“Everything has poison. It is the dosage that decides whether we live or we die…”

– Paracelsus – Swiss alchemist (1493-1541), father of toxicology

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Mithridates VI of Pontus (foreground center in purple robe), in his ‘toxicology’ lab, about to administer an antidote to a slave, minutes after he has forced the poor wretch to swallow belladona (c 70BC)

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Just as present-day governments commission geological surveys for oil, back in 70 BC, Mithridates VI (a.k.a. ‘Mitsy’ in this blog) had his minions scour the countryside for poisonous plants and minerals, to develop poisons from.

Mitsy had a research facility that had only one assistant – a herbalist by the name of Crataeus. So guarded was Mitsy about the stuff he was concocting that he had Crataeus’s family locked up under permanent house arrest 24/7, to be executed summarily in case Crataeus betrayed him.

The house that Crataeus and his family were locked up in was an opulent palace that didn’t want for any pleasure that came to his mind. If Crataeus’s wife wanted one of those well hung nubian slaves to orally stimulate her, she just had to say the word.

Mitsy researched all sorts of poisonous herbs, like hemlock, aconite, deadly nightshade (belladonna), castor, hellebore, azalea, rhododendron, realgar (arsenic), mercury and sulphur, to name just a few. He had Crataeus blend and mix the powders and pastes and then fed the concoctions to captured prisoners and slaves. And while some of those unfortunate suckers were monitored for symptoms and duration of survival prior to death, others were put on an antidote regimen, to test the antidotes that he simultaneously engineered.

Countless prisoners and slaves died horrible deaths as a result of Mitsy’s experimentations. By today’s sensibilities, Mithridates would be recognized as a psychotic mass murderer, on par with prominent Nazis like the infamous bio-weapons expert, Walter Schreiber and the endurance medicine researcher, Josef Mengele, registered physicians who practiced a craft similar to Mitsy’s during the Second World War.

But those were the times that Mitsy grew up in. A man interprets morality as he sees it. Mitsy recognized his own mother’s treachery when she poisoned his father. Life inside any royal household in those times was an all-pervasive mantle of suspicion, conspiracy, treachery, intrigue and paranoia and Mitsy lived in the midst of all that.

In that milieu, poisoning happened to be the preferred method of assassination. There was no such thing as forensic science and poisons left no trace. You could spike a guy’s wine with arsenic and pass the death off as cardiac arrest and no one would be the wiser.

Even when an assassination was carried out in broad daylight before hundreds of witnesses, the justice system in the ancient world perceived it as a crime if the folks that mattered saw it as such. Delivering his corny “Romans, countrymen and lovers, lend me your ears….” monologue in front of thousands of Romans, Brutus convinced them that killing Caesar was the right thing to do. And he walked away, unscathed. For the moment, that is. Until Octavian and Anthony wupped his ass at Philipi and he told his aide to hold his sword while he ran into it, dying a long and excruciating death.

Hold it right there, before you fact check me. The “lend me your ears” bit was from Mark Anthony’s rebuttal monologue, not Brutus’s words.

Who gives a shit anyway?

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Most white guys believe that the ancient ‘civilized’ world was Europe and its language was Latin. We’ll humor them and not correct them for now, since this is not a piece on race relations. It is thought that the 5th to the 2nd centuries BC had been a period of heightened consciousness – of discipline, obedience and the rule of law, the standards set by first the Greeks and then the Romans.

Then, as if someone had flipped a switch, things slid into an age of decadence and greed for the next 400 years, starting the 1^st century AD with the ascendence of the Julio-Claudian Emperors (Augustus –> Tiberius –> Caligula –> Claudius –> Nero) when everyone who was anyone was either poisoning or being poisoned, making this form of killing a sort of status symbol. You were a nobody if you simply died of old age.

During this period, women of the elite gained tremendous notoriety as poisoners. Noblemen had multiple wives and concubines and these women were all conniving to ensure that the inheritance went to their biological sons. Queens did likewise, to ensure that they could rule as regent until little Billy(us) Bob(inus) came of age and was crowned the king.

