Reviews for Mithradates and Spartacus - and why to avoid St John's Wort

Mithradates was a king with a secret formula for long life. For that reason alone he was once a very famous mass-murderer and proto-terrorist yet now, just as the fashion for natural remedies against the poisons of the world, could hardly be higher, he is almost forgotten.

The King of Pontus was a political and military  enemy of Rome, as I described over the New Year in a long review of Adrienne Mayor's new biography for the excellent US website truthdig. But his secret survival formula - to judge from the reaction of readers here - offers much the greater fascination.

The details of how to make this Mithradateum remain a mystery even now, although there is unlikely to be a more thorough weighing of the possibilities than Mayor gives.

 The most practical message that this reviewer took away with him was “beware St. John’s wort,” a natural replacement for Prozac which, it seems, does stimulate resistance to toxins but does other bad things besides, especially to the liver. Chemically-fascinated readers will also find fine pages in The Poison King  on the fate of slaves in arsenic mines, the use and sources of naphtha and the advantage to be gained from eating the testicles of bark-chewing beavers who had made an early discovery of aspirin.

Mithradates was a contemporary of Spartacus, my own present subject about whom other reviewers have been writing this week. Mayor suggests that if the two men had managed to combine forces, there would have been a much greater Roman need for Prozac substitutes than there ever was - and rather depressing for all of us who write about the classics too.

Comments

[Dion Per Sona]

Mithradites was the man reported to have punished Crassus (Roman slumlord) for his greed by feeding him molten gold.

[peter stothard]

Mithradates poured gold down the throat of Manius Aquillius in 88BC , possibly inspiring the King of Parthia to do the same to the crucifier of Spartacus's men (and slum landlord) , Marcus Licinius Crassus thirty five years later.

[Oliver Nicholson]

Mithridates, he died old

[harry]

Crassus wasn't killed with molten gold, he was just stabbed while attempting to negotiate a surrender to the Parthians.

There is no secret to Mithridates' poison survival method - as a youth he made himself take small, regular doses of all the major poisons so that his body built up a resistance.