‘LET us sail at once,’ said Menelaus, ‘while the breeze holds.’ ‘No, no” replied Agamemnon, ‘let us first sacrifice to Athene.’ ‘We Greeks owe Athene nothing!’ Menelaus told him. ‘She defended the Trojan citadel too long.’ The brothers parted on ill terms and never saw each other again, for whereas Agamemnon, Diomedes, and Nestor enjoyed a prosperous homeward voyage, Menelaus was caught in a storm sent by Athene; and lost all but five vessels. These were blown to Crete whence he crossed the sea to Egypt, and spent eight years in southern waters, unable to return. He visited Cyprus, Phoenicia, Ethiopia, an Libya, the princes of which received him hospitably and gave him many rich gifts. At last he came to Pharos, where the nymph Eidothea advised him to capture her prophetic father, Proteus the sea-god, who alone could tell him how to break the adverse spell and secure southerly breeze. Menelaus and three companions accordingly disguised themselves in stinking seal-skins and lay waiting on the shore, until they were joined at midday by hundreds of seals, Proteus’s flock. Proteus himself then appeared and went to sleep among the seals: whereupon Menelaus and his party seized him, and though he turned successively into lion, serpent, panther, boar, running water, and leafy tree, held him fast and forced him to prophesy. He announced that Agamemnon had been murdered, and that Menelaus must visit Egypt once more and propitiate the gods with hecatombs. This he duly did, and no sooner had he raised a cenotaph to Agamemnon, beside the River of Egypt, than the winds blew fair at last. He arrived at Sparta, accompanied by Helen, on the very day that Orestes avenged Agamemnon’s murder.
b. A great many ships, though containing no leaders of note, were wrecked on the Euboean coast, because Nauplius had kindled a beacon on Mount Caphareus to lure his enemies to their death, as if guiding them into the shelter of the Pagasaean Gulf; but this crime became known to Zeus, and it was by a false beacon that Nauplius himself met dead- end many years later.
c. Amphilochus, Calchas, Podaleirius and a few others travelled by land to Colophon, where Calchas died, as had been prophesied, on meeting a wiser seer than himself-none other than Mopsus, the son of Apollo and Teiresias’s daughter Manto. A wild fig-tree covered with fruit grew at Colophon, and Calchas, wishing to abash Mopsus, challenged him as follows: ‘Can you perhaps tell me, dear colleague, exactly how many figs will be harvested
from that tree?’ Mopsus, closing his eyes, as one who trusts to inner sight rather than vulgar computation, answered:
‘Certainly: first ten thousand figs, then an Aeginetan bushel of figs, carefully weighed-yes, and a single fig left over.’ Calchas laughed scornfully at the single fig, but when the tree had been stripped, Mopsus’s intuition proved unerring.
‘To descend from thousands to lesser quantities, deer colleague,’ Mopsus now said, with an unpleasant smile, ‘how many piglings, would you say, repose in the paunch of that pregnant sow; and how many of each sex will she farrow; and when?’
‘Eight piglings, all male, and she will farrow them within nine days,’ Calchas answered at random, hoping to be gone before his guess could be disproved.
‘I am of a different opinion,’ said Mopsus, again closing his eyes. ‘My estimate is three piglings, only one of them a boar; and the time of their birth will be midday tomorrow, not a minute earlier or later.’ Mopsus was right once more, and Calchas died of a broken heart. His comrades buried him at Nothium.
d. The timorous Podaleirius, instead of asking his prophetic friends where he should settle, preferred to consult the Delphic Pythoness, who advised him irritably to go wherever he would suffer no harm, even if the skies were to fall. After much thought, he chose a place in Caria called Syrnos, ringed around with mountains; their summits would, he hoped, catch and support the blue firmament should Atlas ever let it slip from his shoulders. The Italians built Podaleirius a hero-shrine on Mount Drium in Daunia, at the summit of which the ghost of Calchas now maintains a dream oracle.