The first Roman Emperor Augustus’s wife, Livia Drusila, was reported to be quite a terror with poison. The historian Cassius Dio wrote that when Augustus got paranoid that someone in the palace was trying to kill him, he began eating only fresh figs that he plucked with his own hands straight from the trees in his private courtyard. According to Dio, Livia outwitted her husband by smearing poison directly onto the figs while they were still hanging on the branches. That evening dinner, she safely ate the untainted ones herself, while Augustus chomped on the smeared ones and within hours went toes up. Livia is also alleged to have orchestrated the poisonings of a number of Augustus’s grandchildren, in her single-minded zeal to get her son from a previous marriage, Tiberius, to the throne. Incidentally, Jesus was crucified during Tiberius’ reign.

Then there was the infamous trio, Canidia, Martina and Locusta, who poisoned their way through the entire Julio-Claudian dynasty and its court.

Not much is known about Canidia except that she was a vicious contract killer who poisoned hundreds of Roman noblemen for cash. Canidia is thought to have helped Livia murder Augustus. It was when she began thinking she was invincible and started taking money from both sides, that she met a gruesome end, eviscerated alive and strung up in public. No painless drifting off to death by poisoning for Canidia dear, no siree.

By the way, the dreaded ‘chairman’ of Murder Incorporated, mafia don Albert Anastasia, was killed for a very similar reason. If you are a contract killer you should know better than to profit from both sides, is the moral.

Now about Martina. On Tiberius’ orders, Martina poisoned his nephew and heir, Germanicus. A highly competent general posted in Germania, Germanicus was winning battle after battle, expanding Rome’s influence over central and eastern Europe. To his troops and to the Roman populace, Germanicus was the Roman version of Alexander the Great. Unfortunately in ancient Rome it didn’t pay to be more popular than the emperor, unless you could back it up with the Praetorian Guards’ muscle.

Tiberius was getting antsy at all the adulation being heaped on Germanicus, so he had Martina recruit a trusted henchman named Piso to poison Germanicus with a special “delayed-action” concoction over a period of 15 days, making it look like he simply took ill and gradually died. Those days contracting an unknown illness and dying from it was commonplace, so no one batted an eyelid. Martina would have fitted in perfectly at the erstwhile KGB’s First Chief Directorate, now known as the FSB’s “Criminalist Institute”.

And then there was Locusta. On the orders of Agrippina the Younger – empress to Claudius, Locusta poisoned his son from his marriage to Messalina, Britannicus, whom he had named after the island he had invaded and annexed – present day Britain.  Agrippina wanted her own biological son, Nero, to be emperor. So, when it began to seem like Claudius would go on forever, she had Locusta poison him. Nero was crowned and he later signed Locusta up on a lifetime contract as a sorta “court-appointed poisoner”.

Alas, Locusta too met with a horrible death. Soon as Nero was dead (assisted suicide), his successor, Galba, had Locusta arrested, raped and beheaded in public.

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The spread of Christianity did not seem to slow down greed even a bit. By 400AD, the Dark Ages – also known as the Middle Ages or Medieval Period – set in. It was a period of moral recession that wiped out every bit of enlightenment that had been attained through the early Greco-Roman civilization.

Christianity could do nothing to arrest the onset of the Dark Ages. Religion in fact is credited by some, to have been the catalyst which fueled the Dark Ages, rather than being the provider of enlightenment. Christianity brought with it religious bigotry and officially sanctioned oppression and even wholesale genocide by its overseers – the Catholic Church.

If I had met Jesus Christ then personally I would have told him, “Cut it the proselytizing, Dude. If Pontius Pilate summons you, be more diplomatic, make that deal with him.”

Wouldn’t a live Jesus Christ have been better for the future of the world than a dead one?

