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Mithridates und die Vesper von Ephesos (166 Aufrufe)

Γραικύλος schrieb am 21.09.2025 um 23:20 Uhr (Zitieren)

Appian, The Mithridatic Wars 22 f.:

Mithridates VI. Eupator Dionysos hat im Jahre 88 v.u.Z. ein Massaker an ca. 80000 Römern begangen, die als unerbittliche Steuereintreiber verhaßt waren.

22. [...] In the meantime Mithridates built a large number of ships for an attack on Rhodos, and wrote secretly to all his satraps and city governors that on the thirtieth day thereafter they should set upon all Romans and Italians in their towns, and upon their wives and children and their freeman of Italian birth, kill them and throw their bodies out unburied, and share their goods with King Mithridates. He threatened to punish any who should bury the dead or conceal the living, and proclaimed rewards to informers and to those who should kill persons in hiding. To slaves, who killed or betrayed their masters he offered freedom, to debtors, who did the same to their creditors, the remission of half of their debt. These secret orders Mithridates sent to all the cities at the same time. When the appointed day came disasters of the most varied kinds occurred throughout Asia, among which were the following:

23. The Ephesians tore away the fugitives, who had taken refuge in the temple of Artemis, and were clasping the images of the goddess, and slew them.
The Pergameans shot with arrows those who had fled to the temple of Aesculapius, while they were still clinging to his statues.
The people of Adramyttium followed into the sea those who sought to escape by swimming, and killed them and drowned their children.
The Caunii, who had been made subject to Rhodes after the war against Antiochus (1) and had been lately liberated by the Romans, pursued the Italians who had taken refuge about the statue of Vesta in the senate-house, tore them from the shrine, first killed the children before their mother’s eyes, and then killed the mothers themselves and their husbands after them.
The citizens of Tralles, in order to avoid the appearance of blood-guiltiness, hired a savage monster named Theophilus, of Paphlagonia, to do the work. He conducted the victims to the temple of Concord, and there murdered them, chopping off the hands of some who were embracing the sacred images.

Such was the awful fate that befell the Romans an Italians in Asia, men, women, and children, their freedmen and slaves, all who were of Italian blood; by which it was made very plane that it was as much hatred of the Romans as fear of Mithridates that impelled the Asiatics to commit these atrocities.

But they paid a double penalty for their crime – one at the hands of Mithridates himself, who ill-treated them perfidiously not long afterward, and the other at the hands of Cornelius Sulla. [...]

[Appian, Roman History. Ed. by Horace White. Vol. II, Cambridge/Mass. – London 1912, reprinted 2005, pp. 278-281]

(1) Antiochos III. der Große (reg. 223-187 v.u.Z.)