e. A dispute arose between Mopsus and Amphilochus. They had jointly founded the city of Mallus in Cilicia, and when Amphilochus retired to his own city of Amphilochian Argos, Mopsus became sole to reign. Amphilochus, dissatisfied with affairs at Argos, came back after twelve months to Mallus, expecting to resume his former powers, but Mopsus gruntly told him to be gone. When the embarrassed Mallians suggested that this dispute should be decided by single combat, the rivals fought and each killed the other. The funeral pyres were so divided that Mopsus and Amphilochus could not exchange unseemly scowls during their cremation, yet the ghosts somehow became so tenderly linked in friendship that they set up a common oracle; which has now earned a higher reputation for truth even than Delphic Apollo’s. All questions are written on wax tablets, and the responses given in dreams, at the remarkably low price of two coppers apiece.
f. Neoptolemus sailed homeward as soon as he had offered sacrifices: to the gods and to his father’s ghost; and escaped the great tempest which caught Menelaus and Idomeneus, by taking the prophetic advice of his friend Helenus and running for Molossia. After killing King Phoenix and marrying his own mother to Helenus, who became king of the Molossians and founded a new capital city, Neoptolemus regained Iolcus at last. There he succeeded to the kingdom of his grandfather Peleus, whom the sons of Acastus had expelled; but on Helenus’s advice did not stay to enjoy it. He burned his ships and marched inland to Lake Pambrotis in Epirus, near the Oracle of Dodona where he was welcomed by a command of his distant kinsmen. They were bivouacking under blankets supported by spear-butts, stuck into the ground. Neoptolemus remembered the words of Helenus: ‘When you find a house with foundations of iron, wooden walls, and a woollen roof, halt, sacrifice to the gods, build a city!’ Here he begot two more sons on Andromache, namely Pielus and Pergamus.
g. His end was inglorious. Going to Delphi, he demanded satisfaction for the death of his father Achilles whom Apollo, disguised as Paris, was said to have shot in his temple at Troy. When the Pythoness coldly denied him this, he plundered and burned the shrine. Next he went to Sparta, and claimed that Menelaus had betrothed Hermione to him before Troy; but that her grandfather Tyndareus had instead given her to Agamemnon’s son Orestes. Orestes now being pursued by the Erinnyes, and under a divine curse, it was only just, he argued, that Hermione should become his wife. Despite Orestes’s protests, the Spartans granted his plea, and the marriage took place at Sparta. Hermione, however, proving barren, Neoptolemus returned to Delphi and, entering the smoke-blackened sanctuary, which Apollo had decided to rebuild, asked why this should be.
h. He was ordered to offer placatory sacrifices to the god and, while doing so, met Orestes at the altar. Orestes would have killed him then and there, had not Apollo, foreseeing that Neoptolemus must die by another hand that very day, prevented it. Now, the flesh of the sacrifices offered to the god at Delphi has always been a perquisite of the temple servants; but Neoptolemus, in his ignorance, could not bear to see the fat carcasses of the oxen which he had slaughtered being hauled away before his eyes, and tried to prevent it by force.
‘Let us be rid of this troublesome son of Achilles!’ said the Pythoness shortly; whereupon one Machaereus, a Phocian, cut down Neoptolemus with his sacrificial knife.
‘Bury him beneath the threshold of our new sanctuary,’ she commanded. ‘He was a famous warrior, and his ghost will guard it against all attacks. And if he has truly repented of his insult to Apollo, let him preside over processions and sacrifices in honour of heroes like himself.’ But some say that Orestes instigated the murder.
i. Demophon the Athenian touched at Thrace on his return to Athens, and there Phyllis, a Bisaltian princess, fell in love with him. He married her and became king. When he tired of Thrace, and decided to resume his travels, Phyllis could do nothing to hold him.
‘I must visit Athens and greet my mother, whom I last saw eleven years ago,’ said Demophon.
‘You should have thought of that before you accepted the throne,’ Phyllis answered, in tears. ‘It is not lawful to absent yourself for more than a few months at most.’
Demophon swore by every god in Olympus that he would be back within the year; but Phyllis knew that he was lying. She accompanied him as far as the port called Enneodos, and there gave him a casket.
