Asklepiades of Tragilos (12), Brill's New Jacoby [23,985 words]

Asklepiades of Tragilos (12) (22,543 words) Article Table Of Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. T 1 : Stephanos of Byzantion, Ethnika s.v. Τράγιλος T 2 : Pseudo-Plutarch, Vitae Decem Oratorum 837C T 3 : Scholia ad Euripidis Hecubam 1 T 4 : Pliny, Natural History 1.7 F 1 : Pseudo-Probus, Ad Vergili Georgicas 3.267 F 2 a: Scholia ad Apolloni Rhodii Argonautica 2.562 F 2 b: Scholia ad Apolloni Rhodii Argonautica 2.328 F 3 : Scholia ad Pindari Pythia 2.40b F 4 : Harpokration s.v. Δυσαύλης F 5 : Photios s.v. ῾Ρησός (= Suda and Hesychios s.v. ῾Ρησός) F 6 a: Scholia ad Pindari Pythia 4.313a F 6 b: Scholia ad Euripidis Rhesum 895 F 6 c: Scholia ad Apolloni Rhodii Argonautica 1.23 F 7 a: Athenaios, Deipnosophists 10.456b F 7 b: Scholia ad Euripidis Phoinissas 45 F 8 : Harpokration s.v. Μελανίππειον F 9 : Scholia ad Euripidis Alcestim 1 F 10 : Scholia ad Euripidis Rhesum 916 (G. Merro, ‘Apollodoro, Asclepiade di Tragilo ed Eschilo in scholl. Eur. Rh. 916 e 922’, in RFIC 134 (2006), 50) F 11 : Scholia ad Hesiodi Theogoniam 223 F 12 : Scholia ad Homeri Iliadem 3.325 F 13 : Scholia AB ad Homeri Iliadem 6.155 F 14 : Scholia AD Gen. II ad Homeri Iliadem 7.468 F 15 : Scholia ad Pindari Nemea 7.62 F 16 : Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 2.6 F 17 : Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 3.7 F 18 : Hyginus, Poeticon Astronomicon 2.21 F 19 : Pseudo-Probus, Ad Vergilii Georgica 2.84 F 20 : Bodleian Proverbs 374 (Leutsch, Paroemiographus (Zenobius) 1, 83) F 21 : Scholia ad Apollonii Rhodii Argonautica 1.152 F 22 : Scholia ad Apollonii Rhodii Argonautica 2.178 F 23 : Scholia ad Euripidis Andromacham 32 F 24 : Scholia ad Euripidis Hecubam 1273 (Tzetzes, Lycophron 315 ) F 25 : Scholia ad Euripidis Orestem 1645 F 26 : Scholia Q ad Homeri Odysseam 10.2 F 27 : Scholia TV ad Homeri Odysseam 11.269 F 28 : Scholia V ad Homeri Odysseam 11.321 F 29 : Scholia V ad Homeri Odysseam 11.326 F 30 : Scholia V ad Homeri Odyssey 11.582 F 31 : Scholia V ad Homeri Odysseam 12.69 F 32 : Scholia ad Pindari Pythia 3.14 Biographical Essay Bibliography BNJ 12 T 1 FGrH Stephanos of Byzantion, Ethnika s.v. Τράγιλος Subject: genre: geography; genre: Translation mythology;genre: literary criticism Source Date: 6th century AD Historian's Date: 4th century BC Τράγιλος· πόλις µία τῶν ἐπὶ Θράικης πρὸς τῆι χερρονήσωι καὶ Μακεδονίαι. ἐκ ταύτης ἦν ᾽Ασκληπιάδης ὁ τὰ Τραγωιδούµενα γράψας ἐν ἓξ βιβλίοις. Tragilos: one of the cities in Thrace near theChersonesos and Macedonia. Asklepiades, who wrote the Tragoidoumena in six books, was from there. Commentary Stephanos of Byzantion’s reference to Tragilos, which he locates in Thrace, is its sole mention in literature. Benjamin Isaac points out that Stephanos meant to write Chalchidike instead of Chersonesos (The Greek Settlements in Thrace until the Macedonian Conquest (Leiden 1986), 54 n. 279), which itself was a colony of Thrace. Isaac sees in the reference to Asklepiades an indication that Tragilos must have been a place of some culture, although he notes that the excavator C. Koukouli-Chrysanthaki’s identification in the 1970’s of ancient Tragilos with Aidonochori, a town with significant archaic and classical Greek settlement in the form of sanctuaries, for example, is nevertheless speculative (Isaac, Greek Settlements in Thrace, 5-6). Z. Archibald still accepts this as a possibility in her monograph on Thrace, The Odrysian Kingdom of Thrace (Oxford 1998)), e.g., 166). Elsewhere, Tragilos appears twice in the Athenian tribute lists (in tablet A9 and, by apotaxis from Argilos, A10 (see B. Meritt, H. Wade-Gery and M. McGregor, The