# Mithridate **Mitridato** **Known today as.** The antidote attributed by legend to Mithridates VI of Pontus, the forerunner of theriac. Kind: Compound Poisoning: Opioid poisoning (https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/poisons/opioid) ## What did Canale use it for? In the cockerel (ch. 6; note XLIII). ## What does modern science say? As theriac. Heberden found no poison that it would counteract any further than plain opium would; and the practice of small doses, mithridatism, is not effective against all poisons, immunity being generally possible only against the biologically complex ones. The king himself, in Appian’s account, took poison in 63 BC when his army went over to his son Pharnaces, could not die of it because he had accustomed himself to drugs against poisoners, and had Bituitus, an officer of the Gauls, kill him. ## Pharmacognosy and toxicology - **morphine**: from the opium, at a smaller share than in theriac - **myrrh, saffron, castoreum, costus, cinnamon, cassia**: the aromatics - **agaric, rhubarb, gentian**: - **honey and wine**: **Mechanism.** Mithridates’ antidote as Celsus gives it had some three dozen ingredients, Pliny’s fifty-four, and Galen’s forty-one: the opium is what acted, and Heberden held that such compounds were now given chiefly as opiates and aromatics, counteracting no poison further than plain opium would. Hudson reports the historian Annette Bierman’s view that the balsamic ingredients may have been slightly antiseptic and any effect against poisoning purely psychosomatic. **Dose.** Celsus gives a piece the size of an almond in wine against poisoning; Culpeper a scruple or half a dram in the morning, two drams to sweat. Heberden warned that the prescriber lay at the mercy of the mixer for how much opium a dose held. **Standing.** Dropped from the Edinburgh and London pharmacopoeias in the later eighteenth century, after Heberden’s attack on it (1745), though theriacs were kept in the pharmacopoeias of France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Germany well into the nineteenth. ## What lore surrounds it? Pliny already scoffed that the Mithridatic antidote had fifty-four ingredients, none in the same proportion and some measured to the sixtieth part of a denarius, “a vain ostentation of scientific skill.” Like theriac it was compounded in public in city squares, and in Venice, Bologna, and other cities the ingredients were displayed so that officials could check their quality. “Mithridatism,” the building of tolerance by small doses, keeps the king’s name. ## What did the older authorities say? **Pliny.** Tells how Mithridates VI of Pontus drank poison every day, with due precautions, to make himself proof against it, and was the first discoverer of antidotes, one of which keeps his name; and how Pompey found the king’s medical notes in his private cabinet, with a recipe in his own hand: two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue, pounded with a grain of salt. **Celsus.** Gives the recipe: thirty-six simples in the translation, from costmary and sweet flag to saffron, ginger, and cinnamon, with castoreum and poppy-tears, pounded and taken up in honey; against poisoning “a piece the size of an almond is given in wine.” Heberden counted thirty-eight. **Andromachus.** Nero’s physician left out the skink, added vipers, and increased the opium; in Trajan’s time his version took the name *theriac*, and Galen, who championed it, gave both in his books on antidotes. **William Heberden.** In his *Antitheriaka* of 1745 showed the formula to be a jumble that no two authorities agreed on, In his *Antitheriaka* of 1745 called the formula a jumble that no two authorities or shops made alike, and the 1746 London Pharmacopoeia was the last to contain mithridate and theriac. ## Sources - Celsus, *De medicina* V.23. - Heberden, W. (1745). *Antitheriaka: An Essay on Mithridatium and Theriaca*. - Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 29.8, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library. - Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 25.3, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library. - Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 23.77, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library. - Appian, *The Mithridatic Wars* 111, trans. H. White (1912), with notes by J. Lendering. livius.org. - Wikipedia contributors. “Mithridatism.” *Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia*. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism (read 2 October 2026). - Heberden, W. (1745). *Antitheriaka: An Essay on Mithridatium and Theriaca*. - Totelin, L. M. V. (2004). “Mithridates’ antidote: a pharmacological ghost.” *Early Science and Medicine* 9. --- *Mithridate.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/mithridate Historical description, not medical advice.