Theseus In Crete

IT is a matter of dispute whether Medea persuaded Aegeus to send Theseus against Poseidon’s ferocious white bull, or whether it was after her expulsion from Athens that he undertook the destruction of this fire-breathing monster, hoping thereby to ingratiate himself further with the Athenians. Brought by Heracles from Crete, let loose on the plain of Argos, and driven thence across the Isthmus to Marathon, the bull had killed men by the hundred between the cities of Probalinthus and Tricorynthus, including (some say) Minos’s son Androgeus. Yet Theseus boldly seized those murderous horns and dragged the bull through the streets of Athens, and up the steep slope of the Acropolis, where he sacrificed it to Athene, or to Apollo.

b. As he approached Marathon, Theseus had been hospitably entertained by a needy old spinster named Hecale, or Hecalene, who vowed ram to Zeus if he came back safely. But she died before his return, instituted the Hecalesian Rites, to honour her and Zeus Hecalius, which are still performed today. Because Theseus was no more than a child at this time, Hecale had caressed him with childish endearment, and is therefore commonly known by the diminutive Hecalene, as much as Hecale.

c. In requital for the death of Androgeus, Minos gave orders that the should send seven youths and seven maidens every ninth year-at the close of every Great Year-to the Cretan Labyrinth, where the Minotaur waited to devour them. This Minotaur, whose name was Asterius, or Asterion, was the bull-headed monster Pasiphaë had borne to the white bull. Soon after Theseus’s Athens the tribute fell due for the third time, and he so deeply moved by the fathers whose children were indicated by lot, that offered himself as one of the victims, despite Aegeus’s earnest dissuasion. But some say that the lot had fallen on him. According to others, King Minos came in person with a large fleet to elect victims; his eye lighted on Theseus who, though a native to Troezen not Athens, volunteered to come on the condition that if he killed the Minotaur with his bare hands the tribute would be annulled.

d. On the two previous occasions, the ship which conveyed the victims had carried black sails, but Theseus was confident that the gods were on his side, and Aegeus therefore gave him a white sail as a signal of success-though some say that it was a red in juice of the kern- oak berry.

e. When the lots had been cast at the Law Courts, Theseus led his companions to the shrine of Apollo the Dolphin, and on their behalf, he offered a branch of consecrated olive, bound with white wool. The mothers brought provisions for the voyage, and told their fables and heroic tales to hearten them. Theseus, however, replaced two of the maiden victims with a pair of effeminate youths, of unusual courage and presence of mind. These he ordered to take warm baths, avoid the rays of the sun, perfume their heads and bodies with unguent oils, and practise how to talk, gesture, and walk like women. He was thus able to deceive Minos by passing off as maidens.

f. Phaeax, the ancestor of Phaeacians, among whom he were called Odysseus, stood as pilot at the prow of the thirty-yard ship in which they sailed, because no Athenian as yet knew anything about navigation. Some say that the helmsman was Phereclus; but those who name Nausitheus are likely to be right, since Theseus on his return raised monuments to Nausitheus and Phaeax at Phalerum, the port of departure; and initiated the Festival of Navigators, which is still celebrated in their honour.

g. The Delphic Oracle had advised Theseus to take Aphrodite as his guide and companion on the voyage. He therefore sacrificed to her on the strand; and the victim, a she-goat, became a he-goat death-throes. This prodigy won Aphrodite her title of Epitragia.

h. Theseus sailed on the sixth day of Munychion [April]. Every year on this date the Athenians still send virgins to the Dolphin Temple, to propitiate Apollo, because Theseus omitted to do so before taking his leave. The god’s displeasure was shown in a storm, which forced him to take shelter at Delphi and there offer belated sacrifice

i. When the ship reached Crete some days afterwards, Minos came down to the harbour to count the victims. Falling in love with one the Athenian maidens-whether it was Periboea (who became mother of Ajax) or Eriboea, or Phereboea, is not agreed, for these three bore confusingly similar names-he would have ravished her then there, had Theseus not protested that it was his duty as Poseidon’s son to defend virgins against outrage by tyrants. Minos, laughing lewdly replied that Poseidon had never been known to show delicate respect for any virgins who took his fancy.

‘Ha!’ he cried, ‘prove yourself a son of Poseidon, by retrieving bauble for me!’ So saying, he flung his golden signet ring into the sea.

