376 HISTORY OF GREECE. Having made their escape. Python and his brother re'.a-ed to Athens, where they were received with every demonstration of honor, and presented with the citizenship as well as with golden wreaths ; partly as tyrannicides, partly as having relieved the Athenians from an odious and formidab. .3 enemy. 1 Disclaiming the warm eulogies heaped upon him by various speakers in the assembly, Python is said to have replied " It was a god who did the deed; we only lent our hands:" 2 an anecdote, which, whether it be truth or fiction, illustrates powerfully the Greek admiration of tyrannicide. The death of Kotys gave some relief to Athenian affairs in the Chersonese. Of his children, even the eldest, Kersobleptes, was only a youth : 3 moreovfr two other Thracian chiefs, Berisades and Amadokus, now started up as pretenders to shares in the kingdom of Thrace. Kersobleptes employed as his main support and min- ister the mercenary general Charidemus, who either had already married, or did now marry, his sister ; a nuptial connection had been formed in like manner by Amadokus with two Greeks named Simon and Bianor and by Berisades with an Athenian citizen named Athenodorus, who (like Iphikrates and others) had founded a city, and possessed a certain independent dominion, in or near the Chersonese. 4 These Grecian mercenary chiefs thus united themselves by nuptial ties to the princes whom they served, as Seuthes had proposed to Xenophon, and as the Italian Condottieri of the fifteenth century ennobled themselves by similar aUiance vtith princely families for example, Sforza with the Visconti of Milan. All these three Thracian competitors were now represented by Grecian agents. But at first, it seems, Charidemus on behalf of Kersobleptes was the strongest. He and his army were near Perinthus on the north coast of the Propontis, where the Athenian My opinion is, that the assassination of Kotys dates mere probably in 360 B. c. 1 Demosthenes cont. Aristokrat. p. 660, s. 142; p. 662, s. 150; p. 675, s. 193. Plutarch, De Sui Laude, p. 542 E.; Plutarch, adv. Koloten, p 1 126, B 8 Plutarch, De Sui Laude, ut sup. 3 Demosthen. cont. Aristokr. p. 674, s. 193. ftsipaKv^iov, etc. 4 Demosth. cont. Aristokrat. p. 623, 624, s. 8-12 ; p. 064, s. 153 (in which passage KrjdeaTr/g may be fairly taken to mean any near .lonnection by mar- riage). About Athenodorus compare Isokrates Or viii. (Je Pa**e) s. 31
