Kingdom of Cappadocia – Ariarathes IX Eusebes Philopator 101-86 BC

Greek Kingdom of Cappadocia, Ariarathes IX Eusebes Philopator 101-86 BC
ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΑΡΙΑΡΑΘΟΥ ΕΥΣΕΒΟΥΣ ΦΙΛΟΠΑΤΟΡΟΣ​

Some decades before the present coin was struck, under the reign of the child-king Ariarathes VI [130-116 BC], the Kingdom of Cappadocia had fallen under the sway of the neighbouring Kingdom of Pontos. The young king's maternal uncle Mithradates V of Pontus attempted to assert control over Cappadocia by marrying his first daughter Laodike to Ariarathes.

We must assume that the influence Laodike was able to assert over her husband was insufficient to turn Cappadocia into a reliable satellite of Pontos, or that her hold over him diminished as he grew older; thus when Mithradates VI succeeded his father to the throne of Pontos, he conspired to have Ariarathes murdered by a Cappadocian merchant named Gordius, in time replacing Ariarathes VI with the murdered king's son, Ariarathes VII. He too proved insufficiently compliant to Mithradates' will, objecting to his father's murderer being handed a prominent role in the government of Cappadocia, and so was promptly assassinated too in his turn.
Mithradates placed his infant son on the throne of Cappadocia, paying lip service to the deposed dynasty by renaming him as Ariarathes, but early in his reign the Cappadocian nobility rebelled, overthrowing Mithradates' son and installing instead the second son of Ariarathes VI, brother of Ariarathes VII. This revolt was quickly put down and Ariarathes VIII was exiled. Mithradates' young son was restored to the throne as Ariarathes IX.
Under the kingship of Ariarathes IX, Mithradates' hold over the Kingdom of Cappadocia was always tenuous at best; both the Kingdom of Bithynia and the Roman Republic attempted, with limited success, to detach Cappadocia from Mithradates' grip, who was aided by his son-in-law Tigranes II, the powerful king of Armenia. Ariarathes IX was three (possibly four) times deposed and replaced with the Roman-appointed candidate, Ariobarzanes, yet in 89 BC Ariarathes IX was sent back into Cappadocia at the head of a powerful Pontic army and reinstalled, which together with Mithradates' massacre of 80,000 Roman and Italian citizens in the Asiatic Vespers shortly thereafter led directly to war with the Roman Republic.
This beautiful coin was struck at an uncertain point in time but securely in the context of the First Mithradatic War, fought between the great powers of Rome and what may reasonably be called the last great Hellenistic empire, the Kingdom of Pontos. It makes no attempt to disguise the fact that Cappadocia was little more than an extension of Mithradates himself; the style of the obverse portrait greatly resembling that of the Pontic king, and the reverse type also mirroring one employed by Mithradates.

These must have been small, considering the extreme rarity of this issue struck from so few dies, and Ariarathes' absence from Roman histories pertaining to the war. The surviving [Roman] accounts are confused; Plutarch [Parallel Lives, Sulla XI.1] apparently mixes up Ariarathes with his older brother Arkathias, who commanded the king's 10,000 Armenian cavalry alongside his father's generals [Appian Mith. 35, 41]. The records captured by Pompey [Plutarch, Pompey XXXVII.1] suggest Ariarathes was poisoned by his father, possibly while campaigning in Thessaly, circa 87/6 BC, the latter end of which year would not discount the Amphipolis hypothesis. This, however, is only conjecture.