sprechende Instruierung des Epaphroditos der Königin Zeit und Gelegenheit zum Selbstmord gewährte, dann brauchte er weder, sobald er durch ihr Schreiben seiner Sache gewiß war, besondere Vorsichtsmaßregeln zu treffen noch Unschuldige zu verdächtigen 1). Nur ein scheinbarer Widerspruch liegt darin, daß Octavian kurze Zeit vorher durch Drohungen die Gefangene am Selbstmord gehindert hatte 2). Er konnte damals gar nicht anders handeln, weil ein Fremder, in seine Pläne nicht eingeweihter - der Arzt Olympos von dem Entschluß Kleopatras Kenntnis besaß und ihr sogar zum Selbstmord behilflich sein sollte. Vor der Öffentlichkeit mußte der Imperator den Schein wahren, als ob ihm viel daran gelegen sei, die besiegte Feindin für den Triumph aufzusparen. Daher äußerte er, wie die Quellen berichten"), nach dem Tode der Ägypterin Unwillen darüber, daß ihm das Glanzstück seines Triumphes geraubt sei, und ließ 2201 holen, um das Schlangengift aus der Wunde zu saugen 4).

Es ist kein Wort darüber zu verlieren, daß aus diesem Benehmen eines Mannes, der sogar die Unterredungen mit seiner Gattin vorher zu konzipieren pflegte), keine weiteren Schlüsse zu ziehen sind.

Bezüglich der Todes art Kleopatras gilt noch heute aus leicht erklärlichem Grunde das Wort Plutarchs τὸ δὲ ἀληθὲς οὐδεὶς οἶδεν). Für alles einzelne verweise ich auf Gardthausen (II 1, 230 ff.), bei dem auch die Belege zu finden sind). Die von Octavian selbst sofort bevorzugte Version war der Tod durch Schlangenbiß8). Wie ich vermuten möchte,

1) Ob auch Dolabella nach einer Weisung des Imperators handelte, als er der Königin verriet, sie solle in drei Tagen nach Rom eingeschifft werden (Plut., Ant. 84), läßt sich nicht sagen. Denkbar wäre, daß Octavian absichtlich in Gegenwart des lugarǹs vɛariozog, dessen Interesse für Kleopatra ihm nicht entgangen sein wird, seiner Dispositionen Erwähnung tat.

2) S. o. S. 60.

3) Plut., Ant. 86; Dio LI 14, 3. 6; Galen. a. a. O.

4) Suet., Aug. 17, 4; Dio LI 14, 3f.; Oros. VI 19, 18 (nach Livius).

5) Suet., Aug. 84.

6) Ebenso Dio LI 14, 1; καὶ τὸ μὲν σαφὲς οὐδεὶς οἶδεν ᾧ τρόπῳ διεφθάρη. 7) Daß Dichtung und Rhetorik sich früh des dankbaren Stoffes bemächtigten, ist begreiflich (s. o. S. 59 f.). Kleopatra war zuletzt allein mit ihren Kammerfrauen Iras und Charmion und hatte das Gemach abgesperrt (Plut., Ant. 85). Alle Einzelheiten über die letzten Augenblicke der Königin sind daher, wie schon Plutarch zu verstehen gibt, völlig wertlos (vgl. Bouché-Leclercq II 342).

8) Daher rief er die yio herbei (s. o.) und beim Triumph wurde Kleopatra auf einem Ruhebett, mit einer Schlange am Arm, dargestellt (Prop. IV 10, 53; Plut., Ant. 86; Dio LI 21, 8; Zon. X 31). Auch die dem Augustus nahestehenden Zeitgenossen Livius, Vergil und Horaz glauben an das Ende durch Schlangenbiß (Flor. II 21, 11; Oros. VI 19, 18; Verg., Aen. VIII 697; Hor., carm. I 37, 26f.). Nach Bouché-Leclercq II 341, 3 hätte die Erinnerung an die Heiligkeit der Uraeusschlange, dieses uralten Symbols der Pharaonenmacht, eine Rolle gespielt (vgl. Prop. IV 10, 53: sacris admorsa colubris).

