an ironic fate

I just found out something absolutely shocking. (Shocking at least to me, a person of delicate sensibilities.)

What do you know about Mithridates? Many know the story of the king of Pontus who developed an immunity to various poisons and was an inspiration for the Dread Pirate Robert's greatest showdown.

If you're like me, you mainly know about him through A. E. Housman's poem "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff," in which the speaker defends his morose poetry as a way of inoculating himself against the evils of the world:

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.

Hm. How did old Mithridates die? I actually never bothered to ask, nor, I'm ashamed to say, did I ever pay much attention to the actual plot of Mitridate, re di Ponto, the opera by the 14-year-old Mozart, instead just listening to the pleasant music the one time I heard it.

So, today, I just found out how he died, and I'm gobsmacked. No screenwriter (or opera composer) would dare to have come up with this fate. He was finally defeated by Pompey, and instead of being paraded around in defeat, in those death-before-dishonor days, he and his family protected themselves against rape/slavery/worse by entering a suicide pact, killing themselves ... by ... poison!

That's not all: wife and daughters keeled over as planned, but — as planned — the man himself didn't. He was last in line to drink, according to the morals of the time, and there wasn't enough left to overpower the immunity he'd spent his life building. Finally, he asked his friend to end it by sword so he could die with honor.

Like all of us, he'd protected himself against the wrong thing the whole time.