‘First prove that you are a son of Zeus’ retorted Theseus.

This Minos did. His prayer: ‘Father Zeus, hear me!’ was at once answered by lightning and a rap of thunder. Without more ado Theseus dived into the sea, where a large school of dolphins escorted him honourably down to the palace of the Nereids. Some say that Thetis the Nereid then gave him the jewelled crown, the wedding gift from Aphrodite, which afterwards Ariadne wore; others, that Amphitrite the Sea-goddess did so herself, and that she sent the Nereids swimming in every direction to find the golden ring. At all events, when Theseus emerged from the sea, he was carrying both the ring and the crown, as Micon has recorded in his painting on the third wall of Theseus’s temple.

e. Aphrodite had indeed accompanied Theseus: for not only did Periboea and Phereboea invite the chivalrous Theseus to their beds and were not spurned, but Minos’s own daughter Ariadne fell in love with him at first sight. ‘I will help you to kill my half-brother, the Minotaur,’ she secretly promised him, ‘if I may return to Athens with you as your wife.’ This offer Theseus gladly accepted, and married her. Now, before Daedalus left Crete, he had given her a magic ball of thread, and instructed her how to enter and Labyrinth. She must open the entrance door and tie the loose thread to the lintel; the ball would then roll along, diminishing as it went and making, with devious turns and twists, for the corners where the Minotaur was lodged. This ball Ariadne gave to Theseus and instructed him to follow it until he reached the sleeping monster, whom he must seize by the hair and sacrifice to Poseidon. He then can come back by rolling up the thread into a ball again.

1. That same night Theseus did as he was told; but whether he killed Minotaur with a sword given him by Ariadne, or with his bare hands, or with his celebrated club, is much disputed. A sculptured at Amyclae shows the Minotaur bound and led in triumph by Theseus to Athens; but this is not the generally-accepted story.

m. When Theseus emerged from the Labyrinth, spotted with blood, Ariadne embraced him passionately, and guided the whole Athenian group to the harbour. For, in the meantime, the two effeminate-looking youths had killed the guards of the women’s quarters, and  released the virgin victims. They all stole aboard their ship, where Nausitheus and Phaeax were expecting them, and rowed hastily away. But although Theseus broke in the hulls of several Cretan ships, to prevent the persecution, alarm sounded and he was forced to fight a sea-battle in the port before escaping, fortunately without loss, under cover of darkness.

n. Some days later, after disembarking on the island then named Dia, but now known as Naxos, Theseus left Ariadne asleep on the beach and sailed away. Why he did so must remain a mystery. Some say that he deserted her in favour of a new mistress, Aegle, daughter of Panopeus; others that, while wind-bound on Dia, he reflected on the scandal at Athens would cause. Others again say that Dionysus, appearing to Theseus in a dream, threateningly demanded Ariadne for himself, and that, when Theseus noticed Dionysus’s fleet bearing  down on Dia, he weighed anchor in sudden terror; Dionysus having cast a spell which made him forget his promise to Ariadne and even her very existence.

o. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, Dionysus’s priests in Athens affirm that when Ariadne found herself alone on the deserted shore, she broke into bitter laments, remembering how she has trembled while Theseus set out to kill her monstrous half-brother, how she had offered silent vows for his success; and how, through her love of him, she had deserted her parents and motherland. She now invoked the whole universe for vengeance, and Father Zeus nodded in assent. Then, gently and sweetly, Dionysus with his merry train of satyrs and maenads came to Ariadne’s rescue. He married her without delay, setting Thetis’s crown  upon her head, and she bore him many children. Of these only Thoas and Oenopion are sometimes called Theseus’s sons. The crown, which Dionysus later set among the stars as the Corona Borealis, was made by Hephaestus off fiery gold and Indian gems, set in the shape of roses.

