9. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 57; Fulgentius: Mythologicon iii. 7; Apollodorus: iii. 13. 6; Philostratus: Heroica xx. 2 and xix. 2; Argonautica Orphica 392 ff.; Statius: Achilleid i. 269 ff.; Homer: Iliad xi. 831–2; Pindar: Nemean Odes iii. 43 ff.
10. Apollodorus: iii. 13. 8; Homer: Iliad ix. 410 ff.; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: i; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 183.
11. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xix. 332; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. 162 ff.; Hyginus: Fabula 96.
12. Homer: Iliad ix. 769 ff.; 438 ff. and xvi. 298.
13. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 421; Homer: Iliad ix. 447 ff. and 485.
14. Homer: Iliad xi. 786–7; Pindar: Olympian Odes ix. 69–70; Hesiod, quoted by Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad i. 337; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 97; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 816.
15. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Strabo: ix. 4. 2.
16. Apollodorus: iii. 3. 1; Philostratus: Heroica 7; Diodorus Siculus: v. 79; Hyginus: Fabula 81; Pausanias: v. 23. 5; Homer: Iliad x. 61 ff.
17. Dictys Cretensis: i. 16; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 6.
18. Homer: Iliad ii. 21 and i. 247–52; iv. 310 ff.; ii. 553–5; Odyssey iii. 244 and 126–9.
19. Homer: Iliad xvii. 279–80 and iii. 226–7; Sophocles: Ajax 576 and 833, with scholiast; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xxiii. 821; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 455 ff.
20. Sophocles: Ajax 762–77.
21. Homer: Iliad viii. 266–72.
22. Homer: Iliad xiii. 697; ii. 527–30; xiv. 520 and xiii. 701 ff.; Hyginus: Fabula 97; Philostratus: Heroica viii. 1.
23. Homer: Iliad ii. 728 and xiii. 694–7.
24. Apollodorus: i. 8.5; Hyginus: loc. cit.; Homer: Iliad ii. 564–6.
25. Homer: Iliad ii. 653–4; Hyginus: loc. cit.
26. Dictys Cretensis: i. 23; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 80; Diodorus Siculus: v. 62; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 570.
27. Tzetzes: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 10; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. 650 ff; Servius: loc. cit.
28. Stesichorus, quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey vi. 164; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 583; Servius: loc. cit.; Pherecydes, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 570.
29. Ovid: Metamorphoses 643–74; Servius: loc. cit.
30. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 15; Homer: Iliad ii. 303–53; Ovid: Metamorphoses xii. 13–23.
31. Homer: Odyssey xxiv. 118–19 and Iliad i. 71; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 57 ff.
32. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 17; Pindar: Olympian Odes ix. 70 ff; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 206 and 209; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad, i. 59; Homer: Iliad xvi. 140–4.
33. Pausanias: ix. 5. 7–8; Virgil: Aeneid ii. 261.
34. Philostratus: Heroica iii. 35; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 18; Cypria quoted by Proclus: Chrestomathy 1.
35. Homer: Iliad xxiv. 765; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: iii. 12.5.
36. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 19–20; Hyginus: Fabula 101; Pliny: Natural History xxv. 19.
37. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Philostratus: Heroica ii. 18; Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey i. 520; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 20.
1. After the fall of Cnossus, about the year 1400 B.C., a contest for sea-power arose between the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. This is reflected in Herodotus’s account, which John Malalas supports (see 58. 4), of the raids preceding Helen’s abduction, and in Apollodorus’s record of how Paris raided Sidon (see 159. t), and Agamemnon’s people, Mysia. A Trojan confederacy offered the chief obstacle to Greek mercantile ambitions, until the High King of Mycenae gathered his allies, including the Greek overlords of Crete, for a concerted attack on Troy. The naval war, as opposed to the siege of Troy, may well have lasted for nine or ten years.
2. Among Agamemnon’s independent allies were the islanders of Ithaca, Same, Dulichium, and Zacynthus led by Odysseus; the Southern Thessalians led by Achilles; and their Aeacan cousins from Locris and Salamis, led by the two Ajaxes. These chieftains proved an awkward team to handle and Agamemnon could keep them from each other’s throats only by intrigue, with the loyal support of his Peloponnesian henchmen Menelaus of Sparta, Diomedes of Argos, and Nestor of Pylus. Ajax’s rejection of the Olympian gods and his affront to the Zeus-born Athene have been misrepresented as evidence of atheism; they record, rather, his religious conservatism. The Aeacids were of Lelegian stock and worshipped the pre-Hellenic goddess (see 158. 8 and 168. 2).
