The Huntsman and the Castaway HIGHET, GILBERT Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Spring 1973; 14, 1; ProQuest pg. 35

The Huntsman and the Castaway 
Gilbert Highet 

I N ONE of his most lively and apparently original speeches (the 
Euboean, no.7) Dio Chrysostom describes an adventure which he 
says happened to him during his years of exile and penury. 

Crossing the Aegean from Chios to mainland Greece, he was caught 
in a storm and cast ashore in the Hollows of Euboea. It was a desolate 
place. He set out to try to find another ship. After a time he saw a 
hunted deer, which had leapt off the cliff and was dying on the beach. 
When the huntsman appeared, Dio showed him the quarry, helped 
him to skin it and cut it up, and was invited to his home for dinner. 

As they walked (slowly enough, carrying half a deer) the man­
Dio does not give him a name, but let us call him Demeas-described 
his life. It was poor: he lived mostly by hunting, dressed in skins (§62), 
and grew only a little grain (§§11 and 45). It was simple: there were 
only two families in the settlement (his own and that of his brother­
in-law), not big enough to form a village (§42). The land over which 
he hunted game had formerly been part of a large estate, with horses 
and cattle; but its owner had been put to death by the emperor be­
cause of his wealth, the cattle and horses driven off, the land aban­
doned, legally, although not actually, reverting to the nearest city­
community, Carystus.1 

The father of Demeas had been one of two freeborn herdsmen on 

1 The brother-in-law of Demeas is fifty years old (§21); the adventure takes place in the 
last years of Domitian's reign, say about A.D. 95: therefore the brother-in-law was born in 
45 or so. Therefore his father was born in 20 or 25: he died an old man in about 94 (§20). 
The estate was confiscated well before Demeas was married (§20), indeed while he was still 
a boy (§21): therefore during the sixties. This means that the emperor responsible was not, 
as some have thought, Domitian, but Nero (with whom the last Flavian was often com­
pared, e.g. by Juvenal 4.38). The occasion will have been Nero's tour of Greece in 66-67, 
when he swallowed up enormous properties and executed their owners (Dio Cassius 62.11, 
a report interpreted as "imposing taxation on the rich" by A. Momigliano in the relevant 
section of CAH 10.21.6 and called "exaggeration" by Hohl in RE Suppl. 3 [1918] 389). If the 
proprietor was Tib. Claudius Hipparchus (grandfather of Herodes Atticus), then his exe­
cution cannot be attributed to Domitian, as suggested by M. P. Charlesworth in CAH 
11.1.5, p.29 n.1, and \Vilamowitz must be mistaken in commenting "Dies zielt auf das 
Missregiment Domitians" (Griechisches Lesebuch5 2.1 [Berlin 1910] p.lO). The whole thing 
happened a generation before Dio visited Euhoea and heard the story. 

35 



36 THE HUNTSMAN AND THE CASTAWAY 

the estate, who had remained after the confiscation as squatters and 
had taken to hunting in order to live. Each had one son and one 
daughter. They joined the families by marrying the daughters to the 
sons; and now, by the time of Dio's visit, the third generation was 
growing up, one grand-daughter having already married and left 
home (§68). Demeas' brother-in-law had never visited the city.2 
Demeas had been there twice, once as a boy, and once later on, when 
the fathers were dead and he represented the little group (§21). He 
was summoned by a man sent by the magistrates. He was taken into 
the citizens' assembly. There, says he, recollecting the episode, he is 
accused of enriching himself by trespassing on public land without a 
title and without paying rent, and in addition of being a wrecker, 
luring ships onto the rocky coast by false beacons, like the mythical 
king Nauplius. A prominent citizen then comes forward to defend 
Demeas, saying that too much land is derelict, and that anyone 
willing to work it should be given title, with a small rent to be paid in 
kind. Bidden to make a statement, Demeas explains how miserably 
poor he and his people are, and yet conveys the impression that they 
are content with what they have. Eloquent in his indignation, he 
denies that he has ever made any profit out of shipwrecks: on the 
contrary, he has often helped castaways (as in fact he succored Dio). 

At this a man rises in the assembly, accompanied by a neighbor, 
and testifies that two years earlier they were both shipwrecked with 
heavy loss off Cape Caphereus and cast ashore destitute. Demeas (he 
declares) took them in, warmed them at a fire, rubbed them with 
tallow (having no olive-oil), poured hot water over them, clothed 
them and fed them, and kept them for three days to recover: he 
saved their lives. Demeas recognizes him, greets him by his name as 
Sotades, and naively kisses him. 

