The Son of Xenophanes Huxley, George Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Fall 1968; 9, 3; ProQuest pg. 309

On Fragments of Three Historians 

George Huxley 

I 

The Son of Xenophanes 

P AUSANIAS remarks that Antiochos the Syracusan historian was 
son ofaXenophanes1 and in the preface to the 1TEPL • J.raAl'Y)~ 
Antiochos calls himself in Ionic, 'AVTloxo~ 8€J)ocpaJ)EO~.2 In this 

paper I propose to explore two linked hypotheses: (1) that Antiochos 
of Syracuse was a son of Xenophanes the Ionian philosopher; (2) that 
Xenophanes was a source of Antiochos. 

Xenophanes spent his later life in the West. Amongst the places he 
almost certainly visited is Syracuse, because he reported that impres­
sions of a fish and of seals were to be seen in the quarries there.3 

Timaios the Sicilian historian asserted that Xenophanes lived in the 
time of Hieron the tyrant and of Epicharmos (FGrHist 566 F 133). 
Hieron reigned from 478 to 467 B.C. and Epicharmos was at Syracuse 
about that time;4 so Timaios may well have had evidence that 
Xenophanes was in Syracuse in old age. There is no objection to the 
hypothesis that Xenophanes was still active ca. 470 B.C. since he himself 
tells us that he was still alive in his 92nd year (Vorsokr. 21 B 8) and there 
is no reason to date his birth earlier than about 560 B.C. Fragment 8 
suggests that he may have left Kolophon and begun his wanderings 
at the age of twenty-five, but we do not know that he left "when the 
Mede came": 1T"f}AlKO~ ~aO') aO' 0 Mij8oS" acplKE'rO; (Vorsokr. 21 B 22, 5). 

During his western sojourn Xenophanes interested himself not 
only in the geology of Syracuse, but also in the eruptions of the Aeolian 
islands. According to the pseudo-Aristotelian Mirabilia (833aI5) the 

1 Paus. 10.11.3= FGrHist 555 F 1. 
2 Dion.Hal. Ant.Rom. 1.12.3= FGrHist 555 F 2. 
3 Hippol. Haer. 1.14.5=Diels/Kranz, Vorsokr. 21 A 33. 
4 Marmor Parium, FGrHist 239 A 35, and cf Epicharmos fr.98 (Kaibel) which mentions 

that Hieron stopped Anaxilas of Rhegion from destroying Lokroi (in 476 B.C.). Epicharmos 
seems to have addressed Xenophanes (Arist. Metaph. 3.5, 1010a4). 

309 



310 ON FRAGMENTS OF THREE HISTORIANS 

fire of the volcano at Lipara was, Xenophanes maintained, sometimes 
quiescent for sixteen years but erupted on the seventeenth. The 
intermediate source of this remark is not known; Timaios has been 
suggested (see Vorsokr. 21 A 48), but if the Aristotelian writer did not 
take it directly from Xenophanes himself, then Antiochos of Syracuse 
may well have been his authority. For the only surviving fragment of 
the ELK€ALK& or ELK€ALWTL~ aV'YYpacp~ of Antiochos is concerned with the 
settlement of Pentathlos and his Knidians in the Aeolian islands and 
with the islands' geology (FGrHist 555 F 1): "they cultivate the land in 
Hiera (today Volcano) and Strongyle (Stromboli) and Didymai, and 
cross over to them in ships; and in Strongyle fire can be seen coming 
up from the earth; in Hiera, however, the fire of its own accord burns 
up towards the high points of the island." Professor Dover has noted 
the close connexion between this passage and the description of the 
Aeolian islands in Thucydides 3.88.2-3; and he has shown that 
Antiochos was here the source of Thucydides, who mentions that the 
inhabitants cross to Didyme, Strongyle and Hiera to cultivate the 
land.5 Thucydides adds a poetical detail not found in the extant 
fragment of Antiochos: that the local people think that Hephaistos 
has his smithy in Hiera because of the fire seen to be emitted there at 
night and the smoke by day. Such a detail may well have come to 
Thucydides by way of Antiochos from a poetical source. It is not 
wildly speculative to suggest that Antiochos had it, not from his own 
local knowledge, but from Xenophanes, who wrote about eruptions 
at Lipara. 