Athenian Tribute Lists III (Athens 1950), 324 n. 202 for the justification of restoring A9 from A10); the polis entered the lists in 421/420 at the rate of one talent. It also appears twice in inscriptions (FD 3.5 no. 3, col. I 35 (Sylloge3 239 B) and IG 4.12, 94, 20) and in a series of coins issued between 450 and 400 BC (see R. Poole, Catalogue of Greek Coins: Macedonia, etc. (London 1879), 130-2). Note that Meritt, Wade-Gery and McGregor, and Poole, both classify Tragilos as part of Macedonia, but Isaac comments of his own work on Thrace, which included Tragilos, that the ‘region to be covered must be determined in accordance with the ancient, 5th century, conception of Thrace’ and that the ‘south-western boundary [of Thrace] is the Strymon according to all our sources’ (Greek Settlements in Thrace, xiii; n. 5 lists Thucydides 2.97.1-2; Pseudo-Skylax, Periplous 67 and Strabo7.7.4). Archibald comments that ‘‘Thrace’ is a geographical expression the meaning of which depends on the speaker’s perspective’ (Odrysian Kingdom, 6). Thus, there is no need to question Stephanos’s identification of Tragilos as Thracian, nor is the designation of Tragilos as a ‘polis’ unusual, since Greeks flexibly used this for non-Greek as well as Greek settlements (see D. Whitehead, ‘Site-Classification and Reliability in Stephanus of Byzantium’, in D. Whitehead From Political Architecture to Stephanus Byzantius: Sources for the Ancient Greek Polis (Stuttgart 1994), 102). As for Asklepiades himself: there is no independent evidence for his connection to Tragilos; on intimations of Asklepiades’s interest in Thracian themes, however, see Biographical Essay and commentaries on F 1, F 5, F 6a-c, F 10, F 14, F 18, F 22 and F 31. On the title, number of books and their contents see Biographical Essay. BNJ 12 T 2 FGrH Pseudo-Plutarch, Vitae Decem Oratorum 837C Subject: philosophy Source Date: 9th century AD Historian's Date: 4th century BC ἐµαθήτευσε δ᾽ αὐτῶι (sc. ᾽Ισοκράτει) καὶ Θεόποµπος ὁ Χῖος καὶ ῎Εφορος ὁ Κυµαῖος καὶ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης ὁ τὰ Translation (= Photios, Bibliotheca 260.486b.36)Theopompos of Chios and Ephoros the Kymaian and Asklepiades, who wrote theTragoidoumena, were pupils of Isokrates… Τραγωιδούµενα συγγράψας … Commentary This passage from Pseudo-Plutarch lists Asklepiades alongside Theopompos and Ephoros as pupils of Isokrates; it is identical to a passage in Photios in his Bibliotheca 260 (for similarities and differences between Pseudo-Plutarch’s and Photios’s accounts of the lives of the ten orators (Bibliotheca 259-68), see Rebekah M. Smith, ‘Photius on the ten orators’, GRBS 33 (1992), 15989). No date earlier than the 9th century date of Photios can be ascertained for Pseudo-Plutarch. For the plausibility of a ‘student-teacher’ relationship between Asklepiades and Isokrates, seeBiographical Essay. BNJ 12 T 3 FGrH Scholia ad Euripidis Hecubam 1 Subject: genre: national history; genre: antiquities Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC Φιλόχορος ἐν τῆι πρὸς ᾽Ασκληπιάδην ἐπιστολῆι … Translation Philochoros in the letter against Asklepiades … Commentary This scholion to Euripides’s Hecuba (whose larger context seems to be a debate over whoHekabe’s parents were) mentions a letter written against Asklepiades by Philochoros, who is easily identified with the 4th- to 3rd-century Atthidographer Philochoros, from whose Atthis we possess a very large number of fragments (BNJ 328), and to whom the the Suda (s.v. Φιλόχορος:BNJ 328 T 1) also attributes to writings on tragedians, including a fivebook work on Sophoclean myth. Although we have no evidence for the exact content of or reason for the