Mannos, Bardesanes, and Syrmos: the trial at Abgar’s

Syrmos the Scythian used this trial, and Bardesanes the Parthian, and perhaps even more somewhere. I saw it myself, in the house of Abgar the king, Mannos his son having often tried it, I directing. He was so terrible an archer that once, a hunt being around midday — I happened to be riding by, not as some hunter but as a spectator of the hunt — a woodland bear leaps out from some thicket, fearful to approach, terrible to see, perhaps even impossible to hit. All were startled and seeking the roads of flight. Mannos, exhorting us to take courage, dissolved all the fear by throwing two missiles: having shot the eyes of the bear, he made her easy to handle, not even seeing the hunters.

Bardesanes was a wise archer if anyone else was. I know a man who shot as a painter does. The manner was this. He once stood a man opposite, a youth beautiful and stout, whom even a painter would have tired imitating. The youth was holding forth the shield: Bardesanes ordered this, showing the art to us spectators. He, like a good painter, transferred the man holding it onto the shield. First he was drawing the head with upright missiles, imitating a circle of a head; then the casts of the eyes, the fittings of the lips, the rhythm of the chin; and the rest of the man followed the order of the body. He was priding himself, having taken painting together with archery: drawing with missiles and shooting drawings. We wondered, seeing that the shooting was not a warlike practice, but was something delightful too, and danger a pleasure. The youth, having laid down the shield, saw himself drawn upon his own weapon and was rejoicing, having become a soldierly painting. This, then, I have, having wondered.

What would I say of Syrmos? Syrmos too was a wise archer, not having painted with missiles as Bardesanes, but having devised to make a missile a hostile missile. New is the spectacle, but not unbelievable. I saw a missile under a missile. I saw a missile, and a missile being made ready, I was ready to throw. Someone else, a counter-archer, had stood against him from afar. Different was the contest of the archery: the one was contending with an armed missile, the other with a naked one. The mark for each was to join missile with missile. The one was meeting only, like a naked soldier against an armed enemy, and it was bold; the other, inasmuch as it had not been stripped, stuck into the one that met it and was drawing it, hung, as a hostile captive. The stripped one, having been taken, was no longer a missile, but the spoil of a missile.

Cestus 7 of Julius Africanus.