Life of Datames

Datames is the most unusual life in Cornelius Nepos' surviving book on foreign generals: its subject is a Persian provincial commander of the fourth century BC, little known from other sources. Nepos (about 110 to 24 BC) says he will tell more about him because the Greeks had not, and ranks him the bravest and most resourceful of all barbarian generals except Hamilcar and Hannibal.

Datames, son of a Carian father, Camisares, and a Paphlagonian mother, first served in the guard of King Artaxerxes II. Nepos tells how he captured the rebel Paphlagonian ruler Thuys, a giant of a man, and paraded him before the king on a leash like a hunted beast, and how he swiftly seized Aspis, a rebel chieftain in Cataonia. Envied at court and warned of the king's suspicion, Datames revolted. He turned the desertion of his own father-in-law into a victory, held the passes against a royal army, defeated the much larger force of the satrap Autophradates, and repeatedly escaped plots against his life. In the end Mithridates, son of Ariobarzanes, won his trust by pretending to be an enemy of the king, and murdered him at a meeting.

Nepos ends with the moral that even the most cautious can be caught by feigned friendship. The narrative is fast and the Latin simple, with vivid scenes such as Thuys on the leash.