‘This contains a charm,’ Phyllis said. ‘Open it only when you have abandoned all hope of returning to me.’
j. Demophon had no intention of going to Athens. He steered a south-easterly course for Cyprus, where he settled; and when the year was done, Phyllis cursed him in Mother Rhea’s name, took poison, and died. At that very hour, curiosity prompted Demophon to open the casket, and the sight of its contents-who knows what they were-made a lunatic of him. He leaped on his horse and galloped off in panic, belabouring its head with the flat of his sword until it stumbled and fell. The sword flew from his hand, stuck point upwards in the ground, and transfixed him as he was flung over the horse’s head. A story is told of another Thracian princess named Phyllis, who had fallen in love with Demophon’s brother Acamas and, when storms, delayed his return from Troy, died of sorrow and was metamorphosed into an almond-tree. These two princesses have often been confused.
k. Diomedes, like Agamemnon and others, experienced Aphrodite’s bitter enmity. He was first wrecked on the Lycian coast, where King Lycus would have sacrificed him to Ares, had not the princess Callirrhoë helped him to escape; and, on reaching Argos, found that his wife Aegialeia had been persuaded by Nauplius to live in adultery with Cometes or, some say, with Hippolytus. Retiring to Corinth, he learned there that his grandfather Oeneus needed assistance against certain rebels; so he sailed for Aetolia and set him firmly on his throne again. But some say that Diomedes had been forced to leave Argos long before the Trojan War, on his return from the Epigoni’s successful Theban campaign; and that Agamemnon had since assisted him to win back his kingdom. He spent the remainder of his life in Italian Daunia, where he married Euippe, daughter of King Daunus; and built many famous cities, including Brundisium, which may have been why Daunus jealously murdered him when he was an old man, and buried him in one of the islands now called the Diomedans. According to another account, however, he suddenly disappeared by an act of divine magic, and his comrades turned into gentle and virtuous birds, which still nest on those islands. Diomedes’s golden armour has been preserved by the priests of Athene at Apulian Luceria, and he is worshipped as a god in Venetia, and throughout Southern Italy.
l. Nauplius had also persuaded Idomeneus’s wife Meda to be faithless. She took one Leucus for her lover, but he soon drove her and Idomeneus’s daughter Cleisithyra from the palace and murdered them both in the temple where they had taken sanctuary. Leucus then seduced ten cities from allegiance to their rightful king, and usurped the throne. Caught in a storm as he sailed for Crete, Idomeneus vowed to dedicate to Poseidon the first person whom he met; and this happened to be his own son or, some say, another of his daughters. He was on the point of fulfilling his vow when a pestilence visited the country and interrupted the sacrifice. Leucus now had a good excuse for banishing Idomeneus, who emigrated to the Sallentine region of Calabria, and lived there until his death.
m. Few of the other Greeks reached home again, and those who did found only trouble awaiting them. Philoctetes was expelled by rebels from his city of Meliboea in Thessaly, and fled to Southern Italy, where he founded Petelia, and Crimissa near Croton, and sent some of his followers to help Aegestes fortify Sicilian Aegesta. He dedicated his famous bow at Crimissa, in the sanctuary of Distraught Apollo, and when he died was buried beside the river Sybaris.
n. Contrary winds forced Guneus to the Cynips river in Libya, and he made his home there. Pheidippus with his Coans went first to Andros and thence to Cyprus, where Agapenor had also settled. Menestheus did not resume his reign at Athens, but accepted the vacant kingship of Melos; some say, however, that he died at Troy. Elpenor’s followers were wrecked on the shores of Epirus, and occupied Apollonia; those of Protesilius, near Pellene in the Thracian Chersonese; and Tlepolemus’s Rhodians, on one of the Iberian islands, whence a party of them sailed westward again to Italy and were helped by Philoctetes in their war against the barbarous Lucanians. The tale of Odysseus’s wanderings is now Homeric entertainment for twenty-four nights.
o. Only Nestor, who had always shown himself just, prudent, generous, courteous, and respectful to the gods, returned safe and sound to Pylus, where he enjoyed a happy old age, untroubled by wars, and surrounded by bold, intelligent sons. For so Almighty Zeus decreed.
