Telamon And Peleus

THE mother of Aeacus’s two elder sons, namely Telamon and Peleus, was Endeis, Sciron’s daughter. Phocus, the youngest, was a son of the Nereid Psamathe, who had turned herself into a seal while unsuccessfully trying to escape from Aeacus’s embraces. They all lived together in the island of Aegina.
b. Phocus was Aeacus’s favourite, and his excellence at athletic games drove Telamon and Peleus wild with jealousy. For the sake of peace, therefore, he led a party of Aeginetan emigrants to Phocis, where another Phocus, a son of Ornytion the Corinthian, had already colonized the neighbourhood of Tithorea and Delphi-and in the course of time his sons extended the state of Phocis to its present limits.
One day Aeacus sent for Phocus, perhaps intending to bequeath him the island kingdom; but, encouraged by their mother, Telamon and Peleus plotted to kill him on his return. They challenged Phocus to a five-fold athletic contest, and whether it was Telamon who felled him, as if accidentally, by throwing a stone discus at his head, and Peleus who then despatched him with an axe, or whether it was the other way about, has been much disputed ever since. In either case, Telamon and Peleus were equally guilty of fratricide, and together hid the body in a wood, where Aeacus found it. Phocus lies buried close to the Aeaceum.

c. Telamon took refuge in the island of Salamis, where Cychreus was king, and sent back a messenger, denying any part in the murder. Aeacus, in reply; forbade him ever again to set foot in Aegina, though permitting him to plead his case from the sea. Rather than stand and shout on the rocking deck of his ship anchored behind the breakers, Telamon sailed one night into what is now called the Secret Harbour, and sent masons ashore to build a mole, which would serve him as rostrum; they finished this task before dawn, and it is still to be seen. Aeacus, however, rejected his eloquent plea that Phocus’s death was accidental, and Telamon returned to Salamis, where he married the king’s daughter Glauce, and succeeded to Cychreus’s throne.
d. This Cychreus, a son of Poseidon and Salamis, daughter of the river Asopus, had been chosen King of Salamis when he killed a serpent to end its widespread ravages. But he kept a young serpent of the same breed which behaved in the same destructive way until expelled by Eurylochus, a companion of Odysseus; Demeter then welcomed it at Eleusis as one of her attendants. But some explain that Cychreus himself, called ‘Serpent’ because of his cruelty, was banished by Eurylochus and took refuge at Eleusis, where he was appointed to a minor office in Demeter’s sanctuary. He became, at all events, one of the guardian heroes of Salamis, the Serpent Isle; there he was buried, his face turned to the west, and appeared in serpent form among the Greek ships at the famous victory of Salamis. Sacrifices were offered at his tomb, and when the Athenians disputed the possession of the island with the Megarians, Solon the famous law-giver sailed across by night and propitiated him.
e. On the death of his wife Glauce, Telamon married Periboea of Athens, a grand- daughter of Pelops, who bore him Great Ajax; and later the captive Hesione, daughter of Laomedon, who bore him the equally well-known Teucer.
f. Peleus fled to the court of Actor, King of Phthia, by whose adopted son Eurytion he was purified. Actor then gave him his daughter Polymela in marriage, and a third part of the kingdom. One day Eurytion, who ruled over another third part, took Peleus to hunt the Calydonian hoar, but Peleus speared him accidentally and fled to Iolcus, where he was once more purified, this time by Acastus, son of Pelias.
g. Acastus’s wife, Cretheis, tried to seduce Peleus and, when he rebuffed her advances, lyingly told Polymela: ‘He intends to desert you and marry my daughter Sterope.’ Polymela believed Cretheis’s mischievous tale, and hanged herself. Not content with the harm she had done, Cretheis went weeping to Acastus, and accused Peleus of having attempted her virtue.
h. Loth to kill the man whom he had purified, Acastus challenged him to a hunting contest on Mount Pelion. Now, in reward for his chastity, the gods had given Peleus a magic sword, forged by Daedalus which had the property of making its owner victorious in battle and equally successful in the chase. Thus he soon piled up a great heap of stags, bears, and boars; but when he went off to kill even more Acastus’s companions claimed the prey as their master’s and jeered a his want of skill. ‘Let the dead beasts decide this matter with their own mouths!’ cried Peleus, who had cut out their tongues, and now produced them from a bag to prove that he had easily won the contest.

