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Whatever the quality of Mithradates' armies, he himself was such a tough old warrior that, at the age of 68, he still could throw a javelin as well as any of his soldiers and produce from his numerous harem an annual crop of royal children. Defeat only seemed to stimulate his ambition, and in 64 B.C. he was planning to realize a stupendous fantasy—an invasion of Italy from the north, while the main Roman army hunted him in the east.
The Last Order. The immensity of this project, says Author Duggan, makes us "inclined to dismiss it as absurd." But the Romans were "genuinely afraid" of it. Before Mithradates could attempt his march on Italy, his son Pharnaces II led a revolution to overthrow him. Trapped in his own palace, the 69-year-old despot barked his last order—and was obediently stabbed to death by a trusted follower. Many a decade would pass before the memory of the King of Pontus faded from Roman minds—and still more decades before the brutish campaigns of the victors were forgotten by the ruined populace of Asia Minor.