***
1. The mythographers make Aphrodite fight against the Greeks because, as Love- goddess, she had backed Paris’s abduction of Helen. But she was also the Sea-goddess whom the Trojans invoked to destroy the commercial confederacy patronized by Poseidon-and the storms allegedly raised by Athene or Poseidon to deny the victors a safe return, must first have been ascribed to her. This principle of vengeance enabled a great many cities in Italy, Libya, Cyprus, and elsewhere to claim foundation by heroes shipwrecked on their way back from Troy; rather than by refugees from the Dorian invasion of Greece.
2. To bury a young warrior under a temple threshold was common practice, and since Neoptolemus had burned the old shrine at Delphi, the Pythoness naturally chose him as her victim when a new building was planted on its ruins. The previous guardians of the threshold had been Agamedes and Trophonius.
3. Rhea, who sanctified the mysterious object in Demophon’s casket, was also called Pandora, and this myth may therefore be an earlier version of how Epimetheus’s wife Pandora opened the box of spites: a warning to men who pry into women’s mysteries, rather than contrariwise. ‘Mopsus’ was an eighth century BC royal title in Cilicia.
4. The birds into which Diomedes’s followers were transformed are described as ‘virtuous’ evidently to distinguish them from their cruel bird-neighbours, the Sirens.
5. A vow like Idomeneus’s was made by Maeander (‘searching for a man’), when he vowed to the Queen of Heaven the first person who should congratulate him on his storm of Pessinus; and this proved to be his son Archelaus (‘ruler of the people’). Maeander killed him and then remorsefully leaped into the river (Plutarch: On Rivers). A more familiar version of the same myth is found in Judges, where Jephthah vows his daughter as a burnt offering to Jehovah if he is successful in war. These variants suggest that Idomeneus vowed a male sacrifice to Aphrodite, rather than to Poseidon; as Maeander did to the Queen of Heaven, and as Jephthah doubtless did to Anatha, who required such burnt offerings on her holy Judaean mountains. It looks, indeed, as if sacrifice of a royal prince in gratitude for a successful campaign was once common practice-Jonathan would have been slaughtered by his father, King Saul, after the victory near Michmash, had not the people protested-and that the interruption of Idomeneus’s sacrifice, like Abraham’s on Mount Moriah, or Athamas’s on Mount Laphystium was a warning that this custom no longer pleased Heaven. The substitution of a princess for a prince, as in the story of Jephthah, or in the First Vatican Mythographer’s account of Idomeneus’s vow, marks the anti-matriarchal reaction characteristic of heroic saga.
6. Menelaus’s wanderings in the Southern Mediterranean refer to Achaean piracies and attempts at colonization. According to Xanthus, an early Lydian historian, the Phoenician city of Ascalon was founded by Ascalus (‘untilled’), brother of Pelops, and therefore a collateral ancestor of Menelaus. Again, when Joshua conquered Canaan in the thirteenth century BC, the men of Gibeon (Agabon in one Septuagint text, meaning Astu Achaivon, ‘the city of the Achaeans’) came as suppliants to Joshua in Greek fashion, pleading that they were not native Canaanites, but Hivites, i.e. Achaeans, from overseas. Joshua recognized their rights as foresters of the sacred groves and drawers of sacred water (Joshua). It seems from verse 9 that they reminded Joshua of the ancient maritime league of Keftiu presided over by Minos of Cnossus, to which the Achaeans and Abraham’s people both once belonged. Abraham, who came into the Delta with the Hyksos kings, had married his sister Sarah to ‘Pharaoh’, meaning the Cnossian ruler of Pharos-then the chief trading depot of the confederacy. But by the time of Menelaus, Cnossus lay in ruins, the confederates had turned pirates and been defeated by the Egyptians at the Battle of Piari (1229 B.C.)-’I trapped them like wildfowl, they were dragged, hemmed in, laid low on the beach, their ships and goods were fallen into the sea’-and Pharos, no longer the largest port in the ancient world, became a mere breeding place for seals. A submarine disaster had overwhelmed its harbour works, and in early Classical times foreign trade passed through Naucratis, the Milesian enterprise.