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It was as if civilization pressed a reset button and went back to the wantonness of 5000BC. The Dark Ages lasted right up until the Renaissance in the mid-17^th century. Through all the chaos, poisons kept playing a central role in the mayhem. Indeed, a whole dynasty of Catholic Popes, the infamous Borgias of the 15^th century, thrived on the art of poisoning. The murderous patriarch of the family, Rodrigo Borgia, battered and slammed his way to the Papacy, becoming Pope Alexander VI. He made his equally murderous son, Cesare a cardinal even while he was running  an organized crime syndicate at the time.

The Borgias entertained frequently. With word having already spread about their prowess with arsenic, guests who were invited to dinner at the Borgia residence considered the invitation a death sentence. Refusal meant almost certain arrest and death and so did acceptance of their invitations. In Italy, arsenic came to be known as “polvere dell’eredita” (the inheritance powder).

Arsenic had many qualities that endeared it to the calculating mind of the medieval murderer. It looked harmless, like a sack of sugar. It was tasteless and odorless and it mixed easily in food. The symptoms it produced, diarrhea and vomiting, look much like ordinary food poisoning from petrified meat, something very common in those days.

Through the ages arsenic has been the poison of choice the world over. In 1752, 31-yr old spinster, Mary Blandy, was convicted and hanged for murdering her father with it. She admitted to mixing a powder in his tea cup to sweeten his attitude toward her romantic liaison with a lazy lout her father couldn’t stand. On the scaffold, about to be hanged, her knicker showing when strong winds whipped up her skirt, Mary instructed the hangman not to hang her too high, “for the sake of decency.” Reminds me of Saddam Hussein, at the gallows seconds before the plunge, asking his executioners to brush his hair back.

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Enough about the Romans and Christianity for now. I know how short your attention span is, so let’s get back to Mitsy.

Mitsy was a paranoiac. Those days every monarch had to be one, in order to carry on living. Fearing being poisoned with some unknown new concoction, he set out to perfect a “universal” theriac or antidote, after he gained the throne. After many tests which wiped out an entire prison population, he finally settled on a universal antidote. He named it Mithridatium and carried it with him in a tiny marble jar wherever he went.

However, the more he solidified his position on the throne, the more paranoid Mitsy got. The assuring presence of mithridatium didn’t help. Mitsy was smart enough to realize that new poisons were being created by others every frigging day and mithridatium needed constant upgrades if it had to remain effective, much like anti-virus software today.

Meanwhile, Mitsy began noticing something interesting. The few slaves whom he had administered smaller doses of his test potions over time, they not only survived but recovered quickly, even when given heavier doses later on. He realized that they had developed immunity toward the poison. He began consuming sub-lethal doses of all kinds of poisons with the belief that this would build up his immunity against them. As to how far he was successful is debatable, though the principle of immunity through controlled ingestion of the very substance you want to be immune from is an accepted concept today.

Mitsy’s immunization through self-application routine gave birth to a new kind of practice that got a name Mithridatism : protecting oneself against a poison by gradually self-administering non-lethal amounts. As far as is known, Mitsy was the first to discover this form of immunization. Today it is practiced universally, though not on poisons, since poisoning is no longer an effective way to kill and not be caught. Mithridatism is practiced today against viral and bacterial infections and goes by the name : vaccination.

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Mithridatism had been in vogue in other parts of the world at the time as well. In ancient India, Emperor Chandragupta Maurya (340–295 BCE), ordered the regular administering of poison in small amounts to specially hand-picked, extremely pretty pubescent young girls as they were growing up, gradually making them immune to the deadly substance. A number of maidens died as the dosage wasn’t always appropriate but Old Chandy didn’t give a fuck. Whether they lived or died, their parents went home rich beyond their dreams. A sorta win-win situation if one didn’t consider the young lass in it.

The girls who got the doses were called vishakanyas (visha – poison, kanya – maiden). Vishakanyas found employment with the wealthy elite as assassins. The modus operandi was a simple one. A Vishakanya would be told to seduce a nobleman who had been marked for murder. She would invite the sucker to share a pitcher of wine with her before engaging in torrid sex. Witnessing her drinking from the same pitcher, the victim would assume it was safe and he would drink up. While she survived, he would writhe in agony before he raised the daisies. 

