The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (73 page)

h
. Daedalus flew westward until, alighting at Cumae near Naples, he dedicated his wings to Apollo there, and built him a golden-roofed temple. Afterwards, he visited Camicus in Sicily, where he was hospitably received by King Cocalus, and lived among the Sicilians, enjoying great fame and erecting many fine buildings.
⁸

i
. Meanwhile, Minos had raised a considerable fleet, and set out in search of Daedalus. He brought with him a Triton shell, and wherever he went promised to reward anyone who could pass a linen thread through it: a problem which, he knew, Daedalus alone would be able to solve. Arrived at Camicus, he offered the shell to Cocalus, who undertook to have it threaded; and, sure enough, Daedalus found out how to do this. Fastening a gossamer thread to an ant, he bored a hole at the point of the shell and lured the ant up the spirals by smearing
honey on the edges of the hole. Then he tied the linen thread to the other end of the gossamer and drew that through as well. Cocalus returned the threaded shell, claiming the reward, and Minos, assured that he had at last found Daedalus’s hiding-place, demanded his surrender. But Cocalus’s daughters were loth to lose Daedalus, who made them such beautiful toys, and with his help they concocted a plot. Daedalus led a pipe through the roof of the bathroom, down which they poured boiling water or, some say, pitch upon Minos, while he luxuriated in a warm bath. Cocalus, who may well have been implicated in the plot, returned the corpse to the Cretans, saying that Minos had stumbled over a rug and fallen into a cauldron of boiling water.
⁹

j
. Minos’s followers buried him with great pomp, and Zeus made him a judge of the dead in Tartarus, with his brother Rhadamanthys and his enemy Aeacus as colleagues. Since Minos’s tomb occupied the centre of Aphrodite’s temple at Camicus, he was honoured there for many generations by great crowds of Sicilians who came to worship Aphrodite. In the end, his bones were returned to Crete by Theron, the tyrant of Acragas.

k
. After Minos’s death the Cretans fell into complete disorder, because their main fleet was burned by the Sicilians. Of the crews who were forced to remain overseas, some built the city of Minoa, close to the beach where they had landed; others, the city of Hyria in Messapia; still others, marching into the centre of Sicily, fortified a hill which became the city of Enguos, so called from a spring which flows
close by
. There they built a temple of the Mothers, whom they continued to honour greatly, as in their native Crete.
¹⁰

l
. But Daedalus left Sicily to join Iolaus, the nephew and charioteer of Tirynthian Heracles, who led a body of Athenians and Thespians to Sardinia. Many of his works survive to this day in Sardinia; they are called Daedaleia.
¹¹

m
. Now, Talos was also the name of Minos’s bull-headed bronze servant, given him by Zeus to guard Crete. Some say that he was a survivor of the brazen race who sprang from the ash-trees; others, that he was forged by Hephaestus in Sardinia, and that he had a single vein which ran from his neck down to his ankles, where it was stoppered by a bronze pin. It was his task to run thrice daily around the island of Crete and throw rocks at any foreign ship; and also to go thrice yearly, at a more leisurely pace, through the villages of Crete, displaying Minos’s laws inscribed on brazen tablets. When the Sardinians tried to
invade the island, Talos made himself red-hot in a fire and destroyed them all with his burning embrace, grinning fiercely; hence the expression ‘a Sardonic grin’. In the end, Medea killed Talos by pulling out the pin and letting his life-blood escape; though some say that Poeas the Argonaut wounded him in the ankle with a poisoned arrow.
¹²

1
. Apollodorus: iii. 15. 8; Plutarch:
Theseus
19; Pherecydes, quoted by Scholiast on Sophocles’s
Oedipus at Colonus
472; Hyginus:
Fabula
39.

2
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
viii. 236–59; Hyginus:
Fabula
274; Pliny:
Natural History
vii. 57.

3
. Fulgentius:
Myths
iii. 2; First Vatican Mythographer : 232; Second Vatican Mythographer: 130; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 76. 6; Hyginus:
Fabula
39; Pausanias: vii. 4. 5.

4
. Pausanias: i. 21. 6; Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
vi. 14; Hellanicus, quoted by Scholiast on Euripides’s
Orestes
1650; Ovid:
loc. cit
.; Suidas and Photius
sub
Sanctuary of Perdix.

5
. Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit
.; Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 12.

6
. Isidore of Seville:
Origins
xiv. 6; Hyginus:
Fabula
40; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
viii. 182–235.

7
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 77; Apollodorus: ii. 6. 3; Pausanias: ix. 11. 2–3.

8
. Virgil:
Aeneid
vi. 14 ff.; Pausanias: vii. 4. 5; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 78.

9
. Pausanias:
loc. cit
.; Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 14–15; Zenobius:
Proverbs
iv. 92; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 79.

10
. Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit
.; Herodotus: vii. 170.

11
. Pausanias: vii. 2. 2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 30.

12
. Suidas
sub
Risus Sardonicus; Apollonius Rhodius:
Argonautica
1639 ff.; Apollodorus: i. 9. 26; Plato:
Minos
320c.

