[Sidenote:  Early years of Mithridates.] His whole history is in fact one long record of sensuality, treachery, and murder.  From his earliest years he had breathed, as it were, an atmosphere of assassination.  His father had been assassinated when he was eleven years old.  His guardians and even his own mother had then plotted to assassinate him.  They placed him on a wild horse, and made him perform exercises with the javelin on it.  When his precocious vigour defeated their hopes, they tried to poison him.  But by studying antidotes he made his body poison-proof, or at least was reputed to have done so, and, flying from his enemies, lived for seven years through all the hardships of a wild and wandering life, in which he never slept under a roof, and hunted and fought with wild beasts, to emerge in manhood a very tiger himself for strength, and beauty of body, and ferocity of disposition, a tyrant who spared neither man in his ambition nor woman in his lust. [Sidenote:  His physical vigour.] His stature was gigantic, his strength and activity such as took captive the imagination of the East.  He could, it was believed, outrun the deer; out-eat and out-drink everyone at the banquet; strike down flying game unerringly; tame the wildest steed, and ride 120 miles in a day.  Twenty-two nations obeyed him, and he could speak the dialect of each.  A veneer of Greek refinement was spread thinly over the savage animalism of the man. [Sidenote:  Pseudo-civilisation of his court.] He was a virtuoso, and had a wonderful collection of rings.  He maintained Greek poets and historians, and offered prizes for singing.  He had shrewdness enough to employ Greek generals, but not enough to keep him from being grossly superstitious.

[Sidenote:  His kingdom and how it was acquired.] For twenty years (110-90 B.C.) he had been with never-resting activity extending his empire, before the Romans assailed him.  He had inherited from his ancestors the kingdom of Pontus, or Cappadocia on the Pontus, which had been one of the two satrapies into which Cappadocia was divided at the time of the Macedonian conquest.  Mithridates IV. had married a princess of the Greek race, the sister of Seleucus, King of Syria.  His grandfather had conquered Sinope and Paphlagonia, as far as the Bithynian frontier.  His father had helped the Romans in the third Punic War, had been styled the friend of Rome, and had been rewarded with the province of Phrygia nominally for his services against Aristonicus, the pretender to the kingdom of Attalus, but had been deprived of it afterwards when it was found out that really it had been put up for auction by Manius Aquillius, who was completing the subjugation of the adherents of the pretender.  The boundaries of Pontus at his accession cannot be strictly defined.  On the east it stretched towards the Caucasus and the sources of the Euphrates, Lesser Armenia being dependent on it.  On the south and south-west its frontiers were Cappadocia and Galatia.