HOW MITHRIDATES DIED--NOT IN THE BUCKET

HOW POET  RICHARD HOWARD IS AKIN TO  MITHRIDATES

When I first had the immense pleasure of meeting RIchard Howard, I was a newly tenured Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati.

Amazing poet Richard Howard was visiting  the University to see if he could be lured to the mid-west from Manhattan as a visiting Elliston Professor.  The hiring committee members were taking him out to dinner and I was part of the entertainment--  I guess!
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As I opened the back door of the car to sit next to Richard, I heard that the conversation was about the Italian restaurant we were headed towards. Being from Providence where you cannot buy a bad pizza and  which has only excellent Italian restaurants, I chimed in "The food will not be good here--too few Italians"

Richard reached over to take my hand as I sat and said  "Don't worry, my dear, I have been Mithridatized."  SILENCE  broken only by my laugh as I got the joke. "oh yes, I had  forgotten you are from Cleveland."  Everyone  chimed in and we went on to our jolly  dinner of  mediocre food and a friendship had begun-- because I got Richard's joke

Some details about the historical figure MITHRIDATES:.

After Pompey defeated him in Pontus, Mithridates VI fled to the lands north of the Black Sea in the winter of 66 BC in the hope that he could raise a new army and carry on the war through invading Italy by way of the Danube.^[10] His preparations proved to be too harsh on the local nobles and populace, and they rebelled against his rule. He reportedly attempted suicide by poison. This attempt failed because of his immunity to the poison.^[24] According to Appian's Roman History, he then requested his Gallic bodyguard and friend, Bituitus, to kill him by the sword:

Mithridates then took out some poison that he always carried next to his sword, and mixed it. There two of his daughters, who were still girls growing up together, named Mithridates and Nysa, who had been betrothed to the kings of [Ptolemaic] Egypt and of Cyprus, asked him to let them have some of the poison first, and insisted strenuously and prevented him from drinking it until they had taken some and swallowed it. The drug took effect on them at once; but upon Mithridates, although he walked around rapidly to hasten its action, it had no effect, because he had accustomed himself to other drugs by continually trying them as a means of protection against poisoners. These are still called the Mithridatic drugs.

Seeing a certain Bituitus there, an officer of the Gauls, he said to him, "I have profited much from your right arm against my enemies. I shall profit from it most of all if you will kill me, and save from the danger of being led in a Roman triumph one who has been an autocrat so many years, and the ruler of so great a kingdom, but who is now unable to die by poison because, like a fool, he has fortified himself against the poison of others. Although I have kept watch and ward against all the poisons that one takes with his food, I have not provided against that domestic poison, always the most dangerous to kings, the treachery of army, children, and friends." Bituitus, thus appealed to, rendered the king the service that he desired.^[25]

• The poet A. E. Housman alludes to Mithridates' antidote in the final stanza of "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff" in A Shropshire Lad:

There was a king reigned in the East:

There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
–I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

AND RICHARD  SHARES THAT LONG LIFE --  HE  STILL PROSPERS -- STILL WRITING AND PUBLISHING HIS  INTRICATE AND DEMANDING POETRY.