The Library of Greek Mythology (Oxford World's Classics) (18 page)

⁸
He had the following sons by the daughters of Thespios.
*
By Procris, he had Antileon and Hippeus (for the eldest daughter gave birth to twins); by Panope, he had Threpsippas; by Lyse, he had Eumedes; by [. . .], he had Creon; by Epilais, he had Astyanax; by Certhe, he had lobes; by Eurybia, he had Polylaos; by Patro, he had Archemachos; by Meline, he had Laomedon; by Clytippe, he had Eurycapys; he had Eurypylos by Eubote; by Aglaia, he had Antiades; by Chryseis, he had Onesippos; by Oreie, he had Laomenes; he had Teles by Lysidice; he had Entelides by Menippis; by Anthippe, he had Hippodromos; he had Teleutagoras by Eury [. . .]; he had Capylos by Hippo; by Euboia, he had Olympos; by Nice, he had Nicodromos; by Argele, he had Cleolaos; by Exole, he had Erythras; by Xanthis, he had Homolippos; by Stratonice, he had Atromos; he had Celeustanor by Iphis; by Laothoe, he had Antiphos; by Antiope, he had Alopios; he had Astybies by Calametis; by Phyleis, he had Tigasis; by Aischreis, he had Leucones; by Antheia, he had [. . .]; by Eurypyle, he had Archedicos; he had Dynastes by Erato; by Asopis, he had Mentor; by Eone, he had Amestrios; by Tiphyse, he had Lyncaios; he had Halocrates by Olympousa; by Heliconis, he had Phalias; by Hesiocheia, he had Oistrables; by Terpsicrate, he had Euryopes; by Elacheia, he had Bouleus; he had
Antimachos by Nicippe; he had Patroclos by Pyrippe; he had Nephos by Praxithea; by Lysippe, he had Erasippos; he had Lycourgos by Toxicrate; he had Boucolos by Marse; he had Leucippos by Eurytele; and by Hippocrate, he had Hippozygos. These were his sons by the daughters of Thespios.

And he had the following sons by other women. By Deianeira, daughter of Oineus, he had Hyllos, Ctesippos, Glenos, and Oneites; by Megara, daughter of Creon, he had Therimachos, Deicoon, and Creontiades; by Omphale, he had Agelaos, from whom the family of Croesus was descended; by Chalciope, daughter of Eurypylos, he had Thettalos; by Epicaste, daughter of Augeias, he had Thestalos; by Parthenope, daughter of Stymphalos, he had Everes; by Auge, daughter of Aleos, he had Telephos; by Astyoche, daughter of Phylas, he had Tlepolemos; by Astydameia, daughter of Amyntor, he had Ctesippos; and by Autonoe, daughter of Peireus, he had Palaimon.

¹
After Heracles had been transported to the gods, his sons

8

fled from Eurystheus and took refuge with Ceux; but when Eurystheus told him to surrender them and threatened war, they grew afraid, and withdrawing from Trachis, took flight through Greece. With Eurystheus in pursuit, they made their way to Athens, where they sat down on the altar of Pity
*
and asked for help. When the Athenians refused to hand them over, they became embroiled in a war with Eurystheus
*
and killed his sons, Alexander, Iphimedon, Eurybios, Mentor, and Perimedes. Eurystheus himself fled in a chariot, but Hyllos, who had set off in pursuit, killed him
*
as he was passing the Scironian Rocks, and cut off his head; and he gave it to Alcmene, who gouged out the eyes with weaving pins.

²
After the death of Eurystheus, the Heraclids attacked the Peloponnese and captured all its cities. But when a year had elapsed since their return,
*
the entire Peloponnese was gripped by a plague, and an oracle revealed that the Heraclids were to blame because they had returned before the proper time. Accordingly, they left the Peloponnese and withdrew to Marathon, where they settled.

Before their departure from the Peloponnese, Tlepolemos had accidentally killed Licymnios
*
(for he had been beating a servant with his stick, and Licymnios had run between them); so he went into exile at Rhodes with a good number of followers, and settled there.

