Books: Rome's Bogeyman

KING OF PONTUS (208 pp.)—Alfred Duggan—Coward-McCann ($3.95).

"Mithridates, he died old," sang A. E. Housman in A Shropshire Lad—leaving it largely up to his readers to know who Mithradates was and why his longevity was worthy of note. In this book, able and highly readable, Historian Alfred (Julius Caesar) Duggan writes the first full-dress account of Mithradates' amazing life. Deftly stitched together from sundry classical sources (Plutarch, Appian, Strabo), King of Pontus is not only an excellent piece of history but a first-rate tale of war and adventure whose hero is never more heroic than in the closing years of a long...