7. Menelaus’s struggle with Proteus is a degenerate version of a familiar myth: the Seal-goddess Thetis has been masculinized into Proteus, and Menelaus, instead of waiting for the seal-skin to be discarded, and then amorously grappling with the deity, as Peleus did, uses a seal-skin as a disguise, calls upon three men to help him, and requires no more from his captive than an oracular answer. Proteus rapidly transforms himself, as Thetis did with Peleus, or as Dionysus-Zagreus, who is associated with Pharos, did when threatened by the Titans. The Homeric list of his transformations is a muddied one: two or three seasonal sequences have been telescoped. Lion and boar are intelligible emblems of a two-season year; so are bull, lion, and water-serpent, of a three-season year; the panther is sacred to Dionysus; and the ‘leafy tree’, paralleled in the story of Periclymenus, refers perhaps to the sacred trees of the months. Proteus’s changes make amusing fiction, but are wholly inappropriate to the oracular context, unless the real story is that after a reign of eight years, and the annual killing of an interrex in Cretan style, Menelaus became the oracular hero of a settlement founded beside the River of Egypt.
b. A great many ships, though containing no leaders of note, were wrecked on the Euboean coast, because Nauplius had kindled a beacon on Mount Caphareus to lure his enemies to their death, as if guiding them into the shelter of the Pagasaean Gulf; but this crime became known to Zeus, and it was by a false beacon that Nauplius himself met dead- end many years later.
c. Amphilochus, Calchas, Podaleirius and a few others travelled by land to Colophon, where Calchas died, as had been prophesied, on meeting a wiser seer than himself-none other than Mopsus, the son of Apollo and Teiresias’s daughter Manto. A wild fig-tree covered with fruit grew at Colophon, and Calchas, wishing to abash Mopsus, challenged him as follows: ‘Can you perhaps tell me, dear colleague, exactly how many figs will be harvested
from that tree?’ Mopsus, closing his eyes, as one who trusts to inner sight rather than vulgar computation, answered:
‘Certainly: first ten thousand figs, then an Aeginetan bushel of figs, carefully weighed-yes, and a single fig left over.’ Calchas laughed scornfully at the single fig, but when the tree had been stripped, Mopsus’s intuition proved unerring.
‘To descend from thousands to lesser quantities, deer colleague,’ Mopsus now said, with an unpleasant smile, ‘how many piglings, would you say, repose in the paunch of that pregnant sow; and how many of each sex will she farrow; and when?’
‘Eight piglings, all male, and she will farrow them within nine days,’ Calchas answered at random, hoping to be gone before his guess could be disproved.
‘I am of a different opinion,’ said Mopsus, again closing his eyes. ‘My estimate is three piglings, only one of them a boar; and the time of their birth will be midday tomorrow, not a minute earlier or later.’ Mopsus was right once more, and Calchas died of a broken heart. His comrades buried him at Nothium.
d. The timorous Podaleirius, instead of asking his prophetic friends where he should settle, preferred to consult the Delphic Pythoness, who advised him irritably to go wherever he would suffer no harm, even if the skies were to fall. After much thought, he chose a place in Caria called Syrnos, ringed around with mountains; their summits would, he hoped, catch and support the blue firmament should Atlas ever let it slip from his shoulders. The Italians built Podaleirius a hero-shrine on Mount Drium in Daunia, at the summit of which the ghost of Calchas now maintains a dream oracle.
e. A dispute arose between Mopsus and Amphilochus. They had jointly founded the city of Mallus in Cilicia, and when Amphilochus retired to his own city of Amphilochian Argos, Mopsus became sole to reign. Amphilochus, dissatisfied with affairs at Argos, came back after twelve months to Mallus, expecting to resume his former powers, but Mopsus gruntly told him to be gone. When the embarrassed Mallians suggested that this dispute should be decided by single combat, the rivals fought and each killed the other. The funeral pyres were so divided that Mopsus and Amphilochus could not exchange unseemly scowls during their cremation, yet the ghosts somehow became so tenderly linked in friendship that they set up a common oracle; which has now earned a higher reputation for truth even than Delphic Apollo’s. All questions are written on wax tablets, and the responses given in dreams, at the remarkably low price of two coppers apiece.
