b. Theseus settled the Heraclids and their companions at Tricorythus -a city of the Attic tetrapolis-and would not surrender them to Eurystheus, which was the cause of the first war between Athens and the Peloponnese. For, when all the Heraclids had grown to manhood, Eurystheus assembled an army and marched against Athens; Iolaus, Theseus, and Hyllus being appointed to command the combined Athenians and Heraclids. But some say that Theseus had now been succeeded by his son Demophon. Since an oracle announced that the Athenians must be defeated unless one of Heracles’s children would die for the common good, Macaria, Heracles’s only daughter, killed herself at Marathon, and thus gave her name to the Macarian spring.
c. The Athenians, whose protection of the Heraclids is even today a source of civic pride, then defeated Eurystheus in a pitched battle and killed his sons Alexander, Iphimedon, Eurybius, Mentor, and Perimedes, besides many of his allies. Eurystheus fled in his chariot, pursued by Hyllus, who overtook him at the Scironian Rocks and there cut off his head, from which Alcmene gouged the eyes with weaving-pins; his tomb is shown near by. But some say that he was captured by Iolaus at the Scironian Rocks, and taken to Alcmene, who ordered his execution. The Athenians interceded for him, though in vain, and before the sentence was carried out, Eurystheus shed tears of gratitude and declared that he would reveal himself, even in death, as their firm friend, and a sworn enemy to the Heraclids. ‘Theseus;’ he cried. ‘You need not pour libations or blood on my tomb: even without such offerings I undertake to drive all enemies from the land of Attica!’ Then he was executed and buried in front of Athene’s sanctuary at Pellene, midway between Athens and Marathon. A very different account is that the Athenians assisted Eurystheus in a battle which he fought against the Heraclids at Marathon; and that Iolaus, having cut off his head beside the Macarian spring, close to the chariot road, buried it at Tricorythus, and sent the trunk to Gargettus for burial.
d. Meanwhile, Hyllus and the Heraclids who had settled by the Electrian Gate at Thebes invaded the Peloponnese, capturing all its cities in a sudden onset; but when, next year, a plague broke out and an oracle announced: ‘The Heraclids have returned before the due time!’ Hyllus withdrew to Marathon. Obeying his father’s last wish, he had married Iole and been adopted by Aegimius the Dorian; he now went to ask the Delphic Oracle when ‘the due time’ would come, and was warned to ‘wait for the third crop’. Taking this to mean three years, he rested until these had passed and then marched again. On the Isthmus he was met by Atreus, who had meanwhile succeeded to the Mycenaean throne and rode at the head of an Achaean army.
e. To avoid needless slaughter Hyllus challenged any opponent of rank to single combat. ‘If I win’, he said, ‘let the throne and kingdom be mine. If I lose, we sons of Heracles will not return along this road for another fifty years.’ Echemus, King of Tegea, accepted the challenge, and the duel took place on the Corintho-Megarian frontier. Hyllus fell, and was buried in the city of Megara; whereupon the Heraclids honoured his undertaking and once more retired to Tricorythus, and thence to Doris, where they claimed from Aegimius that share of the kingdom which their father had entrusted to him. Only Licymnius and his sons, and Heracles’s son Tlepolemus, who was invited to settle at Argos, remained in the Peloponnese. Delphic Apollo, whose seemingly unsound advice had earned him many reproaches, explained that by the ‘third crop’ he meant the third generation.
f. Alcmene went back to Thebes and, when she died there at a great age, Zeus ordered Hermes to plunder the coffin which the Heraclids were carrying to the grave; and this he did, adroitly substituting a stone for the body, which he carried off to the Islands of the Blessed. There, revived and rejuvenated, Alcmene became the wife of Rhadamanthys. Meanwhile, finding the coffin too heavy for their shoulders, the Heraclids opened it, and discovered the fraud. They set up the stone in a sacred grove at Thebes, where Alcmene is now worshipped as a goddess. But some say that she married Rhadamanthys at Ocaleae, before her death; and others, that she died in Megara, where her tomb is still shown, on a journey from Argos to Thebes-they add, that when a dispute arose among the Heraclids, some wishing to convey her corpse back to Argos, others to continue the journey, the Delphic Oracle advised them to bury her in Megara. Another so-called tomb of Alcmene is shown at Haliartus.
g. The Thebans awarded Iolaus a hero-shrine, close to Amphitryon’s, where lovers plight their troths for Heracles’s sake; although it is generally admitted that Iolaus died in Sardinia.
h. At Argos, Tlepolemus accidentally killed his beloved grand-uncle Licymnius. He was chastising a servant with an olive-wood club when Licymnius, now old and blind, stumbled between them and caught a blow on his skull. Threatened with death by the other Heraclids, Tlepolemus built a fleet, gathered a large number of companions and, on Apollo’s advice, fled to Rhodes, where he settled after long wandering and many hardships. In those days Rhodes was inhabited by Greek settlers under Triops, a son of Phorbas, with whose consent Tlepolemus divided the island into three parts and is said to have founded the cities of Lindus, Ialysus, and Cameirus. His people were favoured and enriched by Zeus. Later, Tlepolemus sailed to Troy with a fleet of nine Rhodian ships.