1
. Hephaestus is sometimes described as Hera’s son by Talos (see
12.
c
), and Talos as Daedalus’s young nephew; but Daedalus was a junior member of the House of Erechtheus, which was founded long after the birth of Hephaestus. Such chronological discrepancies are the rule in mythology. Daedalus (‘bright’ or ‘cunningly wrought’), Talos (‘sufferer’), and Hephaestus (‘he who shines by day’), are shown by the similarity of their attributes to be merely different titles of the same mythical character; Icarus (from
io-carios
, ‘dedicated to the Moon-goddess Car’) may be yet another of his titles. For Hephaestus the smith-god married Aphrodite, to whom the partridge was sacred; the sister of Daedalus the smith was called Perdix (‘partridge’); the soul of Talos the smith flew off as a partridge; a partridge appeared at the burial of Daedalus’s son Icarus. Besides, Hephaestus was flung from Olympus; Talos was flung
from the Acropolis. Hephaestus hobbled when he walked; one of Talos’s names was Tantalus (‘hobbling, or lurching’); a cock-partridge hobbles in his love-dance, holding one heel ready to strike at rivals. Moreover, the Latin god Vulcan hobbled. His cult had been introduced from Crete, where he was called Velchanus and had a cock for his emblem, because the cock crows at dawn and was therefore appropriate to a Sun-hero. But the cock did not reach Crete until the sixth century
B
.
C
., and is likely to have displaced the partridge as Velchanus’s bird.

2
. It seems that in the spring an erotic partridge dance was performed in honour of the Moon-goddess, and that the male dancers hobbled and wore wings. In Palestine this ceremony, called the
Pesach
(‘the hobbling’) was, according to Jerome, still performed at Beth-Hoglah (‘the Shrine of the Hobbler’), where the devotees danced in a spiral. Beth-Hoglah is identified with ‘the threshing-floor of Atad’, on which mourning was made for the lame King Jacob, whose name may mean
Jah Aceb
(‘the heel-god’). Jeremiah warns the Jews not to take part in these orgiastic Canaanite rites, quoting: ‘The partridge gathereth young that she hath not brought forth.’ Anaphe, an island to the north of Crete, with which Minos made a treaty (see
91.
a
), was famous in antiquity as a resting-place for migrant partridges.

3
. The myth of Daedalus and Talos, like its variant, the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, seems to combine the ritual of burning the solar king’s surrogate, who had put on eagle’s wings (see
29.
1
), in the spring bonfire – when the Palestinian New Year began – with the rituals of flinging the partridge-winged
pharmacos
, a similar surrogate, over a cliff into the sea (see
96.
3
), and of pricking the king in the heel with a poisoned arrow (see
10 below
). But the fisherman’s and peasant’s admiration of the flying Daedalus is probably borrowed from an icon of the winged Perseus or Marduk (see
73.
7
).

4
. In one sense the labyrinth from which Daedalus and Icarus escaped was the mosaic floor with the maze pattern, which they had to follow in the ritual partridge dance (see
98.
2
); but Daedalus’s escape to Sicily, Cumae, and Sardinia refers perhaps to the flight of the native bronze-workers from Crete as the result of successive Hellenic invasions. The ruse of the Triton shell, and Minos’s burial in a shrine of Aphrodite to whom this shell was sacred (see
11.
3
), suggest that Minos was also, in this context, regarded as Hephaestus, the Sea-goddess’s lover. His death in a bath is an incident that has apparently become detached from the myth of Nisus and Scylla (see
91.
b–d
); Nisus’s Celtic counterpart, Llew Llaw, was killed in a bath by a trick; and so was another sacred King, Agamemnon of Mycenae (see 112.
1
).

5
. The name Naucrate (‘sea-power’) records the historical consequences of Minos’s defeat in Sicily – the passing of sea-power from
Cretan into Greek hands. That she was one of Minos’s slaves suggests a palace revolution of Hellenic mercenaries at Cnossus.

6
. If Polycaste, the other name of Talos’s mother Perdix, means
poly-cassitere
, ‘much tin’, it belongs to the myth of the bronze man, Talos’s namesake. Cretan supremacy depended largely on plentiful supplies of tin, to mix with Cyprian copper; according to Professor Christopher Hawkes, the nearest source was the island of Majorca.

7
. Talos is said by Hesychius to be a name for the Sun; originally, therefore, Talos will have coursed only once a day around Crete. Perhaps, however, the harbours of Crete were guarded against pirates by three watches which sent out patrols. And since Talos the Sun was also called Taurus (‘the bull’ – Bekker:
Anecdotae
i. 344. 10 ff.; Apollodorus: i. 9. 26), his thrice-yearly visit to the villages was probably a royal progress of the Sun-king, wearing his ritual bull-mask – the Cretan year being divided into three seasons (see
75.
2
). Talos’s red-hot embrace may record the human burnt sacrifices offered to Moloch,
alias
Melkarth, who was worshipped at Corinth as Melicertes (see
70.
5
), and probably also known in Crete. Since this Talos came from Sardinia, where Daedalus was said to have fled when pursued by Minos, and was at the same time Zeus’s present to Minos, the mythographers have simplified the story by giving Hephaestus, rather than Daedalus, credit for its construction; Hephaestus and Daedalus being the same character. The
sardonicus risus
, or
rictus
, a twisting of the facial muscles, symptomatic of lock-jaw, was perhaps so called because the stag-man of early Sardinian bronzes wears the same mirthless, gaping grin.