f. Neoptolemus sailed homeward as soon as he had offered sacrifices: to the gods and to his father’s ghost; and escaped the great tempest which caught Menelaus and Idomeneus, by taking the prophetic advice of his friend Helenus and running for Molossia. After killing King Phoenix and marrying his own mother to Helenus, who became king of the Molossians and founded a new capital city, Neoptolemus regained Iolcus at last. There he succeeded to the kingdom of his grandfather Peleus, whom the sons of Acastus had expelled; but on Helenus’s advice did not stay to enjoy it. He burned his ships and marched inland to Lake Pambrotis in Epirus, near the Oracle of Dodona where he was welcomed by a command of his distant kinsmen. They were bivouacking under blankets supported by spear-butts, stuck into the ground. Neoptolemus remembered the words of Helenus: ‘When you find a house with foundations of iron, wooden walls, and a woollen roof, halt, sacrifice to the gods, build a city!’ Here he begot two more sons on Andromache, namely Pielus and Pergamus.
g. His end was inglorious. Going to Delphi, he demanded satisfaction for the death of his father Achilles whom Apollo, disguised as Paris, was said to have shot in his temple at Troy. When the Pythoness coldly denied him this, he plundered and burned the shrine. Next he went to Sparta, and claimed that Menelaus had betrothed Hermione to him before Troy; but that her grandfather Tyndareus had instead given her to Agamemnon’s son Orestes. Orestes now being pursued by the Erinnyes, and under a divine curse, it was only just, he argued, that Hermione should become his wife. Despite Orestes’s protests, the Spartans granted his plea, and the marriage took place at Sparta. Hermione, however, proving barren, Neoptolemus returned to Delphi and, entering the smoke-blackened sanctuary, which Apollo had decided to rebuild, asked why this should be.
h. He was ordered to offer placatory sacrifices to the god and, while doing so, met Orestes at the altar. Orestes would have killed him then and there, had not Apollo, foreseeing that Neoptolemus must die by another hand that very day, prevented it. Now, the flesh of the sacrifices offered to the god at Delphi has always been a perquisite of the temple servants; but Neoptolemus, in his ignorance, could not bear to see the fat carcasses of the oxen which he had slaughtered being hauled away before his eyes, and tried to prevent it by force.
‘Let us be rid of this troublesome son of Achilles!’ said the Pythoness shortly; whereupon one Machaereus, a Phocian, cut down Neoptolemus with his sacrificial knife.
‘Bury him beneath the threshold of our new sanctuary,’ she commanded. ‘He was a famous warrior, and his ghost will guard it against all attacks. And if he has truly repented of his insult to Apollo, let him preside over processions and sacrifices in honour of heroes like himself.’ But some say that Orestes instigated the murder.
i. Demophon the Athenian touched at Thrace on his return to Athens, and there Phyllis, a Bisaltian princess, fell in love with him. He married her and became king. When he tired of Thrace, and decided to resume his travels, Phyllis could do nothing to hold him.
‘I must visit Athens and greet my mother, whom I last saw eleven years ago,’ said Demophon.
‘You should have thought of that before you accepted the throne,’ Phyllis answered, in tears. ‘It is not lawful to absent yourself for more than a few months at most.’
Demophon swore by every god in Olympus that he would be back within the year; but Phyllis knew that he was lying. She accompanied him as far as the port called Enneodos, and there gave him a casket.
‘This contains a charm,’ Phyllis said. ‘Open it only when you have abandoned all hope of returning to me.’
j. Demophon had no intention of going to Athens. He steered a south-easterly course for Cyprus, where he settled; and when the year was done, Phyllis cursed him in Mother Rhea’s name, took poison, and died. At that very hour, curiosity prompted Demophon to open the casket, and the sight of its contents-who knows what they were-made a lunatic of him. He leaped on his horse and galloped off in panic, belabouring its head with the flat of his sword until it stumbled and fell. The sword flew from his hand, stuck point upwards in the ground, and transfixed him as he was flung over the horse’s head. A story is told of another Thracian princess named Phyllis, who had fallen in love with Demophon’s brother Acamas and, when storms, delayed his return from Troy, died of sorrow and was metamorphosed into an almond-tree. These two princesses have often been confused.
