The Library of Greek Mythology (Oxford World's Classics) (28 page)

⁵
Agamemnon put to sea when he had offered his sacrifice, and called in at Tenedos. Neoptolemos was visited by Thetis,
*
who persuaded him to remain for two days and then offer a sacrifice; so he remained. But the others sailed off and were caught in a storm at Tenos (for Athene had appealed to Zeus to send a storm against the Greeks). And many ships were sunk.

⁶
Athene hurled a thunderbolt at the ship of Aias, but when the ship broke up, Aias escaped to safety on a rock and proclaimed that he had saved himself against the goddess’s will. But Poseidon split the rock with a blow from his trident, and Aias fell into the sea and was killed.
*
His body was washed ashore and buried by Thetis at Myconos.

⁷
When the others were driven towards Euboea by night, Nauplios
*
lit a beacon on Mount Caphereus, and the Greeks, thinking that it came from some comrades who had escaped, sailed towards it, only to have their vessels wrecked on the Capherian Rocks, with the loss of many lives.

⁸
Now Palamedes, the son of Nauplios by Clymene, daughter of Catreus, had been stoned to death as a result of the intrigues of Odysseus.
*
And when Nauplios had come to hear
of it, he had sailed to the Greeks and demanded restitution for the death of his son;
⁹
but turning back with nothing achieved (because all the Greeks had wanted to gratify King Agamemnon, who had been involved with Odysseus in the murder of Palamedes), he had sailed along the coast of Greece contriving that the wives of the Greeks should be unfaithful to their husbands, Clytemnestra with Aigisthos, Aigialeia
*
with Cometes, son of Sthenelos, and Meda, wife of Idomeneus,
*
with Leucos.
¹⁰
But Leucos killed Meda along with her daughter, Cleisithyra, who had taken refuge in a temple; and he then arranged the defection of ten Cretan cities and became their tyrant. And when Idomeneus landed in Crete after the Trojan War, Leucos drove him out.
¹¹
These, then, were the earlier machinations of Nauplios, and later, when he learned that the Greeks were returning home to their countries, he lit the beacon on Mount Caphereus, which is now called Xylophagos.
*
It was there that the Greeks approached the shore, supposing it to be a harbour, and met their deaths.

¹²
After he had remained in Tenedos for two days as Thetis had advised, Neoptolemos travelled by land to the country of the Molossians,
*
accompanied by Helenos. Along the way, Phoenix died, and Neoptolemos buried him. He became king of the Molossians after defeating them in battle, and had a son, Molossos, by Andromache.
¹³
Helenos founded a city in Molossia, where he settled, and Neoptolemos gave him his mother, Deidameia, as a wife. When Peleus was expelled from Phthia by the sons of Acastos, and died, Neoptolemos recovered his father’s kingdom.
*

¹⁴
And when Orestes went mad,
*
Neoptolemos abducted his wife, Hermione, who had been promised to him previously at Troy,
*
and he was killed for that reason by Orestes at Delphi. But some say that he went to Delphi to demand reparation from Apollo for the death of his father,
*
and that he plundered the votive offerings and set fire to the temple, and was killed on that account by Machaireus
*
the Phocian.

^15.
After their wanderings, the Greeks landed in different
countries and settled there, some in Libya, some in Italy, others in Sicily, others again in the islands near Iberia, or along the River Sangarios; and there were some who settled in Cyprus too.

Agapenor settled in Cyprus. [Gouneus went to Libya, and leaving his ships behind, he made his way to the River Cinyps, where he settled. Meges and Prothoos were killed with many others at Caphereus in Euboea . . . and after Prothoos had been shipwrecked at Caphereus, the Magnesians with him were cast ashore on Crete and settled there.
*
]

[After the sack of Ilion, Menestheus, Pheidippos, and Antiphos, and the companions of Elephenor, and Philoctetes sailed together as far as Mimas. Then Menestheus went to Melos, where he became king because the previous king, Polyanax, had died. Antiphos, son of Thessalos, went to the land of the Pelasgians, and after seizing control of it, named it Thessaly. Pheidippos was driven to Andros with the Coans, and then to Cyprus, where he settled. Elephenor had died at Troy, but his companions were carried to the Ionian Gulf and settled at Apollonia in Epirus. The companions of Tlepolemos called in at Crete, and were then driven by the winds to the Iberian Islands, where they settled. The companions of Protesilaos were cast up on the [peninsula of] Pallene near the plain of Canastron. Philoctetes was driven to the land of the Campanians in Italy, and after a war against [the Lucanians], he settled at Crimissa, near Croton and [Thourioi]. Now that his wanderings had reached an end, he founded a sanctuary of Apollo the Wanderer, to whom, according to Euphorion, he dedicated his bow.]

