Then, when I decided to sail—it chanced that I was accompanied only by Xenophon

Probably a slave or afreedman. He is not mentioned elsewhere in Lucian.

during my visit, as I had previously sent my father and my family on to Amastris—he sent me many remembrances and presents, and promised too that he himself would furnish a boat and a crew to transport me. I considered this a sincere and polite offer; but when I was in mid-passage, I saw the master in tears, disputing with the sailors, and began to be very doubtful about the prospects. It was a fact that they had received orders from Alexander to throw us bodily into the sea. If that had been done, his quarrel with me would have been settled without ado; but by his tears the master prevailed upon his crew to do us no harm. “For sixty years, as you see,” said he to me, “I have led a blameless and God-fearing life, and I should not wish, at this age and with a wife and children, to stain my hands with murder;” and he explained for what purpose he had taken us aboard, and what orders had been given by Alexander.

He set us ashore at Aegiali (which noble Homer mentions

Iliad, 2, 855.

), and then they went back again.

There I found some men from the Bosporus who were voyaging along the coast. They were going as ambassadors from King Eupator to Bithynia, to bring the yearly contribution.

Tiberius Julius Eupator succeeded Rhoemetalces as King of the (Cimmerian) Bosporus, on the Tauric Chersonese; its capital was Panticapaeum (Kertch). The period of his reign is about a.d. 154-171. At this time the kingdom seems to have been paying tribute to the Scythians annually as well as to the Empire (Toxaris, 44).

I told them of the peril in which we had been, found them courteous, was taken aboard their vessel, and won safely through to Amastris, after coming so close to losing my life.

Thereupon I myself began to prepare for battle with him, and to employ every resource in my desire to pay him back. Even before his attempt upon me, I detested him and held him in bitter enmity on account of the vileness of his character. So I undertook to prosecute him, and had many associates, particularly the followers of Timocrates, the philosopher from Heraclea. But the then governor of Bithynia and Pontus, Avitus,

L. Lollianus Avitus, consul a.d. 144, proconsul Africae ca. 156, praeses Bithyniae 165.

checked me, all but beseeching and imploring me to leave off, because out of good will to Rutilianus he could not, he said, punish Alexander even if he should find him clearly guilty of crime. In that way my effort was thwarted, and I left off exhibiting misplaced zeal before a judge who was in that state of mind.

Of course Lucian’s case, as it stood, was weak, as Avitus tactfully hinted. But this does not excuse Avitus. The chances of securing enough evidence to convict Alexander in a Roman court were distinctly good, and fear of Alexander’s influence is the only reasonable explanation of the failure to proceed,

Was it not also a great piece of impudence on the part of Alexander that he should petition the Emperor to change the name of Abonoteichus and call it Ionopolis, and to strike a new coin bearing on one side the likeness of Glycon and on the other that of Alexander, wearing the fillets of his grandfather Asclepius and holding the falchion of his maternal ancestor Perseus?

S. Hippolytus (Refut. omn. Haeres. IV. 28-42) contains a highly interesting section “against sorcerers,” including (34) a treatment of this subject. It is very evidently not his own work; and K. F. Hermann thought it derived from the treatise by Celsus. Ganschinietz, in Harnack’s Texte wnd Untersuchungen 39, 2, has disputed this, but upon grounds the representation of a snake with human head to the middle of the third cent (Head, Hist. Numm., 432, Cumont J.c., p. 42). The modern name Inéboli is a corruption of onopolis.

In spite of his prediction in an oracle that he was fated to live a hundred and fifty years and then die by a stroke of lightning, he met a most wretched end before reaching the age of seventy, in a manner that befitted a son of Podaleirius;

As son of Podaleirius, it was fitting, thinks Lucian, that his leg (poda-) should be affected.

for his leg became mortified quite to the groin and was infested with maggots. It was then that his baldness was detected when because of the pain he let the doctors foment his head, which they could not have done unless his wig had been removed.

Such was the conclusion of Alexander’s spectacular career, and such the dénouement of the whole play; being as it was, it resembled an act of Providence, although it came about by chance. It was inevitable, too, that he should have funeral games worthy of his career—that a contest for the shrine should arise. The foremost of his fellow-conspirators and . impostors referred it to Rutilianus to decide which of them should be given the preference, should suceeed to the shrine, and should be crowned with the fillet of priest and prophet. Paetus was one of them, a physician by profession, a greybeard, who conducted himself in a way that befitted neither a physician nor a greybeard. But Rutilianus, the umpire, sent them off unfilleted, keeping the post of prophet for the master after his departure from this life.