letter, as Jacoby notes in his commentary on this testimonium (T 3) the polemic against Asklepiades fits well within the context of Philochoros’s work on the tragedians. BNJ 12 T 4 FGrH Pliny, Natural History 1.7 Subject: natural sciences; genre: mythology Source Date: 1st century AD Historian's Date: 4th century BC ex auctoribus … externis … Heraclide Pontico, Asclepiade qui Τραγωιδούµενα, Philostephano. Translation From the foreign…authors…Herakleides of Pontos (7.175), Asklepiades who theTragoidoumena, Philostephanos (7.207). Commentary This testimonium is from the table of contents of Pliny’s Natural History, Book 1. The two ‘foreign’ – i.e. non-Latin – authors, auctores externi, that precede and follow Asklepiades’s name, Herakleides of Pontos and Philostephanos, occupy sections 53 (qui elati revixerint) and 57 (quae quis in vita invenerit) of Book 7 of Pliny’s work; this led Jacoby to note the names of the chapters that intervened (54: subitae mortis exempla; 55: de sepultura; and 56: de manibus, de anima), suggesting that, if Pliny indeed ordered his references by topic in the Table of Contents, that Asklepiades is one of the sources on the topics of Sudden Death, Burial and The Manes, or Departed Souls. If this is true, here we would see the closest to a ‘present-day’ reference in Asklepiades, in the story of Sophokles’s sudden death from happiness for winning a prize for tragedy. On Asklepiades as an ‘academic’ compiler of myths, see R. Fowler, Early Greek Mythography (Oxford 2000), xxxiii and the Biographical Essay below. BNJ 12 F 1 FGrH Pseudo-Probus, Ad Vergili Georgicas 3.267 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: unknown Historian's Date: 4th century BC Potnia urbs est Boeotiae, ubi Glaucus, Sisyphi filius et Meropes, ut Asklepiades in Τραγωιδουµένων libro primo ait, habuit equas quas adsueverat humana carne alere, quo cupidius in hostem irruerent et perniciosius. ipsum autem, cum alimenta defecissent, devoraverunt in ludis funebribus Peliae. quidam autem has equas Diomedis fuisse, quas Hercules ad Eurysthea perduxerit, et ab Eurystheo a Sisypho distractas, eumque filio suo dedisse. Translation Potnia is a city in Boiotia, where Glaukos, the son of Sisyphos and Merope, as Asklepiades says in the first book of the Tragoidoumena, had female horses whom he had been accustomed to feed with human flesh, which would cause them to rush more eagerly and menacingly upon the enemy. But when they had run out of food, they devoured Glaukos himself during the funeral games of Pelias. But some say that these were the horses of Diomedes which Herakleshad led to Eurystheos, and that Sisyphos, having stolen the horses from Eurystheos, gave them to his own son (Glaukos). Commentary Probus was a 2nd century AD Latin philologist and literary critic from Beirut (ancient Berytus) who was famous in his day and beyond; his lasting reputation in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages caused a number of new attributions including this commentary P. Schmidt, Probus [4] , BNP 11 (Leiden 2007) , 896-7). on Vergil’s Georgics (see On the historical polis Potniai in Boiotia, see M.H. Hansen & T.H. Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (Oxford 2005), 451 (n. 217). It is attested in Xenophon, Hellenica 5.4.51 (described as near Thebes) and in Pausanias 9.8 (in his chapter on Boiotia), and evidence from the protogeometric and Mykenaian periods suggest the site’s antiquity. Aspects of Probus’s story about Glaukos, king of Corinth, and his man-eating horses appear elsewhere with variations. Glaukos appears in a genealogy in Hellanikos (BNJ 4 F 19a) as the son of Merope and Sisyphos, as he does here; in Iliad 6.154, he is the son of Sisyphos and progenitor of Bellerophon. The scholion at Euripides’s Phoenissae 1124 explains that it was the horses (not Glaukos himself) who were ‘Potnian’, which does not contradict Probus’s claim that Glaukos habuit equos there. Sisyphos and Glaukos’s city is called Ephyre in the Iliad 6.152-153, which G.S. Kirk notes ‘must be an old name for Korinthos … for that is where Sisuphos is located in the mythological tradition, and where Bellerophon tamed the horse Pegasos who became the symbol of Corinth on her coins’ (The Iliad: A Commentary, Books 5-8 (Cambridge 1990) 177). The reasons given in the sources for the horses turning on their master are varied: Asklepiades alone attributes it to their hunger, and by implication to their taste for humana caro; others say that the horses drank from a sacred spring by mistake (Servius Danielis on Vergil, Georgics 3.268); ate a miracle plant (Scholia on Euripides, Orestes 31); or that Aphrodite was punishing Glaukos for depriving them of coitus in order to make them go faster (Servius on Vergil, Georgics 3.268). As Jacoby notes, the assimilation of these horses with the man-eating mares of Diomedes (the king of Thrace, not to be confused with the Diomedes of Iliad 6, son of Tydeus and grandson of Adrastos), to whom Pindar tells us Herakles fed a stable-boy (Pindar fr. 169a Snell-Maehler), is unique here; since Asklepiades has a habit of using general expressions such as φασίν and ἔνιοι / ἅπαντες οἱ ποιηταί (say) (as noted by C. Wendel, ‘Mythographie’, RE 162 (Stuttgart 1935), cols. 1353-4; see Biographical Essay below), the reference to Diomedes may have come from Asklepiades himself. If that is the case, the connection of Glaukos to Diomedes may serve as a small piece of evidence that Asklepiades had a special interest in Thracian myth (for full discussion seeBiographical Essay). The setting of Glaukos’s death at Pelias’s funeral games also appears, e.g., in Pausanias 6.20.19 and Hyginus, Fabulae 250. Jacoby reasonably wonders if Asklepiades is making a reference here to Aischylos’s play Γλαῦκος Ποτνιεὺς, of which we possess a few very short fragments, and which (as the Argument for thePersians suggests) Alexandrian scholars believed was the third play in Aischylos’s winning tetralogy on 472 BC that included the lost Phineus, Persians, and Prometheus. The last was presumably a satyr-play that can be identified as Prometheus Pyrkaeus (A. Sommerstein (ed.)Aeschylus 3, Fragments (Cambridge, MA 2008), 210). On Γλαῦκος Ποτνιεὺς see Sommerstein,Aeschylus 3, 22-5, and P. Burian & A. Shapiro (eds.), The Complete Aeschylus 2, Persians and Other Plays (Oxford 2009), 13 and n. 20. BNJ 12 F 2a FGrH Scholia ad Apolloni Rhodii Translation Argonautica 2.562 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC ὁ δ᾽ ἀίξαι πτερύγεσσιν Εὐφηµος προέηκε πελειάδα] ‘and Euphemos put forth a pigeon to fly on wings’ (lines 2.561-2)] because the Argonautstested the Symplegades by ὅτι διὰ πελειάδος ἐπείρασαν οἱ ᾽Αργοναῦται τὰς using a pigeon.Asklepiades relays this in the second book Συµπληγάδας, καὶ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης ἱστορεῖ ἐν of the Tragoidoumena. δευτέρωι Τραγωιδουµένων. Commentary See Commentary on F 2b. BNJ 12 F 2b FGrH Scholia ad Apolloni Rhodii Argonautica 2.328 Subject: natural sciences: animals Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC πελειὰς δὲ εἶδος περιστερᾶς, ὡς καὶ ᾽Αριστοτέλης φησίν. ὅτι δὲ ἐχρήσαντο περιστερᾶι πλεῖν µέλλοντες, καὶ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης ἐν Τραγωιδουµένοις φησίν. Translation The peleias is a type of common pigeon, asAristotle also says. Asklepiades adds in hisTragoidoumena (H