Hyllos married Iole as his father had ordered, and sought to achieve the return of the Heraclids. So he went to Delphi and asked how they could return, and the god declared that they should await the third harvest and then return. Hyllos thought that the third harvest meant three years, and after waiting that length of time, he returned with his army
*
[. . .] of Heracles to attack the Peloponnese when Tisamenos, son of Orestes, was king of the Peloponnesians.
*
There was a further battle, which was won by the Peloponnesians, and Aristomachos was killed. When the sons of [Aristomachos
*
] came of age, they consulted the oracle about their return. The god gave the same response as before, and Temenos admonished him, saying that when they had obeyed this oracle, they had met with misfortune; but the god replied that they were responsible for their own misfortunes because they had failed to understand the oracles, for he meant by the third harvest not a harvest of the earth but of generations of men, and by the narrows, the broad-bellied sea
*
to the right of the Isthmus. On hearing this, Temenos prepared his army and
constructed ships
at the place in Locris which has come to be called
Naupactos
*
for that reason. While the army was there, Aristodemos
*
was struck dead by a thunderbolt, leaving twin sons, Eurysthenes and Procles, by Argeia, daughter of Autesion.

³
And it happened that in Naupactos, a disaster befell the army too. For there appeared amongst them a diviner delivering oracles in a state of inspired abandon, whom they took to be a sorcerer sent by the Peloponnesians to bring ruin to the army. So Hippotes, son of Phylas, son of Antiochos, son of Heracles, hurled a javelin at him, which struck and killed him. As a result, the naval force was destroyed with the loss of all the ships, and the land force was stricken by famine and the army disbanded. When Temenos consulted the oracle about this calamity, the god said that it had all come about because of the diviner,
*
and he ordered him to banish the
murderer for ten years and to take the Three-Eyed One as their guide. Accordingly, they banished Hippotes and searched for the Three-Eyed One; and they came across Oxylos,
*
son of Andraimon, seated on a one-eyed horse (for its other eye had been struck out by an arrow). He had fled into exile at Elis because of a murder, and was making his way back to Aetolia now that a year had passed. So gathering the meaning of the oracle, they made him their guide. And when they engaged the enemy in battle, they gained the upper hand by land and sea, and killed Tisamenos, son of Orestes. On their own side, Pamphylos and Dymas, the sons of Aigimios,
*
were killed in the fighting.

⁴
When they had gained control of the Peloponnese, they erected three altars to Paternal Zeus, offered sacrifices on them, and then drew lots for the cities. The first draw would be for Argos, the second for Lacedaimon, and the third for Messene; and they brought a jug of water and decided that each of them should cast a lot into it. Temenos, and Procles and Eurysthenes, the two sons of Aristodemos, threw pebbles into the jug, but Cresphontes, wanting to be allotted Messene, threw a clod of earth.
*
When this had dissolved in the water, the other two lots would of necessity be the ones that came to light. That of Temenos was drawn first, and that of the sons of Aristodemos second, and Cresphontes acquired Messene.

⁵
They discovered signs lying on the altars where they had made the sacrifices: a toad for those who had won Argos, a snake for those who had won Lacedaimon, and a fox for those who had won Messene. The diviners said of these signs that those who had found the toad would do best to stay in their city (for the creature lacks the strength to travel), whilst those who had found the serpent would be fearsome in attack, and those who had found the fox would be crafty.

Temenos spurned his sons, Agelaos, Eurypylos, and Callias, and relied instead on his daughter Hyrnetho and her husband Deiphontes.
*
As a result, his sons bribed some men from Titana
*
] to murder their father. After the murder had taken place, however, the army decided that the kingdom rightly belonged to Hyrnetho and Deiphontes.

Cresphontes had been ruling in Messene for only a short
time when he was assassinated
*
with two of his sons. Polyphontes, who was one of the Heraclids, succeeded him as king, and forced Merope, the widow of the murdered king, to become his wife. But he too was killed; for Merope had a third son, called Aipytos, whom she had given to her father to bring up. When he reached manhood, he returned in secret and killed Polyphontes, and so recovered his father’s kingdom.

6. Cretan and Theban mythology (the Inachids, Agenorid line)

¹
Having now reached the point in our account of the family

1

of Inachos where we have covered the descendants of Belos as far as the Heraclids, we must proceed next to the line of Agenor. As we have said,
*
Libya had two sons by Poseidon named Belos and Agenor: Belos became king of Egypt and fathered the sons who were mentioned above, but Agenor went away to Phoenicia, where he married Telephassa and had a daughter, Europa, and three sons, Cadmos, Phoenix, and Cilix. (It is said by some,
*
however, that Europa was not Agenor’s daughter, but a daughter of Phoenix.) Zeus fell in love with Europa, and taking the form of a docile bull whose breath smelled of roses,
*
he took her on his back and carried her across the sea to Crete. There he had intercourse with her, and she gave birth to Minos, Sarpedon, and Rhadamanthys (though according to Homer,
*
Sarpedon was a son of Zeus by Laodameia, daughter of Bellerophon).