The original defender now proposes that Demeas be honored with 
a dinner in the prytaneum, given regular clothes, granted the use of 
the land, and awarded a hundred drachmas. This is passed by ac­
clamation. Demeas accepts the dinner, refuses the money, and goes 
home, to remain undisturbed thenceforward. 

As he ends his story, he and Dio reach his cottage. Dio dines on the 
venison with Demeas and his wife, served by a daughter and two 
sons. During the meal Demeas' brother-in-law (for convenience we 

2 The city is not named; but since the huntsmen live on the foothills of Mount Ocha in 
southern Euboea (§38), it must be Carystus: Chalcis is too far distant to be concerned. 



GILBERT HIGHET 37 

may call him Simon) enters with his son, who brings a gift for his girl 
cousin. (The young couple might be named Gorgias and Glycera.) 
Tactfully Dio asks when the girl will be married and to whom. The 
father answers that the bridegroom is present. Then why the delay? 
First, says Simon (§70), to choose an auspicious day-at which Gorgias 
observes that the moon is full and the air clear (§71)-and second, 
says Demeas, because Simon has to go and purchase a sacrificial victim 
(§72)-which Gorgias counters by saying that he has got hold of a pig 
and has been fattening it up C§§73-74). The pig is brought in and 
approved, the wedding is fixed for the day after the morrow, and Dio 
is invited to be a guest. He accepts, thinking how much happier and 
more natural such weddings are than the marriages of the rich, en­
cumbered by the work of matchmakers, by the legal problems of 
settlements and dowries, and by arguments during the celebration 
itself C§80). 

Now, as Dio himself says C§81), I have not told this story without 
meaning to make a point. I suggest that these two episodes, the trial 
in the city and the wedding in the country, may have been inspired by 
a play, one of the lost works of New Comedy, and that in the play they 
were connected much more closely as parts of a single intrigue. It is 
really quite artificial that two kinsmen living in a tiny community 
should wait for the arrival of a benevolent stranger to make the final 
arrangements for a wedding between their children. It is also rather 
artificial to have the huntsman tell a long tale about a legal adventure 
in the city to a poor barefooted vagabond while they walk home 
carrying their dinner. 

The story narrated by Demeas (§§21-63) has several predecessors 
in scenes from Attic drama. In each of them a person who has attended 
a meeting of an assembly describes it on stage to an interested auditor. 
They are Aristophanes' Knights 624-82, Euripides' Orestes 852-956, 
Aristophanes' Women's Assembly 395-457, and Menander's Sicyonian 
(ed. R. Kassel, Berlin 1965) 169-271.3 

3 Links between some or all of these scenes have been examined by several scholars: 
notably E. W. Handley, "Notes on the Sikyonios," BICS 12 (1965) 38-62; R. Kassel, "Men­
anders Sikyonier," Eranos 63 (1965) 1-21; H. Lloyd-Jones, "Menander's Sikyonios," GRBS 7 
(1966) 131-57; and G. A. Ricciardelli, "Osservazioni sulla rhesis del Sicionio di Menandro," 
RivCultCM 8 (1966) 210-14. Evidently Menander is gently parodying (or, as Lloyd-Jones 
prefers, lightly alluding to) the speech in Orestes, and also in certain details copying both 
the Aristophanic scenes. Kassel (21 n.43) points out that "der Bravour-stuck der Euri­
pidesparodie" was a stylistic triumph for Menander, and was also a fine opportunity for the 



38 THE HUNTSMAN AND THE CASTAWAY 

In The Sicyonian a messenger describes to Smicrines an assembly at 
which the citizenship of a girl kidnapped in childhood was debated. 
It was a noisy meeting. The messenger not only gives the speeches 
and verbal fencing of the debaters in direct speech, but even reports 
the shouts of the crowd (244-45). The just cause triumphs-with the 
help of a good man, who is described as aVOpLK(lc 1TcXVV (215), as the 
defender of Orestes was eXv0PE'ioC &vr}p (Or. 918). 

In the Euboean Discourse Demeas describes to Dio an assembly at 
which his entire livelihood and even his life were endangered, until­
thanks to the unexpected intervention of someone apparently a 
stranger to him-he was vindicated and rewarded by the favor of the 
citizens. 

