Pontus in 218 B.C.

Pontus — Spring 218 BC · The Half-Iranian Kingdom.

The Kingdom of Pontus — a Persian-descended monarchy holding the fertile river-valleys of north-central Anatolia, behind the wall of mountains that screens the Black Sea. Its kings, the Mithridatids, were founded as an independent line by Mithridates I Ktistes, "the Founder", some sixty years ago, and they claim a royal pedigree older than any Hellenistic house: descent from one of the Seven Persians who slew the Magus, and through them from Darius and Cyrus themselves. In 218 BC the king is Mithridates III, newly come to the throne. The realm is a weave of three worlds — an Iranian warrior aristocracy and its cavalry, vast Anatolian temple-states worked by sacred slaves, and a Hellenised court — and it is bound to the Seleucids by blood, for the princess Laodice was given in marriage to Antiochus III only four years past. From the fortress-capital of Amaseia in its gorge of the Iris, where the cliffs are carved with the rock-cut tombs of the kings, the dynasty gathers the interior to itself.

While the great powers wrestle over Coele-Syria and the Aegean, Pontus keeps to its own quiet work: the patient gathering of inland Anatolia under a single crown. The kingdom is land-locked in spirit if not in fact — the Greek port-cities of the coast, Sinope and Amisos, remain free and outside its grasp, and will not fall to a Mithridatid king for two generations yet. So the strength of Pontus lies inland: in the rich bottomlands of the Iris, the Lykos and the Thermodon; in fortress-seats like Amaseia, Gazioura and Kabeira; and above all in the great temple-states, Comana of the war-goddess Ma and Ameria of Men Pharnakou, whose sacred slaves and treasuries are a power within the power. The Mithridatids are an old Persian house surviving in a Greek age — wedding their daughters to the Seleucid throne, fielding the heavy horse of their Iranian nobility, and biding their time.