i. After a festive supper, in the course of which he outdid all other as a trencher-man, Peleus fell fast asleep. Acastus then robbed him of his magic sword, hid it under a pile of cow-dung, and stole away with his followers. Peleus awoke to find himself deserted, disarmed, and surrounded by wild Centaurs, who were on the point of murdering him however, their king Cheiron not only intervened to save his life, but divined where the sword lay hidden and restored it to him.
j. Meanwhile, on the advice of Themis, Zeus chose Peleus to be the husband of the Nereid Thetis, whom he would have married himself had he not been discouraged by the Fates’ prophecy that any son born to Thetis would become far more powerful than his father. He was also vexed that Thetis had rejected his advances, for her foster-mother Hera’s sake, and therefore vowed that she should never marry an immortal. Hera, however, gratefully decided to match her with the noblest of mortals, and summoned all Olympians to the wedding when the moon should next be full, at the same time sending her messenger to King Cheiron’s cave with an order for Peleus to make ready.
k. Now, Cheiron foresaw that Thetis, being immortal, would at first resent the marriage; and, acting on his instructions, Peleus concealed himself behind a bush of patti-coloured myrtle-berries on the shores of a Thessalian islet, where Thetis often came, riding naked on a harnessed dolphin, to enjoy her midday sleep in the cave which this bush half screened. No sooner had she entered the cave and fallen asleep than Peleus seized hold of her. The struggle was silent and fierce. Thetis turned successively into fire, water, a lion, and a serpent; but Peleus had been warned what to expect, and clung to her resolutely, even when she became an enormous slippery cuttle-fish and squirted ink at him-a change which accounts for the name of Cape Sepias, the near-by promontory, now sacred to the Nereids. Though burned, drenched, mauled, stung, and covered with sticky sepia ink, Peleus would not let her go and, in the end, she yielded and they lay locked in a passionate embrace.
1. Their wedding was celebrated outside Cheiron’s cave on Mount Pelion. The Olympians attended, seated on twelve thrones. Hera herself raised the bridal torch, and Zeus, now reconciled to his defeat, gave Thetis away. The Fates and the Muses sang; Ganymedes poured nectar; and the fifty Nereids performed a spiral dance on the white sands. Crowds of Centaurs attended the ceremony, wearing chaplets of grass, brandishing darts of fir, and prophesying good fortune.
m. Cheiron gave Peleus a spear; Athene had polished its shaft, which was cut from an ash on the summit of Pelion; and Hephaestus had forged its blade. The Gods’ joint gift was a magnificent suit of golden armour, to which Poseidon added the two immortal horses Balius and Xanthus-by the West Wind out of the Harpy Podarge.

n. But the goddess Eris, who had not been invited, was determined to put the divine guests at logger-heads, and while Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite were chatting amicably together, arm in arm, she rolled a golden apple at their feet. Peleus picked it up, and stood embarrassed by its inscription: ‘To the Fairest!’, not knowing which of the three might be intended. This apple was the proto-catarctical cause of the Trojan War.
o. Some describe Peleus’s wife Thetis as Cheiron’s daughter, and a mere mortal; and say that Cheiron, wishing to honour Peleus, spread the rumour that he had married the goddess, her mistress.
p. Meanwhile Peleus, whose fortunes the kindly Cheiron had restored, and who now also acquired large herds of cattle as a dowry, sent some of these to Phthia as an indemnity for his accidental killing of Eurytion; but, when the payment was refused by the Phthians, let them to roam at will about the countryside. This proved to have been a fortunate decision, because a fierce wolf which Psamathe had sent after him, to avenge the death of her son Phocus, so glutted its hunger on these masterless cattle that it could hardly crawl. When Peleus and Thetis came face to face with the wolf, it made as if to spring at Peleus’s throat, but Thetis glowered balefully with protruded tongue, and turned it into a stone, which is still pointed out on the road between Locris and Phocis.
q. Later, Peleus returned to Iolcus, where Zeus supplied him with an army of ants transformed into warriors; and thus he became known as King of the Myrmidons. He captured the city single-handed, killed first Acastus, then the cowering Cretheis; and led his Myrmidons into the city between the pieces of her dismembered body.

