In the beginning of The Grass Crown, Colleen McCullough gives us a masterly creation of the early Mithridates (also known as Mithradates). His devious personality, his cruelty, his ruthless determination, and also his trying to puzzle out the Romans, not the least Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who, each encountering him in Cappadocia, manage to intimidate him.
Mithridates (132-63 BCE), King of Pontus from 120 to 63, became a competing power with the Romans in what the latter called “Asia,” due to expansionist aims on both sides.
Jonah Lendering has the best online information starting with this page.
For more, go to my earlier post, when we read Sulla the Fortunate by G.P. Baker in 2006.