Macabre Monday Monsters, I have a tale of poison and annihilation for you today. It’s an old tale, so we’ll have to go back quite a ways in time.
In 115 BCE a prince named Mithridates returned to his home in what is the Anatolian region of modern day Turkey. He had been, for a number of years, living in the wilderness to toughen himself up in order to survive… well his family. They were a dysfunctional lot of power hungry murderers, their weapon of choice was poison. During his time in the wilderness, Mithridates had begun ingesting small amounts of poison daily in order to build up an immunity. He’d also lifted like a ton of heavy rocks and read a lot of books. So, smart, handsome, immune to poison, the whole package. There was probably a montage.
Back at court Mithridates wasted no time murdering the family he’d run from, and taking the throne. Like you do if you’re jacked and high on poison. Idk. This is when he developed The Mithridatium. A universal antidote of sorts, The Mithridatium consisted of 54 different ingredients all designed to work together to neutralize any poison. Mithridates took this every day to ensure that no one in his court could turn on him and poison him.
I’m going to skip ahead a bit because the next part involves war with Rome and it’s a lot. Let’s just say Mithridates killed a lot of people, the Romans killed a lot of people, you know, war.
In the end Mithridates lost, the Roman general Pompey stormed his castle (it probably wasn’t a castle), and in a bid to save his honor, Mithridates insisted that his entire family poison themselves. Yeah. And they did, too. And they all died. Mithridates also took the poison… but as it turned out, there might have been something to The Mithridatium because nothing happened. He tried running around the room to make his blood flow faster… nothing. Eventually he ordered a guard to just stab him already and he joined his family in death.
But what of The Mithridatium? Perhaps Pompey stole the recipe because it ended up in Rome. Pliny the Elder mentioned that included among the 54 ingredients were: walnuts, figs, rue and opium leaves, myrrh, and castoreum. I had to look up castoreum… it’s scent from beaver testicles. Make of that what you will. Nero was said to have taken it every day and recipes continue to show up until one was finally printed in 1618. How close it was to the original, I know not.
Eventually it fell out of favor. Not surprisingly, really, it must have taken several arduous side quests just gather the ingredients.
Thank you for reading and don’t forget, the antidote to boredom can always be found in the Stacks of my fellow Macabre Monday writers below.