i. Heracles begot another Hyllus on the water-nymph Melite, daughter of the River- god Aegaeus, in the land of the Phaeacians. He had gone there after the murder of his children, in the hope of being purified by King Nausithous and by Macris, the nurse of Dionysus. This was the Hyllus who emigrated to the Cronian Sea with a number of Phaeacian settlers, and gave his name to the Hyllaeans.
j. The latest-born of all the Heraclids is said to have been the Thasian athlete Theagenes, whose mother was visited one night in the temple of Heracles by someone whom she took for his priest, her husband Timosthenes, but who proved to be the god himself.
k. The Heraclids eventually reconquered the Peloponnese in the fourth generation under Temenus, Cresphontes, and the twins Proeles and Eurysthenes, after killing the High King Tisamenes of Mycenae, a son of Orestes. They would have succeeded earlier, had not one of their princes murdered Carnus, an Acarnanian poet, as he came towards them chanting prophetic verses; mistaking him for a magician sent against them by Tisamenes. In punishment of this sacrilege the Heraclid fleet was sunk and famine caused their army to disband. The Delphic Oracle now advised thorn ‘to banish the slayer for ten years and take Triops as a guide in his place.’ They were about to fetch Triops son of Phorbas from Rhodes, when Temenus noticed an Aetolian chieftain named Oxylus, who had just expiated some murder or other with a year’s exile in Elis, riding by on a one-eyed horse. Now, Triops means ‘three-eyed’, and Temenus therefore engaged him as guide and, landing on the coast of Elis with his Heraclid kinsmen, soon conquered the whole Peloponnese, and divided it by lot. The lot marked with a toad meant Argos and went to Temenus; that marked with a serpent meant Sparta and went to the twins Proeles and Eurysthenes; that marked with a fox meant Messene and went to Cresphontes.
fairy tales books 1. The disastrous invasion of the Mycenaean Peloponnese by uncultured patriarchal mountaineers from Central Greece which, according to Pausanias and Thucydides, took place about 1100 BC, was called the Dorian because its leaders came from the small state of Doris. Three tribes composed this Dorian League: the Hylleids, who worshipped Heracles; the Dymanes (‘enterers’), who worshipped Apollo; and the Pamphylloi (‘men from every tribe’), who worshipped Demeter. After overrunning Southern Thessaly, the Dorians seem to have allied themselves with the Athenians before they ventured to attack the Peloponnese. The first attempt failed, though Mycenae was burned about 1100 BC, but a century later they conquered the eastern and southern regions, having by now destroyed the entire ancient culture of Argolis. This invasion, which caused emigrations from Argolis to Rhodes, from Attica to the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, and apparently also from Thebes to Sardinia, brought the Dark Ages into Greece.
2. Strategic burial of a hero’s head is commonplace in myth: thus, according to the Mabinogion, Bran’s head was buried on Tower Hill to guard London from invasion by way of the Thames: and according to Ambrose (Epistle), Adam’s head was buried at Golgotha, to protect Jerusalem from the north. Moreover, Euripides (Rhesus) makes Hector declare that the ghosts even of strangers could serve as Troy’s guardian spirits. Both Tricorythus and Gargettus lie at narrow cleaves commanding the approaches to Attica. Iolaus’s pursuit of Eurystheus past the Scironian Rocks seems to have been borrowed from the same icon that suggested the myth of Hippolytus.
3. The land of the Phaeacians was Corcyra, or Drepane, now Corfu, off which lay the sacred islet of Macris; the Cronian Sea was the Gulf Of Finland, whence amber seems to have been fetched by Corcyrian enterprise-Corcyra is associated with the Argonaut amber- expedition to the head of the Adriatic.
4. Triops, the Greek colonist of Rhodes, is a masculinization of the ancient Triple- goddess Danaë, or Damkina, after whose three persons Lindus, Ialysus, and Cameirus were named. According to other accounts, these cities were founded by the Telchines, or by Danaus.
5. Alcmene being merely a rifle of Hera’s, there was nothing remarkable in the dedication of a temple to her.
6. Polygnotus, in his famous painting at Delphi, showed Menelaus with a serpent badge on his shield (Pausanias)-presumably the water-serpent of Sparta. A fox helped the Messenian hero Aristomenes to escape from a pit into which the Spartans had thrown him (Pausanias); and the goddess as vixen was well known in Greece. The toad seems to have become the Argive emblem, not only because it had a reputation of being dangerous to handle, and of causing a hush of awe among all who saw it (Pliny: Natural History), but because Argos was first called Phoronicum; in the syllabary which preceded the alphabet at Argos, the radicals PHRN could be expressed by a toad, phryne.
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