When Europa disappeared, her father Agenor sent his sons in search of her, telling them not to return until they had found her. Her mother, Telephassa, joined them in the search, as did Thasos, son of Poseidon, or according to Pherecydes, of Cilix. But when they had searched high and low and were still unable to find her, they abandoned any thought of returning home, and each of them settled in a different place. Phoenix settled in Phoenicia, and Cilix in its vicinity, giving the name Cilicia to all the land that lay under his control near the River Pyramos. Cadmos and Telephassa went to live in Thrace, as did Thasos, who founded the city of Thasos in Thrace
*
and settled there.

²
Europa became the wife of Asterios, ruler of the Cretans, who raised her children. When they grew up, they quarreled with one another,
*
for they fell in love with the same boy, who was called Miletos and was a son of Apollo by Areia, daughter of Cleochos. When the boy responded more favourably to Sarpedon, Minos went to war and gained the upper hand. The others fled. Miletos landed in Caria
*
and founded a city there, naming it Miletos after himself; and in return for a share of the territory, Sarpedon became an ally of Cilix, who was at war with the Lycians, and he became king of Lycia. And Zeus granted him the privilege of living for three generations. According to some accounts, however, the brothers fell in love with Atymnios, son of Zeus and Cassiepeia, and it was over him that they quarrelled.

Rhadamanthys laid down laws for the islanders,
*
but later fled to Boeotia and married Alcmene;
*
and following his death, he sits as a judge with Minos in Hades.
*

Minos lived in Crete, where he enacted laws, and married Pasiphae, daughter of the Sun and Perseis (though according to Asclepiades his wife was Crete, daughter of Asterios). His sons were Catreus, Deucalion, Glaucos, and Androgeos, and his daughters Acalle, Xenodice, Ariadne, and Phaedra. By a nymph, Pareia, he had Eurymedon, Nephalion, Chryses, and Philolaos, and by Dexithea, a son, Euxanthios.

³
When Asterios died without offspring, Minos wanted to become king of Crete, but he encountered opposition. So he claimed that the kingdom had been granted to him by the gods, and to make people believe him, he said that whatever he prayed for would come to pass. And during a sacrifice to Poseidon, he prayed that a bull should appear from the deep, promising to sacrifice it when it appeared. When Poseidon responded by sending up a magnificent bull, Minos acquired the kingdom; but he sent the bull away to join his herds and sacrificed another.†
⁴
Poseidon, angry with Minos for having failed
to sacrifice the bull, turned it savage, and caused Pasiphae to conceive a desire for it. Becoming infatuated with the bull, Pasiphae enlisted the help of Daidalos, an architect who had been exiled from Athens for murder.
*
He built a wooden cow, mounted it on wheels, hollowed it out, sewed round it the hide from a cow that he had skinned, and placing it in the meadow where the bull habitually grazed, he made Pasiphae climb inside. The bull came up to it and had intercourse with it as if it were a genuine cow. As a result, she gave birth to Asterios, who was called the Minotaur;
*
he had the face of a bull, but the rest of his body was human. In obedience to some oracles, Minos kept him enclosed in the Labyrinth. This Labyrinth, which Daidalos had constructed, was a building ‘that with a maze of winding ways confused the passage out’.
*
As for the tale of the Minotaur, and Androgeos, and Phaedra, and Ariadne, we will speak of that later
*
in our account of Theseus.

¹
Catreus, son of Minos, had three daughters, Aerope,

2

Clymene, and Apemosyne, and a son, Althaimenes. When he consulted the oracle
*
to discover how his life would come to an end, the god said that he would die at the hand of one of his children. He tried to keep the oracles secret, but Althaimenes came to hear of them, and fearing that he would become his father’s murderer, he sailed away from Crete with his sister Apemosyne; and coming to land at a place in Rhodes, he took possession of it and named it Cretinia. After climbing the mountain known as Atabyrion,
*
he surveyed the surrounding islands; and catching sight of Crete also and remembering the gods of his fathers, he erected an altar to Atabyrian Zeus. Not long afterwards, he became the murderer of his sister. For Hermes had conceived a passion for her, but when she fled from him and he was unable to catch her because she was so much faster on her feet, he spread hides from freshly skinned animals across her path, and she slipped on them as she returned from the spring, and was raped by him; and she informed her brother of what had happened, but he took the god to be merely an excuse, and kicked her, causing her death.