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 Argonaut, 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.
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.
d. When the Greek fleet assembled for the second time at Aulis, but was wind-bound 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. 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 dating 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.
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.
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 of Laomedon, could call Apollo his father.
g. This Cycnus, a son of Poseidon and Calyce, or Harpale, ruled in Colonae. He had been born in secret, and exposed on the seashore, where was found by some fishermen who saw a swan flying him. After the death of Procleia, he married Philonome, 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, closed Tenes and his sister Hemithea in a chest and set them adrift on the sea. They were washed ashore on the island of Tenedos, where Tenes was hitherto called Leucophrys, which means’ white brow’. Later, when Cycnus learned the truth, he had Molpus stoned to death, and Philonome buried alive. On 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.
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. Achilles also killed Cycnus with a blow on the head, 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 Agamenmon, whom he accused of having invited him to join the expedition only as an afterthought.
i. Palamedes offered a hecatomb to Apollo Smintheus in gratitude for the Tenedan victory but, as he did so, a water-snake approached the altar and bit Philoctetes, the famous archer, in the foot; Neither unguents nor fomentations availed, and the wound grew so noisome, and Philoctetes’s groans so loud, that the army could no longer tolerate his company. Agamemnon therefore ordered Odysseus to put him ashore in a deserted district of Lemnos, where he sustained life for several years by shooting birds; and Medon assumed the command of his troops.
j. According to another account, the accident happened on Chryse, an islet off Lemnos, which has since vanished beneath the sea. There either the nymph Chryse fell in love with Philoctetes and, when he rejected her advances, provoked a viper to bite him while he was clearing away the earth from a buried altar of Athene Chryse; or else a serpent that guarded Athene’s temple bit him when he came too close.
k. According to a third account, Philoctetes was bitten in Lemnos itself by a serpent which Hera sent as a punishment for his having dared to kindle Heracles’s funeral pyre. He was, at the time, raptly gazing at the altar raised to Athene by Jason, and planning to raise another to Heracles.
l. A fourth account is that Philoctetes was bitten while admiring Troilus’s tomb in the temple of Thymbraean Apollo. A fifth, that he was wounded by one of Heracles’s envenomed arrows. Heracles, it is said, had made him swear never to divulge the whereabouts of his buried ashes; but when the Greeks learned that Troy could not be sacked without the use of Heracles’s arrows, they went in search of Philoctetes. Though at first denying all knowledge of Heracles, he ended by telling them exactly what had happened on Mount Oeta; so they eagerly asked him where they might find the grave. This question he refused to answer, but they became so insistent that he went to the place, and there wordlessly stamped on the ground. Later, as he passed the grave on his way to the Trojan War, one of Heracles’s arrows leaped from the quiver and pierced his foot: a warning that one must not reveal divine secrets even by a sign or hint.
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1. The lost play from which Hyginus has taken the story of Thestor and his daughters shows the Greek dramatists at their most theatrical; it has no mythological value.
2. A version of the ‘Jephthah’s daughter’ myth seems to have been confused with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of a priestess at Aulis, on a charge of raising contrary winds by witchcraft; Six Francis Drake once hanged one of his sailors, a spy in Cecil’s pay, on the same charge. Agamemnon’s high-handed action, it seems, offended conservative opinion at home, women being traditionally exempt from sacrifice. The Taurians, to whom Iphigeneia was said to have been sent by Artemis, lived in the Crimea and worshipped Artemis as a man- slayer; Agamemnon’s son Orestes fell into their clutches.
3. Odysseus’s wrestling match with King Philomeleides, whose name means ‘dear to the apple-nymphs’, is probably taken from a familiar icon, showing the ritual contest in which the old king is defeated by the new and given an apple-bough.
4. Achilles killed a second Cycnus; Heracles killed a third, and was prevented by Zeus from killing a fourth. The name implied that swans conveyed these royal souls to the Northern Paradise. When Apollo appears in ancient works of art riding on swan back, or in a chariot drawn by swans (Overbeck: Griechische Kunstmythologie) on a visit to the Hyperboreans, this is a polite way of depicting his representative’s annual death at midsummer. Singing swans then fly north to their breeding grounds in the Arctic circle, and utter two trumpet-like notes as they go; which is why Pausanias says that swans are versed in the Muses’ craft. ‘Swans sing before they die’: the sacred king’s soul departs to the sound of music.
5. Philoctetes’s wound has been associated with many different localities because the icon from which his story derives was widely current. He is the sacred king of Tenedos, Lemnos, Euboea, or any other Helladic state, receiving the prick of an envenomed arrow in his foot beside the goddess’s altar.
6. Heracles was not the only sacred king whose grave remained a secret; this seems to have been common practice on the Isthmus of Corinth, and among the primitive Hebrews (Deuteronomy).
7. Tenes hurling rocks may be a misinterpretation of the familiar icon which shows a sun-hero pushing the sun-boulder up to the zenith, since Talos, a Cretan sun-hero, also hurled rocks at approaching ships. The ships in this icon would merely
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