Part of the poem is devoted to the praise of alcohol, including the Byron-caliber couplet "And malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man." The original meaning of the word alcohol, I learned today, is "powdered ore of antimony." Kohl, the antimony-based eyeliner, is a cognate.
Friday, May 22, 2026
Mithridates, he died old
I looked up the year A.D. 51 to see if anything interesting happened then. Not really. Mithridates of Armenia died in that year, which made me think of "Mithridates, he died old," the final line of A. E. Housman's poem "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff." The poem refers not to Mithridates of Armenia but to the much more famous Mithridates VI -- so we still have a link to 51 via Roman numerals. Housman describes the way Mithridates gradually built up immunity to poisons (including iocane powder?) by ingesting sublethal doses.
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Remarkably, to my mind, just yesterday or the day before, my mother asked me, "Have you heard of Mithridates?" I answered in the affirmative. It may seem an outlandish question, but my mother has been reading a series of historical fiction books set in the first century B.C. Roman imperium.
Incidentally, she pronounced it myth-ruh-DAY-teez, which apparently is the accepted convention. I told her I preferred muh-THRID-uh-teez.
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