[The Navaithos, a river in Italy, bears that name (according to Apollodorus and the rest) because after the capture of Ilion, the daughters of Laomedon and sisters of Priam, Aithylla, Astyoche, and Medesicaste, arrived in that part of Italy with the other captives, and fearing that they might become slaves in Greece,
set fire
to the
ships
. As a result, the river was called
Navaithos
, and the women the
Nauprestides
*
And the Greeks who were with them settled there after the loss of their ships.]

¹⁶
Demophon
*
called in at the land of the Thracian Bisaltians with a small number of ships. Phyllis, the king’s daughter,
fell in love with him, and her father offered her in marriage to Demophon with the kingdom for her dowry; but he wanted to leave for his own country, and after much pleading, and swearing to come back again, he departed. Phyllis accompanied him as far as the place known as Nine Ways,
*
and she gave him a basket, telling him that it contained an object sacred to Mother Rhea, and that he was not to open it unless he had abandoned all hope of returning to he.
¹⁷
Demophon went to Cyprus and settled there. When the appointed time had elapsed, Phyllis called down curses on Demophon and killed herself. Demophon opened the basket, and terrorstruck,
*
he jumped on to his horse and rode it at such a reckless pace that he lost his life; for the horse stumbled, and Demophon was thrown off and fell on his sword. His companions settled in Cyprus.

¹⁸
Podaleirios arrived in Delphi and asked the god where he should settle; and he received an oracle that he should settle in the city where he would suffer no harm if the surrounding heavens fell in. So he settled at a place in the Carian Chersonese which is girded by mountains on every side.

¹⁹
Amphilochos, son of Alcmaion, who, according to some accounts, had later arrived at Troy, was driven by a storm to the land of King Mopsos; and according to some accounts, they fought in single combat for the kingdom and killed one another.
*

²⁰
The Locrians with some difficulty made their way back to their own land; and when, three years later, Locris was struck by a plague,
*
they received an oracle telling them to propitiate Trojan Athene and to send her two maidens as suppliants for the next thousand years. The first to be picked out by the lot were Periboia and Cleopatra.
²¹
On their arrival at Troy, they were pursued by the inhabitants and fled to the sanctuary. Without ever approaching the goddess, they swept and sprinkled her sanctuary; and they never went outside the temple, and kept their heads shorn and wore only a single tunic without any shoes.
²²
When the first suppliants died, the Locrians sent others. They entered the city by night to ensure that they would not be seen outside the sacred precinct and be put to death. Later, however, they sent them as babies with
their nurses; and after the Phocian War,
*
when the thousand years had elapsed, they stopped sending the suppliants.

²³
When Agamemnon arrived back at Mycenae with Cassandra, he was killed by Aigisthos and Clytemnestra;
*
for she gave him a tunic without sleeves or a neck, and he was struck down as he tried to put it on. Aigisthos became king of Mycenae, and they killed Cassandra too.
*
²⁴
But Electra, one of the daughters of Agamemnon, stole away her brother Orestes, and entrusted him to Strophios the Phocian to rear; and he brought him up with his own son, Pylades. On reaching manhood, Orestes went to Delphi to ask the god whether he should take vengeance on his father’s murderers.
²⁵
When this was authorized by the god, he left Mycenae in secret, accompanied by Pylades, and killed his mother and Aigisthos.
*
Not long afterwards, he was struck by madness, and pursued by the Furies, he went to Athens, where he was put on trial in the Areiopagos. According to some, he was indicted by the Furies, or according to others, by Tyndareus, or again, by Erigone, the daughter of Aigisthos and Clytemnestra, and when the votes at his trial were evenly divided, he was acquitted.
*

