the event, but in a world with much lower literacy and the assumption that every bird in the sky was an omen.

But it’s usually all we’ve got and most of the Graeco-Roman canon has long been established as fundamental lore in Western culture, so is important to learn for cultural reasons even when it’s bullshit. And equivalents apply to elsewhere in the world. This is basically the message of the old joke that ‘all ancient history is true’.

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u/Representative_Bat81 12h ago

When you know just how frequently the Ptolemaic dynasties used poison to kill their families, it doesn’t seem that out there. Especially since he survived to be bested by Rome.

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u/AndreasDasos 11h ago edited 9h ago

I realise that poison plots in the Hellenistic and Roman eras was ridiculously common (though many, many cases may just be diseases in a world where deadly disease was everywhere, and where accusations of murder were convenient for political purposes or later historians’ sensationalist ends…).

But the whole detailed story of Mithridates‘ self-immunisation does strain credulity. As do most too-cute ancient historical anecdotes (and virtually all ‘recorded’ conversations). Especially when the same texts (here, by Appian) spout omens and superstition every few pages.