The moral : when a woman invites you over for a drink, be sure to fuck her first.

Take it easy, this post is x-rated. Leave your prim and propahness at the door before you enter this blog. Here we talk dirty and have a belly laf over it. Sex is funnier than you think.

As a child in India, I remember watching in awe while a snake charmer nonchalantly shoved his hand inside a sack filled with cobras, drawing one out and toying with it, pressing it’s jaws so they would reluctantly open and you’d see it’s fangs. Sometimes he’d deliver sharp whacks on it’s head with his open palm and you could see the cobra getting pissed off, it’s head flattening into a broad hood, it’s upper lip quivering as it retracted, baring a purple-pink gum with two large fangs, it’s forked tongue flailing wildly, while it issued a hissing snarl. After a few whacks, unable to stand the humiliation any longer, the cobra repeatedly lashed out with lightning speed and stick it’s fangs into him.

It was a fucking cobra, the most venomous snake in the world and yet, nothing ever happened to the guy! He had been bitten so many times that he was completely immune to cobra venom.

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I have covered Mitsy’s death in Part-1, so if you haven’t already read it, read it before I send over a lactating vishakanya to get you.

The poison Mitsy took as Pompey’s forces closed in was not going to be sufficient to kill him, given his lifelong immunization through his own practice of mithridatism. But Mitsy had to have known that the poison wouldn’t kill him.

Historians suggest he had secretly developed a deadly fast-acting ‘poison-x’ for which he had deliberately not created an antidote. It had one potential user – him. So, why didn’t he use that poison when the Romans were closing in?

Here’s what I think happened. Mitsy couldn’t find it. It must have been one of the first instances of shit happening.

In the end, with the Romans at the city walls, Mitsy got his aide to run him through with his pearl-handled sword. That’s another weird way to commit suicide – asking your secretary to clutch your sword tightly in both hands pointing out and then sprinting across the room and impaling yourself on it. Jesus H!

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Legend has it that two thousand years after Mitsy committed suicide – around the time Crimea became a part of the Soviet Union in 1921, Russian archeologists unearthed a small earthenware pot that was filled with some kind of a powder, at the site where Mitsy is believed to have taken his life.

When the Soviet archeologist left the pot on top of a table and went out for lunch, his cat came in and sniffed around. On his return, Chuchukin found the cat dead under the table and the jar lying on it’s side open.

Minute amounts of the powder found inside the pot were tested and found to contain some of the deadliest herbs known to mankind – aconite, hellebore, belladonna, thorn apple and hemlock. However, 86% by weight was an unknown element that later on proved to be highly toxic thallium, a colorless, odorless and tasteless substance that is now known as the “poisoner’s poison”.

The pot was rushed to the Kamera (Russian for ‘chamber’), a highly secretive facility within the Active Measures section of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate where research was ongoing to find a poison that could kill quickly and leave no trace. Kamera had begun work in 1921, under Lenin’s Cheka, the Soviet secret police agency which would later transform into the KGB, now known as the FSB.

The lab report on the ingredients of the powder was being prepared when one of the technicians, the man who had gathered up the spilled powder from the table, collapsed from a heart attack. Later on, a pinch the size of a pin head, when administered to an otherwise healthy Sevostlag gulag inmate who was serving a life sentence without parole, killed him within two minutes. An invasive forensic autopsy showed no signs other than that of a heart attack.

That the contents of that little pot unearthed on the shore of the Black Sea were still potent after two milennia was testimony to Mithridates’ prowess as a toxicologist. Little could he have known though, that his ‘magic bullet’ would find use 2000 years later, with the Cheka-NKVD-KGB-FSB juggernaut. The Russians would then take poisoning even further, to more exotic agents like high energy alpha particle radiating Polonium-210 that changes the very DNA of the victim, causing irreversible organ failure.

As for Mithridates’ antidotes, Mithridatium was still available at apothecary outlets in Italy as recently as the 1930s.