According to Diogenes Laertius (9.20), Xenophanes wrote a poem 
on the colonisation (by the Phokaians) of Elea in Italy. This alleged 
work, a7TOLKLaf1-0~ €l~ , EMav 'Tij~ , IraA{a~, should not be dismissed as a 
forgery, or a forged title, by Lobon of Argos; for some detailed account 
was available of the battle of Alalia and the settlement at Elea, as is 
clear from Herodotos and from Antiochos.6 Antiochos had evidence 
not given by Herodotos, namely that the leader of the emigration 
from Phokaia was Kreontiades. The alleged poem on the colonisation 
of Elea ascribed to Xenophanes deserves therefore to be considered as 
a possible source of information for Antiochos. We do not know that 

6 K. J. Dover, "La colonizzazione della Sicilia in Tucidide," Maia 6 (1953) 8-9; A. W. 
Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides II (Oxford 1956) in loco. doubts. but without 
good reason, that this passage of Thucydides comes from Antiochos. 

6 FGrHist 555 F 8=Strabo 6.1.1 (252). 



GEORGE HUXLEY 311 

Xenophanes ever settled at Elea, but he was interested in the place 
and made some critical comments on the worship there of Leukothea 
(Vorsokr. 21 A 13). 

If there is a case for maintaining that Antiochos may have used 
Xenophanes as a source, it may also be worthwhile to ask whether 
'AVTtoxoS 8€vocpav€os was a son of the Ionian philosopher. We do not 
know how old Antiochos was when he published his works, but he 
seems to have brought his narrative down to 424/3 at the earliest,7 
so that his floruit lies sometime between that of Herodotos and 
Thucydides. A child ofXenophanes' old age born ca. 490 B.C. could still 
be active ca. 420 B.C. and writing or publishing history. The chrono­
logical objection to the hypothesis that Antiochos was the Ionian 
philosopher's son is thus not fatal. Noteworthy too is the fact that 
Antiochos does not in his preface (T 2b) call himself a Syracusan;8 
since a simple omission from the text is not easily to be assumed here, 
it is possible that Antiochos, who is by others called a Syracusan 
(T 1-3), was a foreigner or metic resident in the city. We cannot argue 
however that, because he wrote in Ionic, he was an Ionian metic; for 
Ionic was the accepted medium of scientific and historical prose in 
Antiochos' time, at least outside Athens. 

I am conscious that the arguments advanced here fall far short of 
proof; both hypotheses however have much in their favour, and 
would, if true, lead to some significant inferences. For if Antiochos 
used Xenophanes, then one of his authorities was a highly intelligent 
man; that authority had lived before 500 B.C., travelled widely 
amongst the western Greeks, was interested, as his autobiographical 
fragment shows, in chronology, and may even have described in 
verse the Phokaian settlement of Elea. The credibility of Antiochos' 
work would thus be enhanced and not least his chronology, which, 
as Professor Dover has demonstrated,9 is the source of the excursus 
on western colonisation at the beginning of Thucydides' Book 6. 
With good reason could the historian of the Western Greeks have 

7 FGrHist 555 F 1, and see also Jacoby, ibid. vol. IIIB, Komm. Text p.486. 
8 Jacoby, FGrHist vol. I1IB, Komm. Noten p.2882• 

9 op.cit. (supra n.5) Iff, following with some modifications the arguments of E. WOlffiin, 
Antiochos von Syrakus und Coe/ius Antipater (Winterthur 1872) 1-21. H. Thesleff, On Dating 
Xenophanes (Finska Vet.-Soc. CommHumLitt 23.3 [Helsingfors 1957]) would date the birth 
of Xenophanes as late 540 B.C. Correctly P. Steinmetz, RhM 109 (1966) 13ff, puts his death 
after 478 B.C. 