r. Thetis successively burned away the mortal parts of her six sons by Peleus, in order to make them immortal like herself, and sent each of them in turn up to Olympus. But Peleus contrived to match the seventh from her when she had already made all his body, except the ankle-bone, immortal by laying it on the fire and afterwards rubbing it with ambrosia; the half-charred ankle-bone had escaped this final treatment. Enraged by his interference, Thetis said farewell to Peleus, and returned to her home in the sea, naming her son ‘Achilles’, because he had as yet placed no lips to her breast. Peleus provided Achilles with a new ankle- bone, taken from the skeleton of the swift giant Damysus, but this was fated to prove his undoing.
s. Too old to fight at Troy himself, Peleus later gave Achilles the golden armour, the ashen spear, and the two horses which had been his wedding presents. He was eventually expelled from Phthia by Acastus’s sons, who no longer feared him when they heard of Achilles’s death; but Thetis instructed him to visit the cave by the myrtle-bush, where he had first mastered her, and wait there until she took him away to live with her for ever in the depths of the sea. Peleus went to the cave, and eagerly watched the passing ships, hoping that one of them might be bringing his grandson Neoptolemus back from Troy.
t. Neoptolemus, meanwhile, was refitting his shattered fleet in Molossia and, when he heard of Peleus’s banishment, disguised himself as a Trojan captive and took ship for Iolcus, there contriving to kill Acastus’s sons and seize the city. But Peleus, growing impatient, had chartered a vessel for a voyage to Molossia; rough weather drove her to the island of Kos, near Euboea, where he died and was buried, thus forfeiting the immortality which Thetis had promised him.

1. The myth of Aeacus, Psamathe (‘sandy shore’), and Phocus (‘seal’) occurs in the folklore of almost every European country. Usually the hero sees a flock of seals swimming towards a deserted shore under a full moon, and then stepping out of their skins to reveal themselves as young women. He hides behind a rock, while they dance naked on the sand, then seizes one of the seal skins, thus winning power over its owner, whom he gets with child. Eventually they quarrel; she regains her skin and swims away. The dance of the fifty Nereids at Thetis’s wedding, and her return to the sea after the birth of Achilles, appear to be fragments the same myth-the origin of which seems to have been a ritual dance of fifty seal- priestesses, dedicated to the Moon, which formed a proem to the Chief-priestess’s choice of a sacred king. Here the scene is set Aegina but, to judge from the story of Peleus’s struggle near Cape Sepias, a similar ritual was performed in Magnesia by a college of cuttle-fish priestesses-the cuttle-fish appears prominently in Cretan works art, including the standard weight from the Royal Treasury at Cnossus, and also on megalithic monuments at Carnac and elsewhere in Brittany. It has eight tentacles, as the sacred anemone of Pelion has eight petals-eight being the number of fertility in Mediterranean myth. Peleus (‘muddy’) may have become the sacred king’s title after he had been anointed with sepia, since he is described as the son of Endeis, ‘the entangler’, a synonym for the cuttle-fish.
2. Acastus’s hunting party, the subsequent banquet, and the loss of Peleus’s magic sword seem to be mistakenly deduced from an icon which showed the preliminaries to a coronation ceremony: coronation implying marriage to the tribal heiress. The scene apparently included the king’s ritual combat with men dressed as beasts, and the drawing a regal sword from a cleft rock (misinterpreted by the mythographer as a heap of cow dung)-as in the myths of Theseus and King Arthur of Lyonesse. But the ashen spear cut by Cheiron from Mount Pelion is an earlier symbol of sovereignty than the sword.
