Latin borrowed the word as antidotum, and used it in the same sense. An antidoton was therefore a preparation administered to neutralize a poison or to combat a sickness. The Greek word antidoton literally means “something given against”, by adding the prefix anti- (“against”) to doton, the neuter past participle of didonai (“to give”).
The roots of the English word antidote stretch back through French and Latin to Ancient Greek. In any case, the 25th anniversary of Antidote seems like a perfect time to explore the ways in which antidotes have fired the human imagination and enriched our language. Judging from the fact that Mithridates also famously took the time to learn all 22 languages of his kingdom, he would have loved the druidic magic of Antidote’s writing remedies too. Later Greek and Roman recipes based on his successes contributed to the emergence of medicinal science, but for Mithridates himself, the medicine was inseparable from the magic of his royal shamans. Take the “Poison King” Mithridates VI of Pontus, for example, who famously made himself immune to poisoning by systematically building a tolerance for every known poison, and mixing over 50 of them into a secret daily elixir.
The history of antidotes and elixirs is a world where myth, magic, and medicine intermingle.
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