312 ON FRAGMENTS OF THREE HISTORIANS 

claimed at the beginning of his 7T€pt 'lTa'\{TJ<;. 'AVTLOX0<; E€vorpav€O<; 
I ~ I ./~ "'J' I , ..... , I \ I \ I , TaO€ GVV€ypa'f'€ 7T€PL Tal\LTJS €K TWV apxaLWV I\OYWV Ta 7TLGTOTaTa KaL 

GarplGTaTa.10 

THE QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY OF BELFAST 

May. 1968 

10 I am grateful to Professor K. J. Dover and Mr W. G. Forrest for tolerant criticism of 
the rather irresponsible speculations contained in this article. The latter points out that if 
Antiochos were a great-grandson of Xenophanes. having been born about 470 B.C., the 
generations would fit as well, or better; unless of course Xenophanes did become the father 
of Antiochos the historian in extreme old age. The name Antiochos is found amongst 
Ionians: the Ionian founder of Delos was called Antiochos (schol. Dionys.Per. 525; see my 
book, The Early Ionians [New York 1966] 29). 



Kleidemos and the 'Themistokles Decree' Huxley, George Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Fall 1968; 9, 3; ProQuest pg. 313

II 

Kleidemos and the 'Themistokles Decree' 

O NE of the historical problems raised by the purported Themis­
tokles decree is to determine the date of the first mention of 
it in Greek literature. For Jameson, the discoverer of the 

decree at Troizen, this is not a serious problem at all, for he believes 
the text of the decree to be a genuine document of the Athenian state 
dating from before the battles of Artemision and Salamis in 480 B.C.1 

But in supposing that the text is genuine, Jameson has to reject or to 
ignore much of the testimony of Herodotos, our most important 
authority. Herodotos gives a different order of events, he describes 
a strategy quite different from that implied by the decree, he carefully 
distinguishes the decision to man the ships (7.144) from the order to 
evacuate the city after the battle of Artemision (8.41.1)-but the 
decree confounds the two-and he gives numbers of ships in the 
Athenian fleet that cannot be reconciled with the round two hundred 
ships of the decree. The choice is between Herodotos and the decree: 
there is no middle way. If the decree is treated as genuine, then 
Herodotos must be declared careless and irresponsible, or seriously 
misled by his sources and informants; but since Herodotos had no 
known reason to misunderstand or to misrepresent the facts, I assume 
that the text from Troizen is a fabrication. When was it forged? 

No fifth century author states that Themistokles proposed a decree 
for the manning of the ships and for the evacuation of Athens. To find 
the clearest allusion to the decree we turn to Plutarch's Themistokles. 
From Chapter 10 of that L~fe it is plain that Plutarch knew a variant 
of the text found at Troizen: he repeats from the text the conventional 
words Tijv 7TOALV 7TCXPCXKCX-rcx(NuBcxL -rfj 'AB1]vCf -rfj 'AB1]vcxtwv fJ-E8EOVan. He 
adds the words 7TCXZSCX~ SJ KCX~ yVJICXZKCX~ KCX~ cXvSp&7To8cx Uc/J{ELJI €KCXU-rOV 

WS <Xv SVlI1}-rCXL: those come from Herodotos (8.41: 'A8T)valwv Tn TLS 

SvvaTa, Ucr'ELJI TE.KVa Kat TOUS olKETas) and are not found in the extant 

1 M. Jameson, "A Decree of Themistokles from Troizen," Hesperia 29 (1960) 198-223. a 
publication of commendable promptitude. Jameson presents a revised text in Hesperia 31 
(1962) 310-315. 

313 



314 ON FRAGMENTS OF THREE HISTORIANS 

parts of the Troizenian text nor, presumably, in what is missing. 
Plutarch records from Herodotos the decision to evacuate slaves 
(avopcf.1Tooa), who are called olKETas in Herodotos but are not men­
tioned in the Troizenian text. These conflations show either that 
Plutarch used a source who had attempted to combine the narrative 
of Herodotos with the Troizenian text or that he combined them 
himself. It is not certain that Plutarch also saw a copy of that text, 
but he does repeat from his source the words from rryv 7T6ALV 7Tapa­

KaTaOEuOaL to 'A07]va{wv P.EOEOVarJ which had stood in the original 
<decree' CA07]va{wv codd., 'A07]vwv Reiske; the stone has 'A07]vwv). 

