Аннотация:The paper deals with the brief statement preserved in the scholia to Argonautica by Apol-lonius of Rhodes (ad IV. 272 sq.): according to it, the third book of Philippica by Theopompus contained a mention of wars waged in time immemorial by the great Egyptian king Sesostris (from the variety of his denotations Theopompus used this basic name-form once introduced by Herodotus). The other fragments of the third book (which described the deeds of Philip II in 357 B.C. — his submission of Amphipolis and the Pangaean mines and his contacts at Thessaly) hint that this mention could be somehow connected to the early history of Thrace also touched by Sesostris’ campaigns, according to Herodotus (II. 103). However, two fragments of the same book of Philippica show Scythian biases, irrelevant of the history of Thrace and the early campaigns of Philip but quite allusive of Sesostris to whom the conquest of Scythia was ascribed: F. 45 (= Hesych., s. v. hippake) mentions hippake, i. e. the famous Scythian mare-milk cheese; F. 47 (= Steph. Byz., s. v. Thapsakos) mentions Thapsakos, actually the city in Syria at the Euphrates, but in this case possibly a distortion in the later tradition of the name Taxakis that could initially appear at Theopompus’ work. According to Herodotus (IV. 120), Taxakis was a Scythian king, who, together with Idanthyrsos, resisted the Persian invasion under Darius I. The proposal of the paper is that the legendary Scythian war of Sesostris was important for Theopompus as a parallel to the conflict of Philip II with the king Ateas in 339 B.C. that ended with the triumph of the Macedonian king and was in all probability accounted in Philippica. Symptomatically, the impetus for that conflict was the intention of Philip II to put a statue of Heracles at the mouth of the Istros resisted by Ateas (Iust. IX. 2. 10–13); eventually altars and cult effigies dedicated to Ammon and Heracles came to be the symbols of the Macedonian boundaries at the far edges of the empire of Alexander the Great, and this practice brought to life a number of replicas («altars of Alexander» at the Borysthenes and the Tanais: Amm. Marc. XXII. 8.40, Ptol. III. 5. 12; trophy of Mithridates VI honouring the victory of his general Diophantos over Scythians, which was presented as unprecedented since the times of Philip, Alexander and Darius: IOSPE I2 352, lin. 8–9, Iust. XXVI. 3. 2, XXXVIII. 7. 3–5). It seems that the tradition of monuments commemorating the victories (real or legendary) of the Hellenistic kings over the Scythians comes back to the episode of war between Philip and Ateas, which, in the light of this tradition, had to be paralleled with the exploits of Sesostris renowned in the Classical tradition for his victorious «stelae» (Hdt. II. 102–103; etc.). In this case there is a reason to believe that the mention of Sesostris in the third book of Philippica, with the adjacent mentions of the hippake and Taxakis, had to form a story of the defeat of Sesostris by Scythians, invincible due to their simple way of living. At Philippica this story, largely shaped after the model of Herodotus’ «Scythian logos» (hence the mention of Taxakis and, probably, of Idathyrsos), had to be juxtaposed to the triumph of Philip II over Ateas; and it found reflection in the eventual tradition (by Megasthenes — FgrH. 715. F. 11 — and in due course by Pompeius Trogus with his followers and Arrian).
