In like manner it was a genuine trait of the sultan that he afterward, for the mere purpose of depriving his enemy of trophies of victory, caused his whole harem to be killed, and distinguished his favorite concubine, a beautiful Ephesian, by allowing her to choose the mode of death. He prosecuted the experimental studies of poisons and antidotes as an important branch of the business of government, and tried to inure his body to particular poisons. He had early learned to look for treason and assassination at the hands of everybody, especially his nearest relations, and he had early learned to practice them against everybody, and most of all against those nearest him; of which the necessary consequence--attested by history--was that all his undertakings finally miscarried through the perfidy of those whom he trusted. At the same time we meet with isolated traits of high-minded justice. When he punished traitors, he ordinarily spared those who were involved in the crime solely through their personal relations with the leading culprits; but such fits of equity are to be met with in every barbarous tyrant. What really distinguishes Mithridates amid the multitude of similar sultans is his boundless activity. He disappeared one fine morning from his palace, and remained unheard of for months, so that he was given over as lost; when he returned, he had wandered _incognito_ through all anterior Asia, and reconnoitered everywhere the country and the people. In like manner he was not only generally fluent in speech, but he administered justice to each of the twenty-two nations over which he ruled in its own language, without needing an interpreter--a trait significant of the versatile East. His whole activity as a ruler bears the same character. So far as we know, his energies, like those of every other sultan, were spent in collecting treasures, in assembling armies--which were usually, in his earlier years at least, led against the enemy not by the king in person, but by some Greek _condottiere_--in efforts to add new satrapies to the old. Of higher elements--desire to advance civilization, earnest leadership of the national opposition, special gifts of genius--there are found, in our traditional accounts at least, no distinct traces in Mithridates, and we have no reason to place him on a level even with the great rulers of the Osmans, such as Mohammed II and Suleiman. Notwithstanding his Hellenic culture, which sat on him not much better than his Roman armor on his Cappadocians, he was throughout an Oriental of the ordinary stamp, coarse, full of the most sensual appetites, superstitious, cruel, perfidious, and unscrupulous, but so vigorous in organization, so powerful in physical endowments, that his defiant laying about him and his unshaken courage in resistance frequently look like talent, sometimes even like genius.