Ariarathes VI of Cappadocia: A Hellenistic and Iranian Monarch

Introduction

Ariarathes VI Epiphanes Philopator was king of Cappadocia from 130 BC to 116 BC, a member of the Ariarathid dynasty and the youngest son of Ariarathes V and Nysa. He acceded as a child, with his mother acting as regent; after the deaths of his brothers, which contemporary accounts attribute to her, courtiers preserved the young prince, killed the regent and raised him to the throne.

Politically he was enmeshed in Pontic and Bithynian ambitions. His maternal uncle Mithridates V of Pontus sought to secure Cappadocia by marrying Ariarathes VI to his daughter Laodice, who bore him two sons, the future Ariarathes VII and Ariarathes VIII, and a daughter Nysa, later wife of Nicomedes III of Bithynia. Cappadocia’s independence remained contested; Mithridates VI later arranged Ariarathes VI’s murder through the Cappadocian noble Gordius, after which the throne passed briefly to his widow, was seized by Nicomedes III (who married the widow), and then taken by Mithridates VI, who installed Ariarathes VII.

Numismatically and ideologically Ariarathes VI combined Hellenistic and Iranian royal imagery. He issued coin types showing himself with the Hellenistic diadem and, notably on tetradrachms, with an Iranian-style tiara; modern scholarship interprets this dual imagery as an appeal to both Greek-speaking and Iranian-oriented elites and to neighboring monarchs and grandees.

His reign is chiefly remembered for the dynastic crisis and foreign interventions it provoked, and for the bilingual visual strategy on his coinage that reflected Cappadocia’s position between Hellenistic and Iranian political-cultural spheres.