Encomion from Panticapaeum and the History of the Bosporan King-dom on the Turn of the 1st and 2nd cc. AD
Saprykin Sergey Yu.
The articles are prepared as the publication of an important inscription found in 1985 in Pant-icapaeum on the territory of its necropolis. It was reconstructed by J.G. Vinogradov, who did not publish it, but only made a brief report on the contents of this document. The full publication has been made by S. Saprykin after Ju. Vinogradov's death. The inscription concerns the politi-cal and military career of an unknown statesman who lived during the reign of the Bosporan kings Rhaescuporis I and his son and successor Sauromates I. From this inscription we can see that the man to whom this laudatio funebris belonged, was a tutor or probably a regent of the young King Sauromates I, called in the inscription «the Great King». The king is compared with the hero Achilles, his ancestors were Heracles and Poseidon. According to the epigraphic and archaeological evidence, the buried man's activities took place in the early 90s AD during the rule of the Roman emperor Domitian, who was murdered in 96 AD and damned. In the inscrip-tion he is called simply «the former Caesar». Being a commander of the hoplites' unit, the hon-ored man won a victory over the Sarmatians-Alans and after that was called to the emperor's court, when Domitian was presumably in Moesia. Emperor Domitian accused the Alans and in-spired the general (who was khiliarkhos by that time) to arrange a military expedition to Taurica against the Scythians and the Taurians. When he came to Chersonesus Taurica, he managed to turn the local kings from concluding a treaty with the Alans, which was against the interests of Rome. During his career, the honoured person organized another military campaign against the Taurians and the Scythians, inspired the king to do something good for the Psechani, a Cauca-sian tribe near the Maeotis and did much bemfits to other tribes of the region, who took his words orders as if they were a law. The encomion was composed by a royal Bosporan biogra-pher in accordance with Hellenistic traditions around the first or second decade of the 2nd с. ВС.