Toxaris vel amicitia

Lucian of Samosata

Lucian, Vol. 5. Harmon, A. M., editor. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.

MNESIPPUS Please go on and say what else they did that is imposing and godlike ; since as far as concerns their voyage and their foreign travel I could point you many who are more godlike than they—the merchant traders, and particularly the Phoenicians among them, who not only sail into the Pontus or as far as Lake Maeotis and the Cimmerian Bosporus,[*](The Sea of Azov and the Straits of Kertsch. ) but cruise everywhere in Greek and foreign waters; for these fellows comb every single shore and every strand, you may say, each year before returning late in the autumn to their own country. On the same principle, you should account them gods, even though most of them are pedlars and, it may be, fishmongers !

TOXARIS Listen then, you amazing fellow, and learn how much more generously than you Greeks we barbarians judge good men. In Argos and Mycenae there is not even a respectable tomb of Orestes or

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Pylades to be seen, but among us a temple has been assigned them, to both together, as was reasonable since they were comrades, and sacrifices are offered them, and all sorts of honours besides. The fact that they were not Scythians but foreigners is no hindrance to their having been accounted good men and their being cherished by the foremost Scythians ; for we do not enquire what country proper men come from, nor do we bear a grudge if men who are not friendly have done noble deeds; we commend what they have accomplished and count them our own in virtue of their achievements. What especially impressed us in these men and gains our commendation is this: it seemed to us that as friends they, surely, had proved themselves the best in the world, and had established precedents for everyone else in regard to the way in which friends should share all their fortunes.

All that the went through in each other’s company or for eac other’s sake our ancestors inscribed on a tablet of bronze which they set up in the Oresteum;[*](Nothing could be more natural than for some Graeco- Scythian city in South Russia (Crimea?) to have had an Oresteum like this, with a set of murals commemorating the exploits of Orestes and Pylades. Indeed, the existence of the paintings is practically guaranteed by two considerations: they represent a version of the story of Orestes among the Taurians that is not known to us prior to Lucian except in art; and that version, involving as it does his killing of the king, is not likely to have been preferred to the Euripidean by Lucian for his present purpose, if the paintings were imaginary. Here there seems to be a core of fact which Lucian can have derived only from some previous writer; and we may perhaps also safely believe that the deified heroes obtained sufficient prestige among the native part of the population of the city and its environs to gain them a Scythian name (Korakoi: §7 end). Compare the Herodotean tale (IV, 103) of the worship of Iphigenia among the Taurians. This kernel of fact, however, has been enveloped in a hull of fiction by transporting the sanctuary to a mythical Scythian capital without a name and making it the focus of a great national cult of friendship—a happy conceit in view of the custom of swearing “blood-brotherhood” (§ 37), but sheer fiction none the less. It is perhaps possible that Lucian drew the fact from some Hellenistic AListorian and supplied the fiction himself; but it is more likely that he found both already combined in his source, and connected with one or more of the tales of Scythian friendship that he puts into the mouth of Toxaris (cf. especially p. 173, n. 2). ) and they made it the law that the first study and lesson for

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their children should be this tablet and the memorising of all that had been written upon it. In point of fact, every one of them would sooner forget the name of his own father than fail to know the achievements of Orestes and Pylades. But in the temple close, too, the very same matters that are set forth on the tablet are to be seen represented in paintings by the ancients; Orestes voyaging with his friend, and then, after his ship had been destroyed on the rocks, his arrest and preparation for the sacrifice; Iphigenia is already consecrating them. Opposite this, on the other wall, he is depicted as just out of his fetters, slaying Thoas and many more of the Scythians. Finally, they are sailing off, with Iphigenia and the goddess; the Scythians meanwhile are vainly laying hold of the ship, which is already under way, hanging to the rudders and trying to get aboard; then, unable to accomplish anything, they swim back to land, some of them because they are wounded, others for fear of that. It is just there that one may see how much good-will they displayed in each other’s interest; I mean, in the engagement with the Scythians. For the artist has portrayed each of them paying no heed to the foemen opposite himself, but encountering those who are assailing the other, trying to meet their missiles in his stead, and counting it nothing to die if he saves his friend and intercepts with his own body the stroke that is being directed at the other.