After mentioning the decree of Themistokles, Plutarch describes 
the evacuation of the Athenian families to Troizen. "The Troizenians 
welcomed them warmly and voted to support them at public 
expense, giving two obols to each person, and to the children permis­
sion to help themselves to the harvest everywhere. They also paid 
the salaries of their schoolmasters. Nikagoras wrote the decree." 
Nikagoras, then, according to Plutarch was the author of a Troizenian 
decree providing for the Athenian refugees, Themistokles of an 
Athenian decree ordering the abandonment of Athens. An inscription 
purporting to be the Nikagoras decree may well have stood, together 
with the text found by Jameson, in the Agora of Troizen. It may 
await discovery there. 

Plutarch continues: "But since the Athenians had no public funds, 
Aristotle says that the Areopagus, having provided eight drachmae 
for each of the combatants, was chiefly responsible for the manning of 
the triremes: Kleidemos, however, supposes that this too was a strata­
gem ofThemistokles. For he states that when the Athenians had come 
down to the Piraeus, the Gorgoneion was missing from the statue of 
the goddess. Therefore Themistokles, pretending to search and 
examine everything, found plenty of money hidden in their belong­
ings; and when that was brought together into the open, the crews of 
the ships were well supplied with pay and provisions." This stratagem 
can hardly be treated as serious history. What first concerns us here is 
Plutarch's statement that according to Kleidemos the stratagem was 
also the work of Themistokles: IO..E{07]P.OS OE Kat TOVTO TOV 6JEp.uJTO­

KAloVS 7TOLELTaL uTpaT~Y7]p.a (FGrHist 323 F 21). The Kat refers to the 
previous mention ofThemistokles, where he is stated to be the author 
of the decree ordering the manning of the ships, the evacuation of 
Athens and the entrusting of the city to Athena. We infer therefore 



GEORGE HUXLEY 315 

on the authority of Plutarch that Kleidemos declared Themistokles 
to be the architect of Athenian victory in 480 B.C. Not content with 
making him proposer of the decree, Kleidemos asserted that Themis­
tokles by a stratagem ensured that the fleet was paid and supplied. 
A remarkable omission from the Troizenian text is any mention of 
pay and provisions for the fleet; in such a carefully composed docu­
ment the omission cannot be accidental. The composer of the decree 
had another story to explain how the fleet was paid. The story was, 
I suggest, the stratagem ofThemistokles at the Piraeus. Did Kleidemos 
give the decree, and then go on to tell the story of the stratagem? 
The narrative of Plutarch, who connects Kleidemos both with the 
decree and with the stratagem, suggests that he did. Was Kleidemos, 
then, the fabricator of the Themistokles decree? 

Kleidemos, according to Pausanias was the earliest of the Atthidog­
raphers (10.15.5= FGrHist 323 T 1). He was active about 350 B.C., and 
was an €~'Y]Y'Y]T~5) or Expounder of sacred law,2 an office that gave 
authority to all he wrote. One of the few facts known about him is the 
statement of Tertullian that the historian was crowned with a golden 
crown (FGrHist 323 T 2). Since in the fourth century B.C. the Demos 
awarded crowns to its benefactors, we may follow Jacoby3 in believing 
that Kleidemos was publicly honoured because in his Protogonia or 
Atthis, the first literary-political work of its kind, he had proved 
himself a steadfast defender of the democracy against those who, 
with the approval of the School ofIsokrates, were advocating a return 
to Areopagitic government-in other words to the 7TaTpLOS 7ToAtTE{a, 

the ancestral constitution. The fragment of Kleidemos in Plutarch's 
Themistokles confirms that the Atthidographer's sympathies were 
democratic, not conservative. In his view, Themistokles, not the 
Areopagus, planned and executed the successful campaigns of 480 B.C. 