3. The Thebans and Athenians seem to have kept out of the war; though Athenian forces are mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships, they play no memorable part before Troy. But the presence of King Menestheus has been emphasized to justify later Athenian expansion along the Black Sea coast (see 162.3). Odysseus is a key-figure in Greek mythology. Despite his birth from a daughter of the Corinthian Sun-god and his old-fashioned foot-race winning of Penelope, he breaks the ancient matrilocal rule by insisting that Penelope shall come to his kingdom, rather than he to hers (see 137. 4). Also, like his father Sisyphus (see 67. 2), and Cretan Cinyras (see 18.5), he refuses to die at the end of his proper term – which is the central allegory of the Odyssey (see 170. 1 and 171. 3). Odysseus, moreover, is the first mythical character credited with an irrelevant physical peculiarity: legs short in proportion to his body, so that he ‘looks nobler sitting than standing.’ The scarred thigh, however, should be read as a sign that he escaped the death incumbent on boar-cult kings (see 18.3 and 151. 2).
4. Odysseus’s pretended madness, though consistent with his novel reluctance to act as behoved a king, seems to be misreported. What he did was to demonstrate prophetically the uselessness of the war to which he had been summoned. Wearing a conical hat which marked the mystagogue or seer, he ploughed a field up and down. Ox and ass stood for Zeus and Cronus, or summer and winter; and each furrow, sown with salt, for a wasted year. Palamedes, who also had prophetic powers (see 52. 6), then seized Telemachus and halted the plough, doubtless at the tenth furrow, by setting him in front of the team: he thereby showed that the decisive battle, which is the meaning of ‘Telemachus’, would take place then.
5. Achilles, a more conservative character, hides among women, as befits a solar hero (White Goddess p. 212), and takes arms in the fourth month, when the Sun has passed the equinox and so from the tutelage of his mother, Night. Cretan boys were called scotioi, ‘children of darkness’ (see 27. 2), while confined to the women’s quarters, not having yet been given arms and liberty by the priestess-mother (see 121.5). In the Mabinogion, Odysseus’s ruse for arming Achilles is used by Gwydion (the god Odin, or Woden) on a similar occasion: wishing to release Llew Llaw Gyffes, another solar hero, from the power of his mother Arianrhod, he creates a noise of battle outside the castle and frightens her into giving Llew Llaw sword and shield. The Welsh is probably the elder version of the myth, which the Argives dramatized on the first day of the fourth month by a fight between boys dressed in girls’ clothes and women dressed in men’s – the festival being called the Hybristica (‘shameful behaviour’). Its historical excuse was that, early in the fifth century, the poetess Telesilla, with a company of women, had contrived to hold Argos against King Cleomenes of Sparta, after the total defeat of the Argive army (Plutarch: On the Virtues of Women 4). Since Patroclus bears an inappropriately patriarchal name (‘glory to the father’), he may have once been Phoenix (‘blood red’), Achilles’s twin and tanist under the matrilinear system.
6. All the Greek leaders before Troy are sacred kings. Little Ajax’s tame serpent cannot have accompanied him into battle: he did not have one until he became an oracular hero. Idomeneus’s boar’s tusk helmet, attested by finds in Crete and Mycenaean Greece, was originally perhaps worn by the tanist (see 18.7); his cock, sacred to the sun, and representing Zeus Velchanos, must be a late addition to Homer because the domestic hen did not reach Greece until the sixth century B.C. The original device is likely to have been a cock partridge (see 92.1). These cumbrous shields consisted of bull’s hides sewn together, the extremities being rounded off, and the waist nipped, in figure-of-eight sha
pe, for ritual use. They covered the entire body from chin to ankle. Achilles (‘lipless’) seems to have been a common title of oracular heroes, since there were Achilles cults at Scyros, Phthia, and Elis (Pausanias: vi. 23. 3).
7. Rhoeo, daughter of Staphylus and Chrysothemis (‘Pomegranate, daughter of Bunch of Grapes and Golden Order’) came to Delos in a chest and is the familiar fertility-goddess with her new-moon boat. She also appears in triad as her grand-daughters the Winegrowers, whose names mean ‘olive oil’, ‘grain’ and ‘wine.’ Their mother is Dorippe, or ‘gift mare’, which suggests that Rhoeo was the mare-headed Demeter (see 16.5). Her cult survives vestigially today in the three-cupped kernos, a vessel used by Greek Orthodox priests to hold the gifts of oil, grain, and wine brought to church for sanctification. A kernos of the same type has been found in an early Minoan tomb at Koumasa; and the Winegrowers, being great-grandchildren of Ariadne, must have come to Delos from Crete (see 27. 8).