k. Diomedes, like Agamemnon and others, experienced Aphrodite’s bitter enmity. He was first wrecked on the Lycian coast, where King Lycus would have sacrificed him to Ares, had not the princess Callirrhoë helped him to escape; and, on reaching Argos, found that his wife Aegialeia had been persuaded by Nauplius to live in adultery with Cometes or, some say, with Hippolytus. Retiring to Corinth, he learned there that his grandfather Oeneus needed assistance against certain rebels; so he sailed for Aetolia and set him firmly on his throne again. But some say that Diomedes had been forced to leave Argos long before the Trojan War, on his return from the Epigoni’s successful Theban campaign; and that Agamemnon had since assisted him to win back his kingdom. He spent the remainder of his life in Italian Daunia, where he married Euippe, daughter of King Daunus; and built many famous cities, including Brundisium, which may have been why Daunus jealously murdered him when he was an old man, and buried him in one of the islands now called the Diomedans. According to another account, however, he suddenly disappeared by an act of divine magic, and his comrades turned into gentle and virtuous birds, which still nest on those islands. Diomedes’s golden armour has been preserved by the priests of Athene at Apulian Luceria, and he is worshipped as a god in Venetia, and throughout Southern Italy.
l. Nauplius had also persuaded Idomeneus’s wife Meda to be faithless. She took one Leucus for her lover, but he soon drove her and Idomeneus’s daughter Cleisithyra from the palace and murdered them both in the temple where they had taken sanctuary. Leucus then seduced ten cities from allegiance to their rightful king, and usurped the throne. Caught in a storm as he sailed for Crete, Idomeneus vowed to dedicate to Poseidon the first person whom he met; and this happened to be his own son or, some say, another of his daughters. He was on the point of fulfilling his vow when a pestilence visited the country and interrupted the sacrifice. Leucus now had a good excuse for banishing Idomeneus, who emigrated to the Sallentine region of Calabria, and lived there until his death.
m. Few of the other Greeks reached home again, and those who did found only trouble awaiting them. Philoctetes was expelled by rebels from his city of Meliboea in Thessaly, and fled to Southern Italy, where he founded Petelia, and Crimissa near Croton, and sent some of his followers to help Aegestes fortify Sicilian Aegesta. He dedicated his famous bow at Crimissa, in the sanctuary of Distraught Apollo, and when he died was buried beside the river Sybaris.
n. Contrary winds forced Guneus to the Cynips river in Libya, and he made his home there. Pheidippus with his Coans went first to Andros and thence to Cyprus, where Agapenor had also settled. Menestheus did not resume his reign at Athens, but accepted the vacant kingship of Melos; some say, however, that he died at Troy. Elpenor’s followers were wrecked on the shores of Epirus, and occupied Apollonia; those of Protesilius, near Pellene in the Thracian Chersonese; and Tlepolemus’s Rhodians, on one of the Iberian islands, whence a party of them sailed westward again to Italy and were helped by Philoctetes in their war against the barbarous Lucanians. The tale of Odysseus’s wanderings is now Homeric entertainment for twenty-four nights.
o. Only Nestor, who had always shown himself just, prudent, generous, courteous, and respectful to the gods, returned safe and sound to Pylus, where he enjoyed a happy old age, untroubled by wars, and surrounded by bold, intelligent sons. For so Almighty Zeus decreed.
***
1. The mythographers make Aphrodite fight against the Greeks because, as Love- goddess, she had backed Paris’s abduction of Helen. But she was also the Sea-goddess whom the Trojans invoked to destroy the commercial confederacy patronized by Poseidon-and the storms allegedly raised by Athene or Poseidon to deny the victors a safe return, must first have been ascribed to her. This principle of vengeance enabled a great many cities in Italy, Libya, Cyprus, and elsewhere to claim foundation by heroes shipwrecked on their way back from Troy; rather than by refugees from the Dorian invasion of Greece.
2. To bury a young warrior under a temple threshold was common practice, and since Neoptolemus had burned the old shrine at Delphi, the Pythoness naturally chose him as her victim when a new building was planted on its ruins. The previous guardians of the threshold had been Agamedes and Trophonius.
3. Rhea, who sanctified the mysterious object in Demophon’s casket, was also called Pandora, and this myth may therefore be an earlier version of how Epimetheus’s wife Pandora opened the box of spites: a warning to men who pry into women’s mysteries, rather than contrariwise. ‘Mopsus’ was an eighth century BC royal title in Cilicia.