Kleidemos is the earliest historian known to have mentioned the 
Themistokles decree; and we have shown that Plutarch uses words 
found in the text at Troizen, in which Themistokles is by implication 
made the architect of victory. I suggest that the text from Troizen 
once stood in the Atthis of Kleidemos, and that Kleidemos was the 
fabricator of the decree. 

One of the first to reject the democratic version of the events of 
480 B.C. was Aristotle. Plutarch points out that Aristotle held the 

2 FGrHist 323 F 14. Cf Jacoby, ibid. IIIB Suppl. 1, Text p.572• 

3 F. Jacoby, Atthis (Oxford 1949) 75. 



316 ON FRAGMENTS OF THREE HISTORIANS 

Areopagus responsible for the victory at Salamis, because that council 
gave each of the combatants eight drachmae a head. Here Plutarch 
is drawing on the Constitution of the Athenians, where Aristotle states 
(Ath.Pol. 23.1-2): HAfter the Persian wars the Areopagus was again 
strong and directed the city, taking the leadership by no decree, but by 
being the cause of the sea battle at Salamis. For when the generals 
were at a loss what to do and had ordered each to save himself, the 
Areopagus distributed eight drachmae to each person, and brought 
them aboard the ships." The words are a pointed rebuttal of Kleide­
mos: twenty or so years before the writing of the Constitution of the 
Athenians, Kleidemos had asserted that Themistokles had saved 
Athens by his decree, had by a stratagem arranged for the fleet to be 
paid and provisioned, and had planned the evacuation of Athens. 
Here we find Aristotle stating that the generals (including Themisto­
kles) were at a loss, that the Areopagus had paid the fleet, and, 
following Herodotos, that each was ordered to save himself. He seems 
in fact to be rejecting the chief provisions of the <Themistokles 
decree'. We cannot prove that he follows here the conservative 
Androtion against Kleidemos, but he may well do so. 

Why did Aristotle reject the democratic view of the Salamis 
campaign? In other matters he follows the 8TJILOTLKOl, of whom 
Kleidemos was one, with approval. He accepts their account of Solon's 
reforms, and by silent omission rejects, in the matter of the cancel­
lation of debts, Androtion's view of them (FGrHist 324 F 34). Later he 
gives a highly democratic-and unhistorical-account of the reforms 
ofEphialtes, according to which the reformer was aided by Themisto­
kles. Yet he does not hesitate to rebut point by point the democratic 
view of the events of 480 B.C. If he had thought the <Themistokles 
decree'-what we may now call Kleidemos' decree-genuine, he 
could never have supposed the Areopagus responsible for saving 
Greece. 

Aristotle had read the narrative of Herodotos carefully, and one of 
his reasons for rejecting the decree may well have been the impossi­
bility of reconciling it with Herodotos. Atthidography was not exact 
history. Atthidographers, both conservatives like Androtion and 
STJILOTLKollike Kleidemos, wrote history with clear political purposes, 
one of the aims of the conservatives being to support the ancestral 
constitution, of the democrats to champion the democracy. The heroes 
of the democrats were Themistokles and Ephialtes, of the Areopagites 



GEORGE HUXLEY 317 

Aristides and Kimon. The democratic historians were determined to 
show that Themistokles, the man of the Demos, alone had planned 
the salvation of Athens from the Mede, in order to prove that the 
democracy could save Athens from another barbarian, the Mace­
donian. But Herodotos and Thucydides did not make Themistokles 
sole architect of victory over the Persians; therefore cogent evidence 
for his part in saving Greece, even before battle was joined, had to be 
provided by the 0YJIWTLKot themselves. So, I submit, the earliest and 
the most popular of the Attic-born Atthidographers, relying on his 
authority as Exegetes, produced the needed document, the 'Themisto­
kles decree'. Very soon afterwards, before the peace of Philokrates, 
Aischines in 348 used the decree as an exhortation to fight the Mace­
donian. "Who was it," Demosthenes (19.303) in 343 taunted him, 
referring to the time before the peace, "who was it who read to us 
the psephismata of Miltiades and of Themistokles ?"4 Kleidemos, I 
suggest, had composed the decree as part of his attack on the Areopa­
gus, and Aischines found it equally useful as a rallying point against 
Macedon. Writing at this very time Theopompos of Chi os accused the 
Athenians of deluding the Greeks with exaggerated historical claims 
and with forged decrees. Such a decree was the Themistokles decree 
of Kleidemos, from whose Atthis Aischines borrowed it. Later, perhaps 
early in the third century B.C., a Troizenian or an Athenian had the 
decree copied from Kleidemos and set up in the Agora of Troizen. 

