With respect to Spartacus and Hannibal, no one man haunted the Roman republic more than Mithridates the Great. For while the rebel slave and the son of Carthage both managed to rebel, briefly, against Roman rule, Mithridates practically lived the whole of his life in defiance of the great republic, holding his own against many of its armies, captained by some of its most legendary generals. His voice comes down to us through history, impelling us to rebel against tyranny, to not settle for less than our freedom, a remarkable feat given that the rebel king, by all rights, should not have lived beyond boyhood.
In the time of the Roman republic, royal courts were fractious and dangerous places where treachery against ones own blood was refined to an art. Mithridates' mother was a gleeful practitioner of the poisonous arts, a fact which seems to have instilled in her son two lifelong passions: suspicion of all womenkind and the quest to find the perfect curative. The former poisoned Mithridates' relationships while the latter poisoned his body. But as Ms. Mayor's account of the great king explains so clearly, it was his systematic approach to the pursuit of the perfect potion which allowed him to build up a legendary resistance to all toxins, a fact which did as much as his rebellion to transform him into a legend of history. Sweeping aside his mother and compelling his sister into marriage, Mithridates set about his lifelong quest of defying Rome by learning as much as he could from his land and his people. A descendent of Alexander the Great's generals and an admirer of the great conquerer, he took up many of Alexander's practices, living his life as much in the saddle as he did in his palaces. In doing so, it seems sometimes as if his life is one, continuous adventure, with fortunes now rising and now waning in the war against Italy.
Ms. Mayor, a scholar at Stanford University, captures the whole of Mithridates' vast life, devoting as much time to his experimentation with various poisons and curatives as she does to the uprising against Rome for which he is known. Though she indulges in a great deal of speculation, thanks to the incomplete nature of the historical record, her conjectures seem sensible and logical, illuminating the life of a man for whom we have no contemporary equivalent. For his desire to be free seems to have been married to a kind of ruthless cruelty the modern world finds appalling. Animating such a giant figure, making some sense of the myths and the legends, a challenge Ms. Mayor more than manages.
Who isn't up for a good rebellion? After all, our love affair with the underdog must emanate from somewhere. Mithridates is the ultimate story of devoting oneself to the unwinnable war because it's right to fight for ones principles. Unless one has an active dislike for history, the journey will not fail to entertain or edify. (3/5 Stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment