Arimazes

Arimazes (Ancient Greek: Ἀριμάζης) or Ariomazes (Ancient Greek: Ἀριομάζης), was a chief who had possession, in 328 BCE, of a very strong fortress in Sogdiana, usually called the Rock of Ariamazes, which the historian Johann Gustav Droysen identifies with a place called Kohiten, situated near the pass of Kolugha or Derbend.

Arimazes at first refused to surrender the place to Alexander the Great, but afterwards yielded when some of the Macedonians had climbed to the summit. In this fortress Alexander found Roxana, the daughter of the Bactrian chief, Oxyartes, whom he made his wife. The first century historian Quintus Curtius Rufus[1] relates that Alexander crucified Arimazes and the leading men who were taken; but this is not mentioned by the Greek historian Arrian in his account[2] or Polyaenus,[3] and is improbable.[4]

References
  1. Quintus Curtius Rufus, Histories of Alexander the Great vii. 11
  2. Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander iv. 19
  3. Polyaenus, Stratagems in War iv. 3. ~29
  4. Strabo, Geographica xi. p. 517

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William (1870). "Arimazes". In Smith, William (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 1. p. 286.

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