4 M. Guarducci, RivFC N.S. 39 (1961) 59, who proposes to date the fabrication in the years 
357 to 355 B.C., and C. Habicht, Hermes 89 (1961) 17, emphasise the significance ofthis passage 
for any explanation of the circumstances in which the 'decree' was composed. I can find 
nothing in Plutarch's text to confirm the assertion of Habicht (op.cit. 29) that although 
Kleidemos mentioned the psephism of Themistokles, "das Zitat spricht eher gegen die 
Annahme, dass er den Text selbst eingelegt hat." Habicht (loc.cit.) justly states that the 
date of publication of Kleidemos' Atthis is not exactly known: the outside limits are 354 
and 340, with ca. 350 a likely epoch. (Jacoby, op.cit. [supra n.2] 1). It is however most unlikely 
that Aischines in 348 could have made use of the Themistokles psephisma in his speech 
unless it had already been exhibited in public as an inscription or leukoma or published in 
an Atthis. Taking due regard for all the possibilities I incline to the view that Kleidemos 
did not merely include the forged decree in his Atthis before 348, but composed it himself 
in time for Aischines to make political use of it soon afterwards. M. Chambers provides a 
useful doxography of writings on the 'decree' (Philologus 111 [1967] 157-169, esp. 165) and 
looks, in my opinion correctly, for the origins of its fabrication amongst mid-fourth 
century Athenian politics. 

A draft of this paper was read in 1962 by Professor Sterling Dow and Mr W. G. Forrest. 
I am grateful to both scholars for their comments, the more so since their views on the 
genuineness of the inscription are, or were, opposed-against and for, respectively. Having 
pondered the problem of the' decree' for a long time, I now offer the Kleidemos hypothesis 
as a small contribution to the debate. 



318 ON FRAGMENTS OF THREE I-llSTORIANS 

About the political tendencies of the Atthidographers in the middle 
of the fourth century the Themistokles decree of Kleidemos tells us 
much; but alert historians will admit the possibility that the same 
decree, of which the Troizenian text is a copy, may add nothing to 
our knowledge of the Persian wars. 

THE QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY OF BELFAST 

June, 1968 



Nikolaos of Damascus on Urartu Huxley, George Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Fall 1968; 9, 3; ProQuest pg. 319

III 

Nikolaos of Damascus on U rartu 

I N HIS Jewish Antiquities (1.94-95) Josephos quotes from Book 96 of 
the Universal History of Nikolaos of Damascus (first century B.C.) 
some remarks on the Ark: "There is above the country of Minyas 

in Armenia a great mountain called Baris, where, so the legend goes, 
many fugitives saved themselves during the flood, and one man 
being carried in an ark ran aground on the summit; and the relics 
of the timbers were preserved for a long time. This might well be 
the very man of whom Moses the Jewish lawgiver wrote." 

