was not only in general a man of
fluent speech, but he administered justice to each of the twenty-two
nations over which he ruled in its own language without needing
an interpreter--a trait significant of the versatile ruler of
the many-tongued east. His whole activity as a ruler bears
the same character. So far as we know (for our authorities are
unfortunately altogether silent as to his internal administration)
his energies, like those of every other sultan, were spent in
collecting treasures, in assembling armies--which were usually,
in his earlier years at least, led against the enemy not by the king
in person, but by some Greek -condottiere---in efforts to add new
satrapies to the old. Of higher elements--desire to advance
civilization, earnest leadership of the national opposition, special
gifts of genius--there are found, in our traditional accounts at
least, no distinct traces in Mithradates, and we have no reason to
place him on a level even with the great rulers of the Osmans, such
as Mohammed II and Suleiman. Notwithstanding his Hellenic culture,
which sat on him not much better than the Roman armour sat on his
Cappadocians, he was throughout an Oriental of the ordinary stamp,
coarse, full of the most sensual appetites, superstitious, cruel,
perfidious, and unscrupulous, but so vigorous in organization, so
powerful in physical endowments, that his defiant laying about him
and his unshaken courage in resistance look frequently like talent,
sometimes even like genius. Granting that during the death-struggle
of the republic it was easier to offer resistance to Rome than in the
times of Scipio or Trajan, and that it was only the complication of the
Asiatic events with the internal commotions of Italy which rendered
it possible for Mithradates to resist the Romans twice as long as
Jugurtha did, it remains nevertheless true that before the Parthian
wars he was the only enemy who gave serious trouble to the Romans in
the east, and that he defended himself against them as the lion of the
desert defends himself against the hunter. Still we are not entitled,
in accordance with what we know, to recognize in him more than the
resistance to be expected from so vigorous a nature. But, whatever
judgment we may form as to the individual character of the king,
his historical position remains in a high degree significant.
The Mithradatic wars formed at once the last movement of the political
opposition offered by Hella