Cornelius Nepos on Marathon and Paros

Abstract

It might seem waste of labour to examine minutely an account of the battle of Marathon and the Parian expedition so late as that contained in the brief life of Miltiades ascribed to Cornelius Nepos, more especially as I must confess that the results of my enquiry are in the main negative, and that such positive conclusions as I reach have not the charm of novelty, but serve merely to strengthen theories already well known, and in England at least widely accepted. But this late epitome is almost the only consecutive narrative of these events outside the pages of Herodotus. Marathon was sung by poets, and bespattered with rhetoric by patriotic orators, but such historical accounts as there once were of the battle have perished, save for the still later epitome of Trogus Pompeius made by Justin. Again there is good reason to think that Cornelius Nepos is here following the fourth-century historian Ephorus. This is manifestly the case in his account of the Parian expedition, the kernel of which is little more than a translation of the fragment of Ephorus preserved in Stephanus of Byzantium s.v. Paros. That Nepos drew his story of Marathon from the same source is the general, and as I shall hope to show, the right opinion, though it has been denied by Dr. E. Meyer. Further, the view of the campaign and the conception of the battle to be found in Nepos have been accepted as historical by many of the highest authorities in Germany, e.g., by Drs. H. Delbrück, G. Busolt, and in the main by Dr. E. Meyer.