previous next
[5] Among these came hopefully a man who was bilingual,1 and knew the Persian language.

He said that he was a Lycian, had been brought there as a captive, and had pastured goats in these mountains for a number of years. He had come to know the country well and could lead a force of men over a path concealed by bushes2 and bring them to the rear of the Persians guarding the pass.

1 Strictly speaking, that is, he knew Persian and Lycian (Plut. Alexander 37.1), but Curtius 5.4.4 adds more relevantly that he also knew Greek.

2 This is a somewhat unexpected term which editors have viewed with suspicion, but a path which follows folds in the mountains is often marked by vegetation. Curtius 5.4.24 locates these bushes in a great ravine.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: