Lokarin posted...
I'm not allowed to talk about politics (IE: Alberta is having a bit of a book burning fiasco right now)
Makes perfect sense, it gets really cold up there. Gotta stay warm somehow!
Realthuddydrumz posted...
Didn't Mithrodites try to poison himself to escape torture - only to find out that his family's long standing tradition of building up resistance to various poisons made him virtually immune? True or not, that is a fucked up but interesting story.
More or less. It wasn't his family's tradition, it was his personal obsession. Hence why he's called the Poison King.
He started researching all sorts of herbs, plants, medicines, and tons of different poisonous substances (from animal bits to mineral deposits to toxic plants) when he was still a teenager (because his father died of poison, and he was paranoid about avoiding the same fate). Then he eventually started dosing himself from a young age with ever-increasing amounts of various things to build up his immunity.
Eventually, decades later, when he lost his war against Rome and they were coming for him, he took poison to kill himself (so they couldn't capture him and drag him back to Rome to parade him around in shame in a Triumph, or torture him, or both). But ironically years of trying to make himself immune to poisons... made him immune to poison. So he wound up having to have one of his lieutenants stab him instead.
(Conversely, the other version of the story is that the poison he chose to use was the most potent one he'd ever found/created, and should have easily have bypassed even his immunity, but at the last minute he wound up splitting his dose with his two daughters, so his remaining half-dose wasn't strong enough to finish him off.)
He basically became so famous for his crafting of antidotes and developing immunity through slowly building resistance over time that they literally
named
the concept after him - to this day, the technical term for building up your immunity through small doses but increasing exposure over time is called "mithridatism".
He's actually got a pretty interesting life story even beyond that though. Stuff like major comet sightings around the time he was born that he used to point to as a sign of divine favor (a lot of his coins were issued with his face on one side and a comet on the other). Or how he sort of modeled aspects of his life after Alexander the Great. And being a major player in the lives of famous Romans like Sulla and Pompey. He was a hugely significant figure for his time, who mostly gets left out of histories (or gets treated like little more than a footnote) because most of them were written by the Romans, or by the people who followed the Romans and maintained their Romano-centric worldview.