8. The Greeks’ difficulty in finding their way to Troy is contradicted by the ease with which Menelaus had sailed there; perhaps in the original legend Trojan Aphrodite cast a spell which fogged their memory, as she afterwards dispersed the fleets on the return voyage (see 169. 2).
9. Achilles’s treatment of the spear wound, based on the ancient homoeopathic principle that ‘like cures like’, recalls Melampus’s use of rust from a gelding-knife to restore Iphiclus (see 72. e).
10. Maenads, in vase-paintings, sometimes have their limbs tattooed with a woof-and-warp pattern formalized as a ladder. If their faces were once similarly tattooed as a camouflage for woodland revelling, this might explain the name Penelope (‘with a web over her face’), as a title of the orgiastic mountain-goddess; alternatively, she may have worn a net in her orgies, like Dictynna and the British goddess Goda (see 89. 2 and 3). Pan’s alleged birth from Penelope, after she had slept promiscuously with all her suitors in Odysseus’s absence (see 161. l), records a tradition of pre-Hellenic sexual orgies; the penelope duck, like the swan, was probably a totem-bird of Sparta (see 62. 3–4).
11. No commentator has hitherto troubled to explain precisely why Calchas’s nest of birds should have been set on a plane-tree and devoured by a serpent; but the fact is that serpents cast their slough each year and renew themselves, and so do plane-trees – which makes them both symbols of regeneration. Calchas therefore knew that the birds which were devoured stood for years, not months. Though later appropriated by Apollo, the plane was the Goddess’s sacred tree in Crete and Sparta (see 58. 3), because its leaf resembled a green hand with the fingers stretched out to bless – a gesture frequently found in her archaic statuettes. The blue spots on the serpent showed that it was sent by Zeus, who wore a blue nimbus as god of the sky. Cinyras’s toy ships perhaps reflect a Cyprian custom borrowed from Egypt, of burying terracotta ships beside dead princes for their voyage to the Otherworld.
12. The fifty daughters of Cinyras’s who turned into halcyons will have been a college of Aphrodite’s priestesses. One of her titles was ‘Alcyone’, ‘the queen who wards off [storms]’, and the halcyons, or kingfishers, which were sacred to her, portended calms (see 45. 2).
161
THE SECOND GATHERING AT AULIS
CALCHAS, the brother of Leucippe and Theonoë, had learned the art of prophecy from his father Thestor. One day, Theonoë was walking on the seashore near Troy, when Carian pirates bore her off, and she became mistress to King Icarus. Thestor at once set out in pursuit, but was shipwrecked on the Carian coast and imprisoned by Icarus. Several years later, Leucippe, who had been a mere child when these sad events took place, went to Delphi for news of her father and sister. Advised by the Pythoness to disguise herself as a priest of Apollo and go to Caria in search of them, Leucippe obediently shaved her head and visited the court of King Icarus; but Theonoë, not seeing through the disguise, fell in love with her, and told one of the guards: ‘Bring that young priest to my bedroom!’ Leucippe, failing to recognize Theonoë, and fearing to be put to death as an imposter, rebuffed her; whereupon Theonoë, since she could not ask the palace servants to commit sacrilege by killing a priest, gave orders that one of the foreign prisoners must do so, and sent a sword for his use.