Baris is an ancient name of Ararat, the highest mountain in 
Armenia. l The name Minyas is kept by most editors and is assumed 
to be an allusion to the Argonautic expedition or to the Minni of 
Jeremiah,2 the Mannai of Assyrian inscriptions, who, however, belong 
to the Lake Urmia, not to the Lake Van, region. It is true that the 
historian Medeios, who wrote about Alexander the Great, asserted 
that Thessalians followed Jason from Armenion in Thessaly and came 
to Armenia;3 so the linking of the <Minyad land' to Argonautic 
legend in the Nikolaos fragment is attractive. The weight of the 
manuscripts is not in favour of the reading MLvva8a, however, although 
Naber in his Teubner text of Josephos (Leipzig 1888) implies that it is. 
Generally the group RO(M) followed by Niese in his edition (Berlin 
1887) is superior. R (Codex Regius Parisinus; cent. xiv), 0 (Codex 
Oxoniensis [Bodleianus], miscell. graec. 186; cent. xv) and L (Codex 
Laurentianus, pluto lxix, 20; cent. xiv) are reported to give here 
p:l'}Jlva8a.4 I suggest that the temptation to emend to MLJlva8a here 
should be resisted; still less do we need to put, with J. Vossius, 
MLAva8a; for the Milyas is a country in southwestern Asia Minor, 
remote from Armenia. 

1 Kiepert, Formae Orbis Antiqui (Berlin 1902) v; H. Treidler, in Der Kleine Pauly I (Stuttgart 
1964) 825-826. 

Z Jer. 51 :27, "The Kingdoms of Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz." 
3 FGrHist 129 F 1 (Strabo 11.14.12). Nikolaos (FGrHist 90 F 11, 54 and 55) also wrote about 

the Argonauts, but only, it seems, in connexion with Kokhis, not with Armenia as a whole. 
4 See FGrHist 90 F 72 app.crit. 

319 



320 ON FRAGMENTS OF THREE HISTORIANS 

The land of Van and Ararat once lay in the heartland of the great 
kingdom of Urartu (i.e. Ararat, the Uruatru of Assyrian annals). The 
most successful ofUrartian conquerors was king Menua, who extended 
his frontiers as far to the west as Melitene and northwards to the 
neighbourhood of Erevan about 800 B.C.5 Urartians were long estab­
lished in the Van region, and they survived as the Alarodioi of 
Herodotos (3.94 and 7.79) under the Persian empire, long after the 
decline of their independent power during Skythian, Cimmerian and 
Assyrian incursions. Thus there is no reason to suppose that the name 
of the great conqueror Menua was blotted out in Armenia. Rather, 
the presence of the Menuad land in the fragment of Nikolaos strongly 
suggests that Menua was not quite forgotten some eight centuries 
after his death. 

The mention of Moses shows that Nikolaos compared the 'one man' 
in the Ark with Noah of the Old Testament. Josephos names here 
Berossos, Hieronymus the Egyptian (FGrHist 787), Mnaseas (ofPatara) 
and "many others" as having written about the Flood and the Ark; 
but he does not state that they also mentioned Noah. The identifica­
tion of the person who landed on Mount Baris with the Hebraic Noah 
or Noe is thus almost certainly due to Nikolaos himself;6 but what 
his source for the mention of the Menyad land was we do not know. 
There is no reason to think that he took the toponym from Berossos; 
in his Babyloniaka that scholar called the king who sailed in the Ark 
Xisouthros and declared that it went aground amongst the Kordyaian 
(Kurdish?) mountains of Armenia; but the fragments of his account 
suggest that Xisouthros floated away from Babylonia in the cataclysm; 
in the version of Nikolaos the Ark may well have been said to have 
been launched near Ararat, to the summit of which many persons, 
he claimed, were able to flee. In Berossos' account, however, it seems 
that only those who sailed in the Ark were saved.7 The narrative of 
Nikolaos was therefore independent of Berossos and of the Mosaic 
version, according to which "All in whose nostrils was the breath of 
life, of all that was in the dry land, died."8 

THE QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY OF BELFAST 

April, 1968 

5 A. Goetze, Kleinasien2 (Munich 1957) 192. 
6 Ben Zion Wacholder, Nicolaus of Damascus (Univ. Calif. Publ. Hist. 75, 1962) 55. 
7 Berossos, FGrHist 680 F 4b (16) and c. 
8 Genesis 7 :22. I am grateful to my colleague Me E. D. Phillips for his comments on a 

draft of this paper.