p. The Cretans, however, refuse to admit that the Minotaur ever existed, or that Theseus won Ariadne by clandestine means. They describe the Labyrinth as merely a well-guarded prison, where Athenian youths and maidens were kept in readiness for Androgeus funeral games. Some were sacrificed at his tomb; others presented to the prizewinners as slaves. It happened that Minos’s cruel and arrogant general Taurus had carried all before him, year after year: winning every event in which he competed, much to the disgust of his rivals. He had also forfeited Minos’s confidence because he was rumoured to be carrying on an adulterous affair with Pasiphaë, connived at by Daedalus, and one of her twin sons bore a close resemblance to him. Minos therefore, gladly granted Theseus’s request for the privilege of fighting against Taurus. In ancient Crete, women as well as men attended the games, and Ariadne fell in love with Theseus when, three time succession, she saw him toss the former champion over his head, pinning his shoulders to the ground. The sight afforded Minos almost satisfaction: he awarded Theseus the prize, accepted him as his son law, and remitted the cruel tribute.

q. A traditional Boeotian song confirms this tradition that none of the victims were put to death. It records that the Cretans sent an offering of their first-born to Delphi, for the most part children of Crethanised Athenian slaves. The Delphians, however, could not support these from the resources of their small city, and therefore packed them off to found a colony at Iapygia in Italy. Later, they settled at Boeotia in Thrace, and the nostalgic cry raised by the Boeotian maidens: ‘Oh, let us return to Athens!’, gives a constant render of their origin.

r. An altogether different account is given by the Cypriots and others. They say that Minos and Theseus agreed on oath that no ship except the Argo, commanded by Jason, who had a commission to clear the sea of pirates-might sail in Greek waters with a crew larger than five. When Daedalus fled from Crete to Athens, Minos broke this pact by pursuing him with warships, and thus earned the anger of Poseidon, who had witnessed the oath, and now raised a storm which drove him to his death in Sicily. Minos’s son Deucalion, inheriting the quarrel, threatened that unless the Athenians surrendered Daedalus, he would put to death all the hostages given him by Theseus at the conclusion of the pact. Theseus replied that Daedalus was his blood-relation, and enquired mildly whether some compromise could not be reached. He exchanged several letters on the subject with Deucalion, but meanwhile secretly built warships: some at Thymoetidae, a port off the beaten track, and others at Troezen, where Pittheus had a naval yard about which the Cretans knew nothing. Within a month or two his flotilla set sail, guided by Daedalus and other fugitives from Crete; and the Cretans mistook the approaching ships for part of Minos’s lost fleet and gave them a resounding welcome. Theseus therefore seized the harbour without opposition, and made straight for Cnossus, where he cut down Deucalion’s guards, and killed Deucalion himself in an inner chamber of the palace. The Cretan throne then passed to Ariadne, with whom Theseus generously came to terms; she surrendered the Athenian hostages, and a treaty of perpetual friendship was concluded between the two nations, sealed by a union of the crowns-in effect, she married Theseus.

s. After long feasting they sailed together for Athens, but were driven to Cyprus by a storm. There Ariadne, already with child by Theseus, and fearing that she might miscarry from sea-sickness, asked to be put ashore at Amathus. This was done, but hardly had Theseus regained his ship when a violent wind forced the whole fleet out to sea again. The women of Amathus treated Ariadne kindly, comforting her with letters which, they pretended, had just arrived from Theseus, who was repairing his ship on the shores of a neighbouring island; and when she died in childbed, gave her a lavish funeral. Ariadne’s tomb is still shown at Amathus, in a grove sacred to her as Aridela. Theseus, on his eventual return from the Syrian coast, was deeply grieved to learn that she had died, and endowed her cult with a large sum of money. The Cypriots still celebrate Ariadne’s festival on the second day of September, when a youth lies down in her grove and imitates a travailing woman; and worship two small  statues of her: one in silver, the other in brass, which Theseus left them. They say that Dionysus, so far from marrying Ariadne, was indignant that she and Theseus had profaned his Naydan grotto, and complained to Artemis, who killed her in childbed with merciless shafts; but some say that she hanged herself for fear of Artemis.

t. To resume the history of Theseus: from Naxos he sailed to Delos, and there sacrificed to Apollo, celebrating athletic games in his honour. It was then that he introduced the novel custom of crowning the victor with palm-leaves, and placing a palm-stem in his right hand. He also prudently dedicated to the god a small wooden image of Aphrodite, the work of Daedalus, which Ariadne had brought from Crete and left aboard his ship-it might have  been the subject of cynical comment by the Athenians. This image, still displayed at Delos, rests on a square base instead of feet, and is perpetually garlanded.