3. Thetis’s transformations suggest a display of the goddess’s seasonal powers presented in a sequence of dances. The myrtle behind which Peleus first met her, emblemized the last month of his predecessor’s reign; and therefore served as their rendezvous when his own  reign ended. This myth seems to record a treaty-marriage, attended by representatives of twelve confederate tribes or clans, between a Phthian prince and the Moon-priestess of Iolcus in Thessaly.
4. It may well be that the author of the old English Seege or Battayle of Troy drew on a lost Classical source when he made Peleus ‘half man, half horse’: that is to say, Peleus was adopted into an Aeacid horse-oak clan. Such an adoption will have implied a sacrificial horse- feast: which explains the wedding gift of Balius and Xanthus without a chariot for them to draw. The Centaurs of Magnesia and the Thessalians of Iolcus seem to have been bound by an exogamic alliance: hence the statement by the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius that Peleus’s wife was, in reality, Cheiron’s daughter.
5. Peleus’s embarrassment when he looked at the apple thrown down by Eris suggests a picture of the Moon-goddess, in triad, presenting the apple of immortality to the sacred king. Acastus’s murder, and Peleus’s march into the city between the dismembered pieces of Cretheis’s body, may be a misinterpretation of an icon which showed a new king about to ride through the streets of his capital after having ritually hacked his predecessor in pieces with an axe.
6. The frequent murders, accidental or intentional, which caused princes to leave home  and be purified by foreign kings, whose daughters they then married, are an invention of later mythographers. There is no reason to suppose that Peleus left Aegina, or Phthia, under a cloud; at a time when kingship went by matrilineal succession, candidates for the throne always  came from abroad, and the new king was reborn into the royal house after ritually murdering his predecessor. He then changed his name and tribe, which was expected to throw the vengeful ghost of the murdered man off his scent. Similarly, Telamon of Aegina went to Salamis, was chosen as the new king, killed the old king-who became an oracular hero-and married the chief-priestess of an owl college. It was found convenient, in more civilized times, when much the same ritual was used to purify ordinary criminals, to forget that kingship implied murder, and to suggest that Peleus, Telamon, and the rest had been involved in crimes or scandals unconnected with their accession to the throne. The scandal is frequently a false accusation of having attempted a queen’s virtue. Cychreus’s connection with the Eleusinian Mysteries and Telamon’s marriage to an Athenian princess became important when, in 620 BC, Athens and Megara disputed the possession of Salamis. The Spartans judged the case,  and the Athenian ambassadors successfully based their claim on Telamon’s connection with Attica (Plutarch: Solon).
7. Phocus’s death by the discus, like that of Acrisius, seems to be a misinterpretation of an icon which showed the end of the seal-king’s reign-the flying discus being a sun-disk; as the myth makes plain, the sacrificial weapon was an axe. Several heroes besides Achilles were killed by a heel wound, and not only in Greek but in Egyptian, Celtic, Lydian, Indian, and Norse mythology.
8. The burning of Thetis’s sons was common practice: the yearly sacrifice of boy surrogates for the sacred king. At the close of the eighth year the king himself died. A parallel in the Indian Mahabharata is the drowning by the Ganges-goddess of her seven sons by the God Krishna. He saves the last, Bhishma; then she deserts him. Actor’s division of his kingdom into three parts is paralleled in the myth of Proetus: the sacred king, instead of letting himself be sacrificed when his reign was due to end, retailed one part of his kingdom, and bequeathed the remainder to his successors. Subsequent kings insisted on a lifetime  tenure of sovereignty.
9. Peleus’s death at Cos suggests that his name was a royal title there as well as at Phthia, Iolcus, and Salamis. He became king of the Myrmidons because the Phthians worshipped their goddess as Myrmex (‘ant’). Antoninus Liberalis’s story of Thetis and the wolf seems to have been deduced from an icon which showed a priestess of Wolfish Aphrodite (Pausanias) wearing a Gorgon mask as she sacrifices cattle.