HISTORY OF PHARMACY. 
53 
Attalus Philometor, King of Pergamus, was celebrated 
for his knowledge of botany and pharmacology. He him- 
self cultivated hyosciamus, aconite, cicuta and hellebore, in 
his gardens, and made a number of experiments upon the 
activity of these plants. Galen and Marcellus Empiricus 
refer to two remedies bearing his name ; one, a plaster, of 
which white lead is the base, the other an internal remedy 
for jaundice. 
Without question, the most celebrated of these pharma- 
ceutic soverigns was Mithridates Eupator, King of Pontius, 
the implacable, and so long successful, rival of Roman 
power. His cruelty and violent passions, which raised 
against him so many enemies, had wrought upon him such 
a fear of being poisoned, that he made the most prying 
searches, in order to know every thing that appertained to 
toxicology. He experimented upon criminals, as also upon 
himself, with poisonous substances, and daily took a certain 
quantity of poison with its antidote. He so accustomed 
himself to the use of poisons that at the moment of his last 
defeat, wishing to use some upon himself which he always 
carried about him, he could not succeed in destroying him- 
self by this means. We are assured that having been 
wounded in battle, the Agares, people of Scythia, had him 
cured by remedies into the composition of which the 
venom of the serpent entered. From thence, probably, 
arose the interest which he attached to the study of poisons 
and animal venom. Upon the subject of venoms he wrote 
a work, to which he gave the title of Theriaca* 
Mithridates is particularly celebrated in medicine as the 
author of an electuary, the formula of which still figured 
not long ago in all the Pharmacopoeias, and to which he at- 
tached great importance as an alexiteric. This composition 
was so famous, that one of the first cares of Pompey, 
* From the word fl^pta, venomous beast. 