4. The birds into which Diomedes’s followers were transformed are described as ‘virtuous’ evidently to distinguish them from their cruel bird-neighbours, the Sirens.
5. A vow like Idomeneus’s was made by Maeander (‘searching for a man’), when he vowed to the Queen of Heaven the first person who should congratulate him on his storm of Pessinus; and this proved to be his son Archelaus (‘ruler of the people’). Maeander killed him and then remorsefully leaped into the river (Plutarch: On Rivers). A more familiar version of the same myth is found in Judges, where Jephthah vows his daughter as a burnt offering to Jehovah if he is successful in war. These variants suggest that Idomeneus vowed a male sacrifice to Aphrodite, rather than to Poseidon; as Maeander did to the Queen of Heaven, and as Jephthah doubtless did to Anatha, who required such burnt offerings on her holy Judaean mountains. It looks, indeed, as if sacrifice of a royal prince in gratitude for a successful campaign was once common practice-Jonathan would have been slaughtered by his father, King Saul, after the victory near Michmash, had not the people protested-and that the interruption of Idomeneus’s sacrifice, like Abraham’s on Mount Moriah, or Athamas’s on Mount Laphystium was a warning that this custom no longer pleased Heaven. The substitution of a princess for a prince, as in the story of Jephthah, or in the First Vatican Mythographer’s account of Idomeneus’s vow, marks the anti-matriarchal reaction characteristic of heroic saga.
6. Menelaus’s wanderings in the Southern Mediterranean refer to Achaean piracies and attempts at colonization. According to Xanthus, an early Lydian historian, the Phoenician city of Ascalon was founded by Ascalus (‘untilled’), brother of Pelops, and therefore a collateral ancestor of Menelaus. Again, when Joshua conquered Canaan in the thirteenth century BC, the men of Gibeon (Agabon in one Septuagint text, meaning Astu Achaivon, ‘the city of the Achaeans’) came as suppliants to Joshua in Greek fashion, pleading that they were not native Canaanites, but Hivites, i.e. Achaeans, from overseas. Joshua recognized their rights as foresters of the sacred groves and drawers of sacred water (Joshua). It seems from verse 9 that they reminded Joshua of the ancient maritime league of Keftiu presided over by Minos of Cnossus, to which the Achaeans and Abraham’s people both once belonged. Abraham, who came into the Delta with the Hyksos kings, had married his sister Sarah to ‘Pharaoh’, meaning the Cnossian ruler of Pharos-then the chief trading depot of the confederacy. But by the time of Menelaus, Cnossus lay in ruins, the confederates had turned pirates and been defeated by the Egyptians at the Battle of Piari (1229 B.C.)-’I trapped them like wildfowl, they were dragged, hemmed in, laid low on the beach, their ships and goods were fallen into the sea’-and Pharos, no longer the largest port in the ancient world, became a mere breeding place for seals. A submarine disaster had overwhelmed its harbour works, and in early Classical times foreign trade passed through Naucratis, the Milesian enterprise.
7. Menelaus’s struggle with Proteus is a degenerate version of a familiar myth: the Seal-goddess Thetis has been masculinized into Proteus, and Menelaus, instead of waiting for the seal-skin to be discarded, and then amorously grappling with the deity, as Peleus did, uses a seal-skin as a disguise, calls upon three men to help him, and requires no more from his captive than an oracular answer. Proteus rapidly transforms himself, as Thetis did with Peleus, or as Dionysus-Zagreus, who is associated with Pharos, did when threatened by the Titans. The Homeric list of his transformations is a muddied one: two or three seasonal sequences have been telescoped. Lion and boar are intelligible emblems of a two-season year; so are bull, lion, and water-serpent, of a three-season year; the panther is sacred to Dionysus; and the ‘leafy tree’, paralleled in the story of Periclymenus, refers perhaps to the sacred trees of the months. Proteus’s changes make amusing fiction, but are wholly inappropriate to the oracular context, unless the real story is that after a reign of eight years, and the annual killing of an interrex in Cretan style, Menelaus became the oracular hero of a settlement founded beside the River of Egypt.
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