Lysimachus

Lysimachus is the chief magistrate of Rhodes for the year, a man whose public authority first helps secure Cimon’s imprisonment and then becomes an instrument in a violent attempt to reclaim a beloved woman. His defining reversal is not a change of office but a change in how he uses it: when his hope of marrying Cassandra is extinguished, he abandons the restraint he believes his magistracy requires and allies himself with the very captive whose beloved is also being taken from him.

Identity and Public Position

Lysimachus holds Rhodes’s chief magistracy for that year. His authority is visible when he arrives at the shore with a large company of armed men after Cimon and his party are driven onto the island. The Rhodian sailors have recognized Cimon and alerted the young Rhodian gentlemen; the newcomers are then taken from the shore to a village. After Pasimondas complains to the island’s senate, Lysimachus comes from the city and has Cimon and his companions led to prison.

The imprisonment is severe but not a death sentence. Pasimondas tries to have the captives put to death, yet their lives are spared in consideration of Cimon’s earlier release of the young Rhodians. They are instead condemned to perpetual imprisonment, where they remain despondent and without hope of relief. Lysimachus thus begins as part of the public machinery that confines Cimon, even though the story’s later action will depend on his decision to break that confinement.

Love, Rivalry, and the Prison Visit

Lysimachus loves Cassandra ardently. His brother, Ormisdas, has long been negotiating for her hand, and the negotiations have repeatedly been disrupted by untoward circumstances. When Pasimondas prepares his own wedding to Iphigenia, he renews the negotiations and brings them to a successful conclusion: Ormisdas is to marry Cassandra on the same day that Pasimondas marries Iphigenia. The double wedding is arranged as a single occasion, avoiding the need for a separate celebration.

For Lysimachus, this agreement closes off the hope he has cherished. He conceals his distress and considers how to prevent the marriage, but sees no possible course except carrying Cassandra away. His position makes such an act seem easy to accomplish, yet it also makes him regard it as more dishonorable: he would be using the very public office he holds to commit an abduction. The account gives his conflict plainly, without resolving it in favor of duty. After prolonged deliberation, love outweighs his sense of the impropriety attached to his office.

He turns to Cimon because he judges him the most trustworthy possible companion. Summoning the prisoner secretly to his chamber, Lysimachus presents Cimon’s successive misfortunes—his transformation through love, the loss of Iphigenia, and imprisonment—as trials of constancy. He also makes the personal parallel explicit: Pasimondas is preparing to take Iphigenia, while Ormisdas is about to take Cassandra. The appeal binds their interests together. Lysimachus offers Cimon the chance to recover Iphigenia, and Cimon agrees at once to serve as his comrade, without demanding further consideration of the danger.

The Wedding-Day Raid

Lysimachus sets the operation for the third day after their conversation, when the newly married women are to enter their husbands’ houses for the first time. He plans to go with Cimon and Cimon’s companions, while bringing trusted friends of his own; their aim is to enter near nightfall, seize both women from among the wedding guests, and carry them to a ship he has secretly prepared. He proposes that they kill anyone who tries to stop them. Cimon remains quietly in prison until the appointed day.

When the feast arrives, Lysimachus makes the plan practical by dividing the armed men into three parties. They conceal their weapons beneath their clothes. One party is sent ahead to the harbor so that no one can obstruct the group’s departure to the waiting ship. Lysimachus then brings the other two parties to Pasimondas’s house: one is left at the door to prevent the raiders from being trapped inside or denied an exit, while Lysimachus, Cimon, and the remaining men go upstairs.

In the dining hall, the two brides are seated with the other women. The raiders overturn the tables, take their respective beloveds, and pass them to companions who are to carry them straight to the ship. The brides weep and cry out, as do the women and servants, and the house erupts into noise and lamentation. The account assigns the decisive blows to Cimon: Pasimondas confronts the escaping party with a heavy club and Cimon kills him with a blow to the head; Ormisdas runs to his brother’s aid and is also killed by Cimon. Others who approach are wounded or beaten back by Cimon’s companions and Lysimachus’s men. Lysimachus is a principal organizer and participant in the escape, but the narrative does not attribute either brother’s death to him personally.

Reversal and Narrative Role

The raid turns the story’s distribution of power inside out. Lysimachus, who helped consign Cimon to a sentence of lifelong confinement, now secretly summons him and depends on his strength. His office initially gives him command over the prisoners; later, he uses his standing and connections to organize the escape, though the choice itself violates the honor he associates with holding office. His private desire does not merely oppose public responsibility: it recruits public authority into a private enterprise.

The double abduction also makes the alliance reciprocal rather than simply strategic. Cimon seeks Iphigenia, while Lysimachus seeks Cassandra; neither man’s aim is incidental to the other’s. The arrangement for simultaneous weddings concentrates their losses into one occasion, and Lysimachus answers that concentration with a coordinated seizure of both brides. The party reaches the ship with the women and their companions, leaving the wedding house in blood, uproar, and grief. The supplied account ends at their successful departure; it does not establish what becomes of Lysimachus, Cassandra, or the fugitives afterward.