It is possible that Demeas' tale in Dio is based on a passage in a lost 
comedy, of the type known to us from The Sicyonian.' Its central 
theme is particularly common in New Comedy: an important 
character is saved from misfortune by the appearance of some person 
or thing from the past, which leads into a recognition-scene (Dio §59). 
Suppose that in the comedy Demeas was a poor huntsman or farmer, 
living on the bare subsistence level (like Cnemon in The Curmudgeon) 
and strange to the ways of the city (like the speaker of Georgos fr.3); 
that he was falsely accused of trespassing, and threatened with eviction 
or worse; and that Sotades appeared out of his past, to justify him, so 
that the right cause, as it must do in comedy, triumphed. 

Can that adventure be connected with the other episode in Dio's 
narrative, the preparations for the wedding of Demeas' daughter 
Glycera? This also is a favorite comic theme, e.g. Curmudgeon 935-53, 
Samian Woman 325-32. A wedding often occurs at the end of a play, 
just after some obstacle to it has been removed by an unexpected 
twist of fortune; and it was just such a happy peripeteia that brought 
about the acquittal of the bride's father Demeas. In Dio's story the 
two impediments which have held up the marriage-the need to fix 
an auspicious day and the requirement of procuring a sacrificial 
animal-are too trivial to have been part of a comic intrigue. In New 

actor, who had to evoke the whole of a noisy debate filled with different types of voice. 
The opening of the Orestes speech was also parodied by the Middle Comedy poet Alcaeus 
(fr.19 Kock). 

'Dio admires and praises Menander (18.6-7) and quotes him at least once (32.16= 
Plodum fr.335.6-7). He refers to plots and productions of New Comedy (old by his time) in 
15.7, 19.5,32.94 and 57.11. He also likes paraphrasing Attic drama: e.g. in 52 and 59. 



GILBERT HIGHET 39 

Com.edy the com.m.onest external obstacles to a m.arriage are lack of a 

dowry and dubiety about the bride's citizenship and status. Suppose 
that Demeas had been involved in a legal case concerning money or 
citizenship or both;5 that this had prevented his daughter's marriage; 
that Sotades unexpectedly appeared to give the evidence that saved 
him; and that in recognition of an earlier benefaction (such as his 
rescue after shipwreck) Sotades had presented him with a sum of 
money.6 The wedding could then proceed. The guest of honor would 
be, not the shipwrecked philosopher Dio, but the former castaway 
Sotades. 

I have failed to find a title which would clearly indicate the existence 
of such a play, or any group of fragments which might belong to it. 
No Kynagos or Kynegos is known.7 Only one line remains of the 
Kynegetai of Anaxandrides (Middle Comedy) and it tells us nothing.s 
Two titles involve shipwreck. One is Dis Nauagos or Dionysus Nauagos, 
falsely attributed to Aristophanes and held to be by his imitator 
Archippus: this can scarcely be relevant.9 The other comes from the 
Middle Comedy, the Nauagos of Ephippus;lo but the only fragment 
from it is a witty speech mocking the members of Plato's Academy, 
and it is hard to fit it into such a comedy as we have imagined. Only 
one word of the Naukleros by Eudoxus survives;l1 and the fragments 
of Menander's Naukleros are not encouraging. Menander's Halieus 
may have contained a shipwreck and a rescue (see fr.15); fragment 14 
expresses a sentiment rather like that which Dio voices in §§109-26;12 
but the other fragments will not fit into any intrigue such as has been 
suggested above. The connection between the Euboean Discourse and a 
play of the New Comedy is therefore, at least for the present, purely 
conjectural. Yet many dramas of which we know virtually nothing 

5 In §49 he tells the assembly with considerable emphasis that his father was legally a 
citizen. 

S Dio makes the huntsman refuse the hundred drachmas (§63), but this is part of the 
general philosophical doctrine expressed in this discourse, that money is evil (§§104-06, 109). 

7 Philetaerus of the Middle Comedy wrote a Kynagis or Kynegis (Kock, CAF II pp.231-33, 
frr.6-9), but the hunting girl was no doubt a harlot, and the play was sexy and sophisticated. 

• Kock, CAF II p.l44, fr.24. 
t Kock. CAF I pA59. fr.266; and pp.679-89. 
10 Kock, CAF II pp.257-58. fr.14. 
11 Kock, CAF III p.332, fr.!. 
12 Similarly the little speech in Menander's Hydria (frA01 Koerte) would go quite well 

in the mouth of Demeas. So would the speech on farming from Philemon's Pyrrhus (Kock. 
CAF II pp,496-97, fr.71). 



40 THE HUNTSMAN AND THE CASTAWAY 

were familiar to Dio and to scholars of his era: for example, in 32.23 
he quotes what appears to be a fragment from a wholly unknown 
comedy. 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

October, 1972