u. A horned altar stands beside the round lake of Delos. Apollo himself built it, when he was only four years of age, with the closely compacted horns of countless she-goats killed by Artemis on Mount Cynthus-his first architectural feat. The foundations of the altar, and its enclosing walls, are also made entirely of horns; all taken from the same side of the victims- but whether from the left, or from the right, is disputed. What makes the work rank among the seven marvels of the world is that neither mortar nor any other colligative has been used. It was around this altar-or, according to another version, around an altar of Aphrodite, on which the Daedalic image had been set-that Theseus and his companions danced the Crane, which consists of labyrinthine evolutions, trod with measured steps to the accompaniment of harps. The Delians still perform this dance, which Theseus introduced from Cnossus; Daedalus had built Ariadne a dancing-floor there, marked with a maze pattern in white marble relief, copied from the Egyptian Labyrinth. When Theseus and his companions performed the Crane at Cnossus, this was the first occasion on which men and women danced together. Old- fashioned people, especially sailors, keep up much the same dance in many different cities of Greece and Asia Minor; so do children in the Italian countryside, and it is the foundation of the Troy Game.

v. Ariadne was soon revenged on Theseus. Whether in grief for her loss, or in joy at the sight of the Attic coast, from which he had been kept by prolonged winds, he forgot his promise to hoist the white sail. Aegeus, who stood watching for him on the Acropolis, where the Temple of the Wingless Victory now stands, sighted the black sail, swooned, and fell headlong to his death into the valley below. But some say that he deliberately cast himself into the sea, which was thenceforth named the Aegean.

w. Theseus was not informed of this sorrowful accident until he had completed the sacrifices vowed to the gods for his safe return; he then buried Aegeus, and honoured him with a hero-shrine. On the eighth day of Pyanepsion [October], the date of the return from Crete, loyal Athenians flock down to the seashore, with cooking-pots in which they stew different kinds of beans-to remind their children how Theseus, having been obliged to place his crew on very short rations, cooked his remaining provisions in one pot as soon as he landed, and filled their empty bellies at last. At this same festival a thanksgiving is sung for the end of hunger, and an olive-branch, wreathed in white wool and hung with the season’s fruits, is carried to commemorate the one which Theseus dedicated before setting out. Since this was harvest time, Theseus also instituted the Festival of Grape Boughs, either in gratitude to Athene and Dionysus, both of whom appeared to him on Naxos, or in honour of Dionysus and Ariadne. The two bough-bearers represent the youths whom Theseus had taken to Crete disguised as maidens, and who walked beside him in the triumphal procession after his return. Fourteen women carry provisions and take part in this sacrifice; they represent the mothers of the rescued victims, and their task is to tell fables and ancient myths, as these mothers also did before the ship sailed.

x. Theseus dedicated a temple to Saviour Artemis in the market place at Troezen; and his fellow-citizens honoured him with a sanctuary while he was still alive. Such families as had been liable to the Cretan tribute trader took to supply the needful sacrifices; and Theseus awarded his priesthood to the Phytalids, in gratitude for their hospitality. The vessel in which he sailed to Crete has made an annual voyage to Delos and back ever since; but has been so frequently over, hauled and refuted that philosophers cite it as a stock instance, when discussing the problem of continuous identity.

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1. Greece was Cretanised towards the close of the eighteenth century BC, probably by an Hellenic aristocracy which had seized power in Crete a generation or two earlier and there initiated a new culture. The straightforward account of Theseus’s raid on Cnossus, quoted by Plutarch, makes reasonable sense. It describes a revolt by the Athenians against a Cretan overlord who had taken hostages for their good behaviour; the secret building of a flotilla; the sack of the unwalled city of Cnossus during the absence of the main Cretan fleet in Sicily; and a subsequent peace treaty ratified by the Athenian king’s marriage with Ariadne, the Cretan heiress. These events, which point to about the year 1400 BC, are paralleled by the mythical account: a tribute of youths and maidens is demanded from Athens in requital for the murder of a Cretan prince. Theseus, by craftily killing the Bull of Minos, or defeating Minos’s  leading commander in a wrestling match, relieves Athens of this tribute; marries Ariadne, the royal heiress; and makes peace with Minos himself.