²⁶
When Orestes asked the oracle how he could be delivered from his affliction, the god replied that this would be achieved if he fetched the wooden statue that lay in the land of the Taurians.
*
Now the Taurians are part of the Scythian race, who murder strangers and cast their bodies into the sacred fire. The fire lay in the sanctuary and rose up from Hades through a certain rock.
²⁷
So when Orestes arrived with Pylades in the land of the Taurians, they were discovered, captured, and taken in chains to Thoas, the king, who dispatched the pair of them to the priestess. But Orestes was recognized by his sister, who was performing the rites amongst the Taurians, and he fled with her, taking the wooden statue with him. It was brought to Athens, where it is now called the Tauropolos Statue; but it is said by some that Orestes was driven by a storm to the island of Rhodes, [where the statue remained] and was dedicated in a defensive wall in obedience
to an oracle.
²⁸
Returning to Mycenae, he united his sister Electra to Pylades, while he himself married Hermione, or according to some, Erigone, and became the father of Tisamenos.
*
He died from a snake-bite at Oresteion in Arcadia.

²⁹
Menelaos, with a total of five ships under his command, put in at Sounion, a headland of Attica; and when he was driven away from there by the winds towards Crete, he was carried a great distance, and wandered along the coasts of Libya, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Egypt collecting a wealth of treasure.
*
³⁰
According to some accounts, he discovered Helen at the court of Proteus, king of Egypt; for until that time, Menelaos had possessed only a phantom
*
of her, fashioned from clouds. After wandering for eight years, he sailed back to Mycenae, where he found Orestes, who was there after avenging his father’s murder. From there, he went to Sparta and recovered his own kingdom; and after he had been made immortal by Hera, he went to the Elysian Fields with Helen.
*

¹
Odysseus, according to some accounts, wandered to Libya,

7

or according to others, to Sicily, or again around the Ocean and the Tyrrhenian Sea.

²
After putting to sea from Ilion, he called in at Ismaros, a city of the Ciconians, and seized it by force of arms and pillaged it, sparing only Maron, who was a priest of Apollo. When the Ciconians who lived on the mainland came to hear of this, they armed themselves and advanced against him. Losing six men from each ship, he put to sea and fled.

³
Landing at the country of the Lotos-Eaters, he sent some of his men to discover who the inhabitants were. But they tasted the lotos and remained where they were; for in that land, there grew a delicious fruit called the lotos, which caused those who tasted it to forget all else. When Odysseus learned of this, he kept the others back, and dragged the men who had tasted the lotos back to the ships by force. And he set sail for the land of the Cyclopes and approached its shore.

⁴
Leaving the rest of his ships at the neighbouring island, he approached the land of the Cyclopes with only a single ship,
and disembarked with twelve companions. Close to the sea there was a cave, which he entered, taking with him the wineskin that Maron had given him. This cave was owned by Polyphemos, who was a son of Poseidon and the nymph Thoosa; he was a man of enormous size, a savage man-eater with a single eye on his forehead.
^s
Lighting a fire, Odysseus and his companions sacrificed some of the kids and began to feast; but the Cyclops arrived, and after he had driven his flocks into the cave and placed a huge stone at its entrance, he caught sight of the men and devoured some of them.
⁶
Odysseus gave him some of Maron’s wine to drink. He drank it down and asked for more, and then, when he had drunk for a second time, he asked Odysseus to tell him his name. Odysseus replied that he was called Nobody, and the Cyclops promised that he would kill Nobody last and the others before him: such was the gift of friendship that he promised him in return for the wine. And overcome by drunkenness he fell asleep.

⁷
Odysseus found a club lying in the cave, and helped by four of his comrades, he sharpened its point, and then, after heating it in the fire, blinded the Cyclops with it. Polyphemos cried out to the neighbouring Cyclopes and they came to help; but when they asked who was hurting him, and he replied, ‘Nobody,’ they went away again, believing him to mean that he was being injured by nobody.
⁸
When the flocks sought to leave for their usual pasture, he opened up the cave, and standing at the entrance, stretched out his hands to feel the sheep [as they passed]. But Odysseus tied three rams together and slipping beneath the largest of them, he hid under its belly and left with the sheep; and then, after releasing his companions from their sheep, he drove the animals to the ships, and as he was sailing away, shouted to the Cyclops that he was Odysseus and had escaped from his hands.
⁹
Now the Cyclops had been warned by a diviner that he would be blinded by Odysseus, and when he heard the name, he tore rocks from the ground and hurled them into the sea; and the ship only just escaped them. It was these events that gave rise to Poseidon’s anger against Odysseus.