5*

68 Edmund Groag, Beiträge zur Geschichte des zweiten Triumvirats.

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ist sie daraus entstanden, daß nach Dios Bericht1) der Eunuch der Königin bereits unmittelbar nach ihrer Gefangennahme durch Schlangenbiß den Tod suchte und fand. Doch bleibt immerhin die Möglichkeit, daß auch Kleopatra und ihre beiden Kammerfrauen dieser Todesart den Vorzug gaben. Nöldekes Einwand eine Schlange tötet zurzeit nur einen" trifft bezüglich der ägyptischen Brillenschlange (Aspis, Naja haje) nicht zu, wie von Kennern dieser Schlangenart versichert wird.

Wien.

1) LI 14, 3: ὁ γὰρ εὐνοῦχος ἅμα τῷ συλληφθῆναι αὐτὴν τοῖς τε ἑρπετοῖς ἑαυτὸν ἐθελοντής παρέδωκε καὶ δηχθεὶς ὑπ' αὐτῶν ἐς σοφὸν προπαρεσκευασμένην οἱ ἐσεπεπηδήσει.

The vita Miltiadis of Cornelius Nepos.

By Stanley Casson.

The singular inadequacy of Herodotus to describe the events of the Persian Wars in an intelligible narrative which would be at once free from the influence of tainted sources and comprehensible in itself, renders it most necessary to take into account any shreds of evidence derived from sources other than his.

Cornelius Nepos in his Lives of Distinguished Generals provides not a little of such independent evidence, which, whatever its origin, seems to be free from those preconceptions implicit in evidence gleaned by the Herodotean method of λέγειν τὰ λεγόμενα.

These lives of the Generals, long attributed to an otherwise unknown Aemilius Probus, were declared in 1569 by Dionysius Lambinus to be the work of Cornelius Nepos. A compromise between the rival views was ultimately reached in the decision arrived at that the actual existing text, as edited by Lambinus, was an epitome by Probus of the more lengthy originals by Nepos. Seeing that the text was used very extensively as a standard school book, we might go so far as to say that Probus abridged and simplified the longer versions with a view to using the work as a school book, rather than as a historical epitome.

But, whatever the truth about its authorship may be, this book of lives gives to the historian a unique collection of fragments of evidence bearing directly on the Persian Wars, and apparently derived, as will be shown later, from sources quite distinct from and in some ways superior to those of Herodotus1).

The life of Miltiades seems to contain the majority of such evidence and to be independent of all Herodotean inspiration. Both as a biography and as literature it is poor and its narrative shows little of the charm of Plutarch or of the style of Herodotus. It is not even accurate, for it confuses Miltiades the son of Kimon with his uncle Miltiades the son of

1) Macan, however, remarks that there is hardly a single item to be found in Cornelius which can be treated as authoritative'. Appendix I. 14. An unbiassed estimate of Cornelius alone can show how far this is correct.

69

Kypselus by referring to the former the establishment of the colony in the Chersonese which was the work of the latter. But nevertheless it throws much light on the history of that tragic and desolate family, the Philaidae, and on the career of its most ill-fated member the hero of Marathon. The connection of the Philaidae with Athenian international relations, though slight, seems to have been important, and an account of the family seems to have an important bearing on the investigation of the sources used by Nepos. At the outset the Philaidae incurred the unpopularity of the ruling families of Athens: for Kimon the son of Stesagoras and the father of Miltiades was first exiled under Peisistratus and was subsequently assassinated by the Peisistratidae 1).