2. Theseus’s killing of the bull-headed Asterius, called the Minotaur, or ‘Bull of Minos’; his wrestling match with Taurus (‘bull’); and his capture of the Cretan bull, are all versions of the same event. Bolynthos, which gave its name to Attic Probalinthus, was the Cretan name for ‘wild bull’. ‘Minos’ was the title of a Cnossian dynasty, which had a skybull for its emblem-‘Asterius’ could mean ‘of the sun’ or ‘of the sky’ and it was in bull-form that the king seems to have coupled ritually with the Chief-priestess as Moon-cow. One element in the formation of the Labyrinth myth may have been that the palace at Cnossus-the house of the labrys, or double-axe-was a complex of rooms and corridors, and that the Athenian raiders had difficulty in finding and killing the king when they captured it. But this is not all. An open space in front of the palace was occupied by a dance floor with a maze pattern used to guide performers of an erotic spring dance. The origin of this pattern, now also called a labyrinth, seems to have been the traditional brushwood maze used to decoy partridges towards one of their own cocks, caged in a central enclosure, which uttered food-calls, lovecalls, and challenges; and the spring dancers will have imitated the ecstatic hobbling love-dance of the cock-partridges, whose fate was to be knocked on the head by the hunter (Ecclesiasticus).

3. An Etruscan wine-jar from Tragliatella, showing two mounted heroes, explains the religious theory of the partridge-dance. The leader carries a shield with a partridge device and a death-demon perches behind him; the other hero carries a lance, and a shield with a duck device. To their rear is a maze of a pattern found not only on certain Cnossian coins, but in  the British turf-cut mazes trodden by schoolchildren at Easter until the nineteenth century. Love-jealousy lured the king to his death, the iconographer is explaining, like a partridge in the brushwood maze, and he was succeeded by his tanist. Only the exceptional hero-a Daedalus, or a Theseus-returned alive; and in this context the recent discovery near Bosinney in Cornwall of a Cretan maze cut on a rock-face is of great importance. The ravine where the maze was first noticed by Dr Renton Green is one of the last haunts of the Cornish chough; and this bird houses the soul of King Arthur-who harrowed Hell, and with whom Bosinney is closely associated in legend. A maze dance seems to have been brought to Britain from the eastern Mediterranean by Neolithic agriculturists of the third millennium BC, since rough stone mazes, similar to the British turf-cut ones, occur in the ‘Beaker B’ area of Scandinavia and North-eastern Russia; and ecclesiastic mazes, once used for penitential purposes, are found in South-eastern Europe. English turf-mazes are usually known as ‘Troy- town’, and so are the Welsh: Caer-droia. The Romans probably named them after their own Troy Game, a labyrinthine dance performed by young aristocrats in honour of Augustus’s ancestor Aeneas the Trojan; though, according to Pliny, it was also danced by children in the Italian countryside.

4. At Cnossus the sky-bull cult succeeded the partridge cult, and the circling of the dancers came to represent the annual courses of the heavenly bodies. If, therefore, seven youths and maidens took part, they may have represented the seven Titans and Titanesses of the sun, moon, and five planets; although no definite evidence of the Titan cult has been  found in Cretan works of art. It appears that the ancient Crane Dance of Delos-cranes, too, perform a love dance-was similarly adapted to a maze pattern. In some mazes the dancers held a cord, which helped them to keep their proper distance and execute the pattern faultlessly; and this may have given rise to the story of the ball of twine (A. B. Cook: Journal of Hellenic Studies); at Athens, as on Mount Sipylus, the rope dance was called cordax (Aristophanes: Clouds). The spectacle in the Cretan bull ring consisted of an acrobatic display by young men and girls who in turn seized the horns of the charging bull and turned back- somersaults between them over his shoulders. This was evidently a religious rite: perhaps here also the performers represented planets. It cannot have been nearly so dangerous a sport as most writers on the subject suggest, to judge from the rarity of casualties among banderilleros in the Spanish bull ring; and a Cretan fresco shows that a companion was at hand to catch the somersaulter as he or she came to earth.

5. ‘Ariadne’, which the Greeks understood as ‘Ariagne’ (‘very holy’), will have been a title of the Moon-goddess honoured in the dance, and in the bull ring: ‘the high, fruitful Barley-mother’, also called Aridela, ‘the very manifest one’. The carrying of fruit-laden boughs in Ariadne’s honour, and Dionysus’s, and her suicide by hanging, ‘because she feared Artemis’, suggest that Ariadne-dolls were attached to these boughs. A bell-shaped Boeotian goddess-doll hung in the Louvre, her legs dangling, is Ariadne, or Erigone, or Hanged Artemis; and bronze dolls with detachable limbs have been found in Daedalus’s Sardinia. Ariadne’s crown made by Hephaestus in the form of a rose-wreath is not a fancy; delicate gold wreaths with gemmed flowers were found in the Mochlos hoard.

