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 Hellas to Rome, and the beginning of a revolt against the Roman supremacy resting on very different and far deeper grounds of antagonism--the national reaction of the Asiatics against the Occidentals.