During his exile, however, he kept up the traditions of his house by entering for and winning prizes in the chariot races at Olympia, and there is a story that by assigning the glory of one of his victories to Peisistratus. he was permitted to return to Athens лóoлordos. Miltiades the elder was the half-brother (by the same mother) of this Kimon, and he too incurred the hostility of Peisistratus, due, no doubt, to his excessive devotion to the older ideals of Attic aristocracy: for, as Herodotus says, he was οἰκίης τεθριπποτρόφου-a thing that was falling into disfavour under the democratic rule of Peisistratus, who, in addition, could boast himself of no very ancient ancestry. Little wonder then that Miltiades 'chafed under the Peisistratid domination and wished to emigrate', and it was not long before Peisistratus facilitated his 'wish' by getting for him the permission' of the Oracle to depart a convenient form under which to exile disturbing elements in the State. He arrived at the Chersonese and we hear how after being seized by the men of Lampsakus he was released by order of Croesus, whose friendship he enjoyed, a friendship the more easily understood, when we remember the strong anti-Persian tendencies of his family. He died, however, shortly after, childless, and was succeeded by his nephew Stesagoras who in turn was assassinated after a brief space of time. But the misfortunes of the family did not end with the luckless Stesagoras, for there is no more tragic career in Greek history than that of Miltiades the younger, and it is in the narrative of his life that the superiority of Nepos over Herodotus is demonstrated.

Miltiades the son of Kimon, Herodotus says, was sent by the Peisistratidae in 513 to the Chersonese. Apparently it was a case of exile, as with his father and uncle before him, though Herodotus tries to obscure this issue by explaining how οἱ (Πεισιστράτιδαι) μιν καὶ ἐν Ἀθήνησι ἐποίευν εὖ ὡς οὐ συνειδότες δῆθεν τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ τὸν θάνατον. On his voyage to the Chersonese, says Cornelius Nepos, he stopped at

1) Herodotus VI. 103.

Lemnos and it is in this account of the Lemnian expedition that we first meet with the divergence between the narratives of Herodotus and Nepos, and the use by the latter of clearer documents and earlier historical traditions. On his arrival at Lemnos, Miltiades demanded its surrender and allegiance to Athens; the Lemnians replied that they would submit only when he sailed from his home to Lemnos with a north wind. He, therefore, left Lemnos and proceeded to the Chersonese, where he effected a temporary organisation and settlement of his domains. Subsequently he returned to Lemnos and demanded the surrender of the island on the gound that the conditions previously made by the Lemnians had been fulfilled, as he had sailed on a northern wind from his home in the Chersonese. The Carians who then inhabited Lemnos, continues Nepos, submitted-resistere ausi non sunt atque ex insula demigrarunt. After this it appears that Miltiades captured other islands for Athens-pari felicitate ceteras insulas quae Cyclades nominantur sub Atheniensium redegit potestatem, and we can see in this either a definite policy of forming an outer line of defence against Persia as he seems to have intended in the later Parian expedition, or else an interpretation of a raid in the light of the later fifth century when every expedition was for the purpose of subduing islands into the Athenian power 1).

However this may be, Herodotus barely alludes to the expedition at all, and what he does say seems confused. The anecdote, or rather the folk-tale, of Lemnos about Miltiades and the wind from the north he attributes to the Pelasgians (Pelasgians and Carians alike were types of Aborigines to Greek historians), and describes how it was uttered when, on the occasion of the Pelasgian atrocities in early times2), Athens demanded the surrender of Lemnos. 'Very many years afterwards', he says, 'Miltiades the son of Kimon came from Elaeum in the Chersonese on the Etesian winds and ordered the Pelasgians to leave the island, reminding them of the oracle' (i. e., their answer to the Athenians when they visited them at the bidding of the oracle). Herodotus has obviously misplaced the whole story just as his account of the mission of Alexander after the battle of Salamis ought to have been inserted before the battle if the sequence of events is to be understood: the 'carrying out of apparently impossible conditions', though a universal type of folk-story, is nevertheless applicable much more to the occasion of the expedition of Miltiades to Lemnos than to the legendary mission of the Pelasgians to Athens.

After his return to the Chersonese, Miltiades was still dogged by the family misfortune. As far as we can gather from the very confused

1) Mitchell and Caspari's edition of Grote, page 159, note 2.

2) The earliness of the date is implied by Herodotus when he says that 'neither Athenians nor any other Greeks at that time owned slaves'. (vi. 137.)