6. Theseus’s marriage to the Moon-priestess made him lord of Cnossus, and on one Cnossian coin a new moon is set in the centre of a maze. Matrilineal custom, however, deprived an heiress of all claims to her lands if she accompanied a husband overseas; and this explains why Theseus did not bring Ariadne back to Athens, or any farther than Dia, a Cretan island within sight of Cnossus. Cretan Dionysus, represented as a bull-Minos, in fact-was Ariadne’s rightful husband; and wine, a Cretan manufacture, will have been served at her orgies. This might account for Dionysus’s indignation, reported by Homer, that she and the intruder Theseus had lain together.

7. Many ancient Athenian customs of the Mycenaean period are explained by Plutarch and others in terms of Theseus’s visit to Crete: for instance, the ritual prostitution of girls, and ritual sodomy (characteristic of Anatha’s worship at Jerusalem, and the Syrian Goddess’s at Hierapolis), which survived vestigially among the Athenians in the propitiation of Apollo with a gift of maidens, and in the carrying of harvest branches by two male inverts. The fruit- laden bough recalls the lulab carried at the Jerusalem New Year Feast of Tabernacles, also celebrated in the early autumn. Tabernacles was a vintage festival, and corresponded with the Athenian Oschophoria, or ‘carrying of grape dusters’; the principal interest of which lay in a foot race (Proclus: Chrestornathia). Originally, the winner became the new sacred king, as at Olympia, and received a fivefold mixture of ‘oil, wine, honey, chopped cheese, and meal’- the divine nectar and ambrosia of the gods. Plutarch associates Theseus, the new king, with this festival, by saying that he arrived accidentally while it was in progress, and exculpates him from any part in the death of his predecessor Aegeus. But the new king really wrestled against the old king and flung him, as a pharmacos, from the White Rock into the sea . In the illustrative icon which the mythographer has evidently misread, Theseus’s black-sailed ship must have been a boat standing by to rescue the pharmacos; it has dark sails, because Mediterranean fishermen usually tan their nets and canvas to prevent the salt water from rotting them. The kern-berry, or cochineal, provided a scarlet dye to stain the sacred king’s face, and was therefore associated with royalty. ‘Hecalene’, the needy old spinster, is probably a worn-down form of ‘Hecate Selene’, ‘the far-shooting moon’, which means Artemis.

8. Bean-eating by men seems to have been prohibited in pre-Hellenic times-the Pythagoreans continued to abstain from beans, on the ground that their ancestors’ souls could well be resident in them and that, if a man (as opposed to a woman) ate a bean, he might be robbing an ancestor of his or her chance to be reborn. The popular bean-feast therefore suggests a deliberate Hellenic flouting of the goddess who imposed the taboo; so does Theseus’s gift of a male priesthood to the Phytalids (‘growers’), the feminine form of whose name is a reminder that fig-culture, like beans planting, was at first a mystery confined to women.

9. The Cypriots worshipped Ariadne as the ‘Birth-goddess of Amathus’, a title belonging to Aphrodite. Her autumn festival celebrated the birth of the New Year; and the young man who sympathetically imitated her pangs will have been her royal lover, Dionysus. This custom, known as couvade, is found in many parts of Europe, including some districts of East Anglia.

10. Apollo’s horn temple on Delos has recently been excavated. The altar and its foundations are gone, and bull has succeeded goat as the ritual animal in the stone decorations-if it indeed ever was a goat; a Minoan seal shows the goddess standing on an altar made entirely of bulls’ horns.

11. Micon’s allegorical mural of Thetis presenting a crown and ring to Theseus, while Minos glowers in anger on the shore, will have depicted the passing of the thalassocracy from Cretan to Athenian hands. But it may be that Minos had symbolically married the Sea- goddess by throwing a ring into the sea, as the Doges of Venice did in the middle ages.

12. Oenopion and Thoas are sometimes called Theseus’s sons’ because these were the heroes of Chios and Lemnos, subject allies of the Athenians.