b. Now, the prisoner chosen was Thestor, who went to the bedroom in which Leucippe had been locked, displayed his sword, and despairingly told her his story. ‘I will not kill you, sir,’ he said, ‘because I too worship Apollo, and prefer to kill myself! But let me first reveal my name: I am Thestor, son of Idmon the Agonaut, a Trojan priest.’ He was about to plunge the sword into his own breast, when Leucippe snatched it away. ‘Father, father!’ she exclaimed, ‘I am Leucippe, your daughter! Do not turn this weapon against yourself; use it to kill King Icarus’s abominable concubine. Come, follow me!’ They hurried to Theonoë’s embroidery-chamber. ‘Ah, lustful one,’ cried Leucippe, bursting in and dragging Thestor after her. ‘Prepare to die by the hand of my father, Thestor son of Idmon!’ Then it was Theonoë’s turn to exclaim: ‘Father, father!’; and when the three had wept tears of joy, and given thanks to Apollo, King Icarus generously sent them all home, laden with gifts.1
c. Now Priam, after rejecting Agamemnon’s demand for the return of Helen, sent Thestor’s son Calchas, a priest of Apollo, to consult the Delphic Pythoness. Having foretold the fall of Troy and the total ruin of Priam’s house, she ordered Calchas to join the Greeks and prevent them from raising the siege until they were victorious. Calchas then swore an oath of friendship with Achilles, who lodged him in his own house, and presently brought him to Agamemnon.2
d. When the Greek fleet assembled for the second time at Aulis, but was windbound there for many days, Calchas prophesied that they would be unable to sail unless Agamemnon sacrificed the most beautiful of his daughters to Artemis. Why Artemis should have been vexed is disputed. Some say that, on shooting a stag at long range, Agamemnon had boasted: ‘Artemis herself could not have done better!’; or had killed her sacred goat; or had vowed to offer her the most beautiful creature born that year in his kingdom, which happened to be Iphigeneia; or that his father Atreus had withheld a golden lamb which was her due.3 At any rate, Agamemnon refused to do as he was expected, saying that Clytaemnestra would never let Iphigeneia go. But when the Greeks swore: ‘We shall transfer our allegiance to Palamedes if he continues obdurate,’ and when Odysseus, feigning anger, prepared to sail home, Menelaus came forward as peace-maker. He suggested that Odysseus and Talthybius should fetch Iphigeneia to Aulis, on the pretext of marrying her to Achilles as a reward for his daring feats in Mysia. To this ruse Agamemnon agreed, and though he at once sent a secret message, warning Clytaemnestra not to believe Odysseus, Menelaus intercepted this, and she was tricked into bringing Iphigeneia to Aulis.4
e. When Achilles found that his name had been misused, he undertook to protect Iphigeneia from injury; but she nobly consented to die for the glory of Greece, and offered her neck to the sacrificial axe without a word of complaint. Some say that, in the nick of time, Artemis carried her off to the land of the Taurians, substituting a hind at the altar; or a she-bear; or an old woman. Others, that a peal of thunder was heard and that, at Artemis’s order and Clytaemnestra’s plea, Achilles intervened, saved Iphigeneia, and sent her to Scythia; or that he married her, and that she, not Deidameia, bore him Neoptolemus.5
f. But whether Iphigeneia died or was spared, the north-easterly gale dropped, and the fleet set sail at last. They first touched at Lesbos, where Odysseus entered the ring against King Philomeleides, who always compelled his guests to wrestle with him; and, amid the loud cheers of every Greek present, threw him ignominiously. Next, they landed on Tenedos, which is visible from Troy, and was then ruled by Tenes who, though reputedly the son of Cycnus and Procleia, daughter of Laomedon, could call Apollo his father.
g. This Cycnus, a son of Poseidon and Calyce, or Harpale, ruled Colonae. He had been born in secret, and exposed on the seashore, but was found by some fishermen who saw a swan flying down to comfort him.6 Afte
r the death of Procleia, he married Phylonome, daughter of Tragasus: she fell in love with her step-son Tenes, failed to seduce him, and vengefully accused him of having tried to violate her. She called the flautist Molpus as a witness; and Cycnus, believing them, locked Tenes and his sister Hemithea in a chest and set them adrift on the sea. They were washed ashore on the island of Tenedos, hitherto called Leucophrys, which means ‘white brow’.7 Later, when Cycnus learned the truth, he had Molpus stoned to death, buried Phylonome alive and, hearing that Tenes survived and was living on Tenedos, hastened there to admit his error. But Tenes, in an unforgiving mood, cut the cables of Cycnus’s ship with an axe: hence the proverbial expression for an angry refusal – ‘He cut him with an axe from Tenedos.’ Finally, however, Tenes softened, and Cycnus settled near him on Tenedos.8
h. Now, Thetis had warned Achilles that if ever he killed a son of Apollo, he must himself die by Apollo’s hand; and a servant named Mnemon accompanied him for the sole purpose of reminding him of this. But Achilles, when he saw Tenes hurling a huge rock from a cliff at the Greek ships, swam ashore, and thoughtlessly thrust him through the heart. The Greeks then landed and ravaged Tenedos; and realizing too late what he had done, Achilles put Mnemon to death because he had failed to remind him of Thetis’s words. He buried Tenes where his shrine now stands: no flautist may enter there, nor may Achilles’s name be mentioned.9 Achilles also killed Cycnus with a blow on the head, his only vulnerable part; and pursued Hemithea, who fled from him like a hind, but would have been overtaken and violated, had not the earth swallowed her up. It was in Tenedos, too, that Achilles first quarrelled with Agamemnon, whom he accused of having invited him to join the expedition only as an afterthought.10