2
MNESIPPUS In that matter, to be sure, your judgement is sound. But as regards Orestes and Pylades, on just what ground did you so admire them, that you have put them on a parity with the gods, and that too when they were trespassers upon your soil and— what is most significant—enemies? Why, when the Scythians of that day seized them after their shipwreck and dragged them off intending to sacrifice them to Artemis, they set upon the keepers of their prison, overpowered the watch, and not only slew the king but carried off the priestess,Both here and below in § 6 Lucian omits as self-understood the point that Orestes discovers the priestess to be his sister Iphigenia, previously thought to have perished at Aulis under the sacrificial knife. nay even kidnapped Artemis herself, and then went. sailing away, after having made a mock of the Scythian commonwealth.In the point that this version of the story makes the Greeks escape by overpowering the Scythians and killing Thoas, their king, it differs significantly both from Euripides in the Iphigenia among the Taurians and from Sophocles in the Chryses, in which Thoas was killed, to be sure, but only after they had somehow got away and he had overtaken them at “Sminthe,” whose ruler, Chryses, turning out to be the son of Agamemnon and Chryseis, and so the half-brother of Orestes and Iphigenia, aids them to kill their pursuer. Elsewhere in extant ancient literature the Lucianic version is found only in Servius and in accounts derived from him (Serv. in Aen., II, 216; cf. [Hyginus], 261, and Mythogr. Vat., II, 202). It may have been the accepted version of the cult of Diana at Aricia (Preller, Robert), but cannot be of Latin origin. It is surely the early version, effaced in the literary tradition by the influence of Euripides, but perpetuated (as early myths often were) in art through a painting by some famous Hellenistic master, later reflected not only in Graeco- Roman sarcophagus-reliefs but in the murals of some Graeco- Scythian Oresteum (§6). Lucian’s knowledge of it may safely be ascribed to an allusion to those murals in the literary source from which he derives the curious mixture of fact and fiction in § 6. So if that is why you honour those heroes, you will very soon produce many like them! Draw the conclusion for yourselves in the light of what happened of old whether it is desirable for you that many an Orestes and Pylades should descend upon Scythia. To me it seems that very soon, under those conditions, you would become irreligious yourselves, yes, godless, after the remainder of your gods had been similarly shipped out of the country to foreign parts. And then, I suppose, in place of the whole company of gods, you will deify the men who came to obtain them for export and will sacrifice to the robbers of your temples as gods!