A V 13 p. 544 b 1) that those about to sail had recourse to a pigeon. (Cross referenced with F 22 and F 31) Commentary These two scholia to the Argonautika cite Asklepiades, specifically Book 2 of his Tragoidoumena, for the story that the Argonauts used a bird to conquer the Symplegades; the Homeric scholiast atOd. 12.69 (F 31, see below) similarly assigns (at least) this part of the Jason story to Asklepiades. Both F 2b and F 31 call the bird a peleias, which may be Asklepiades’s own terminology but is also the term used by Homer and Apollonios, neither of whom uses the generic peristera of Apollonios’s scholiast Geoffrey Arnott notes that the peleias was believed by writers from Homer onwards to be a type of pigeon but that in the story of the Argonauts it refers in fact to the Rock Dove, which ‘remains a fairy common resident of the Greek cliffs and inland rocks’; Aristotle, however, used the word of other types of doves and pigeons, and at HA 597b3-5 distinguishes between the peleias and the peristera (W.G. Arnott, Birds in the Ancient World From A-Z(Routledge 2007), 170. Apparently the scholiast misreads Aristotle here, but in any case the fact that he saw fit to invoke him in defining the peleias for his audience suggests that this word may have gone out of use by Byzantine times. Jacoby points out that Asklepiades is our earliest witness for the full story of the Argonauts at treacherous rocks, which he identifies as the Symplegades (although F 32 may indicate that he called these same rocks both Planktai and the Symplegades). In connecting the name Symplegades to the Argonauts, he is presumably taking his cue from the Medea, which is the earliest source to make this connection. (In Homer Odyssey 12.69-72, Kirke notes that the Argonauts are the only men to have gotten through the rocks she refers to as the Planktai, thus encouraging Odysseus to take the alternate route through Skylla and Charybdis.) Apollonios presents us with two sets of clashing rocks: the Plegades (the semantic equivalent of Symplegades) in Book 2, then a separate set of rocks he calls the Planktai in Book 4.860, which Jason passes through – just as we learned Odysseus had in Homer. For futher discussion on the naming of these rocks, see J. Nishimura-Jensen, ‘Unstable Geographies: The Moving Landscape in Apollonius’ Argonautica and Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos’, TAPA 130 (2000), 287-317. ForPhineus, who figures in the Apollonian story of the Argonauts, see F 22 and F 31. BNJ 12 F 3 FGrH Scholia ad Pindari Pythia 2.40b Translation Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC τὸν δὲ ᾽Ιξίονα οἱ µὲν ᾽Αντίονος γενεαλογοῦσιν, Some say that Ixion is a descendant of Antion, like Aischylos (F ὡς Αἰσχύλος· Φερεκύδης δὲ Πεισίωνος· ἔνιοι δὲ 89); Pherekydes (BNJ 3 F 51) says he is the son of Peison; but others say he is the son of Ares, and others, Phlegyas. In the ῎Αρεος· οἱ δὲ Φλεγύα. ᾽Ασκληπιάδης δὲ ἐν third book of the Tragoidoumena Asklepiadeswrites thus: τρίτωι Τραγωιδουµένων οὕτω γράφει· ‘Some, like Pherekydes, say in addition that Ixion also went «προσιστοροῦσι δὲ ἔνιοι, ὅτι καὶ µανείη ὁ ᾽Ιξίων, ὡς Φερεκύδης. καὶ τὴν ἐπὶ τοῦ τροχοῦ mad. And they have treated the story of his punishment on the δὲ κόλασιν αὐτῶι παρεγκεχειρήκασιν· ὑπὸ γὰρ wheel allegorically; for they say that he was destroyed by having been snatched away by a whirlwind and storms.’ Ixion δίνης καὶ θυελλῶν αὐτὸν ἐξαρπασθέντα married Dia, the daughter of Deioneus. It was custom in the old φθαρῆναί φασιν». οὗτος ἔγηµε Δίαν τὴν Δηιονέως θυγατέρα. ἔθος δὲ ἐπὶ τοῖς παλαιοῖς days to bring some gift to the fathers of brides, as even Homer remarks (Iliad 11.244). ‘First he gave 100 bulls, τοῖς τῶν νυµφῶν πατράσι δῶρά τινα then he gave a 1000 goats and an equal number of sheep.” προσάγειν, ὡς καὶ ῞Οµηρος· «πρῶτ᾽ ἑκατὸν βοῦς δῶκεν, ἔπειτα δὲ χίλι᾽ ὑπέστη αἶγας ὁµοῦ According to custom, Deioneus was coming to claim the offering of gifts from the groom Ixion, so Ixion, digging a ditch καὶ ὄις». ὁ δὲ Δηιονεὺς κατὰ τὸ σύνηθες and filling it with fire called his father-in-law as if to a feast; γήµαντα τὸν ᾽Ιξίονα τὴν τῶν δώρων Deioneus, being unwary of Ixion’s plot, coming forward trod εἰσεπράττετο δόσιν, καὶ οὕτως ὁ ᾽Ιξίων διορύξας βόθρον καὶ πληρώσας πυρὸς ἐκάλεσε upon the fire and was burned to death. Since no one would τὸν πενθερὸν ὡς ἐπὶ εὐωχίαν. ὁ δὲ ἀπρονόητος purify Ixion of his defilements, and all the gods also turned away from him, Zeus took pity on him and purified him of the ὢν τοῦ µηχανήµατος εἰσελθὼν ἐπέστη τῆι πυρᾶι καὶ κατεκαύθη· τοῦ δὲ µύσους µηδενὸς murder, and led him up into heaven and kept him there as a καθαρίζοντος τὸν ᾽Ιξίονα, ἀποστραφέντων δὲ guest. They say that Ixion, committing a second offense, was moved with lust for Hera, and that when Zeus learned of this he αὐτὸν καὶ τῶν ἄλλων θεῶν, οἰκτείρας ὁ Ζεὺς ἐκάθηρε µὲν αὐτὸν τσῦ φόνου, ἀνήγαγε δὲ καὶ formed and modeled a cloud in the likeness of Hera, and Ixion εἰς οὐρανὸν καὶ συνέστιον εἷχεν αὐτόν. τὸν δὲ seeing it rushed upon it and had intercourse with it. And from these two was born a beastly and frightful sort of man, whom δευτέρωι ἁµαρτήµατι ἐπιχειροῦντα εἰς ἔρωτα τῆς ῞Ηρας κινηθῆναί φασι· µαθόντα δὲ τὸν Δία νεφέλην τῆι ῞Ηραι ἀναπλάσαι καὶ ἐκτυπῶσαι ὁµοίαν, τὸν δὲ ᾽Ιξίονα θεασάµενον ἐφορµῆσαι καὶ παρακλιθῆναι. γενέσθαι δὲ ἐξ αὐτῶν ἄγριόν τινα καὶ τερατώδη ἄνδρα, ὃν Κένταυρον ὠνόµασαν. ὕστερον δὲ τροχῶι τοὺς πόδας καὶ τὰς χεῖρας τοῦ ᾽Ιξίονος προσδεσµευθῆναι, καὶ κελεῦσαι τὸν Δία πρὸς τὴν δίνησιν τοῦ τροχοῦ τὸ τοιοῦτον **, ὡς προσήκει τοὺς εὐεργετήσαντας βελτίοσιν ἀµείβεσθαι καὶ µὴ τοῖς ἐναντίοις καταβλάπτειν. they called Kentauros. Later the feet and hands of Ixion were bound on the wheel, and Zeus commanded that <Ixion should utter a saying> like this to the rotation of the wheel, that it befits those who have done good deeds to be repaid with better circumstances, and not to harm them with the opposite. Commentary Asklepiades is quoted in this scholion to Pindar, Pythian 2, where the poet offers Ixion as a cautionary example to his dedicatee Hieron of Syracuse. Jacoby’s numeration (Pythian 2.40) belongs to Aristophanes of Byzantion and is used by A. Drachmann in his Scholia Vetera in Pindari Carmina (Leipzig 1910; reprinted Stuttgart 1997). In the 19th century Boeckh edition, however, which is used by most modern scholarship, this appears as line 21 (see E. Dickey,Ancient Greek Scholarship (Oxford 2007), 39 n. 23). The Pindar passage is the earliest appearance of the Ixion story. The poet presents it as cautionary tale for Hieron’s benefit: the king should learn to repay his benefactor often with sweet favors, as Ixion himself says (τὸν εὐεργέταν ἀγαναῖς ἀµοιβαῖς ἐποιχοµένους τίνεσθαι: Pythian2.24). Pindar also tells us that Ixion learned his lesson for two wrongs, the slaying of kin and the attempt to rape Hera. The punishment of the wheel and the story of Hera’s substitution with a cloud, from which union came Kentauros (progenitor of the Kentauroi), also appear in Pindar, but the details of the kin-murder, the shunning of Ixion, and Zeus’s pity for him are left for the scholiast to fill in. Jacoby’s fragment begins with an account of the different fathers assigned to Ixion by Aischylos and Pherekydes as well as some unnamed sources: these fathers include Antion (Aischylos F 89 as cited by Jacoby; see also Diod. 4.69), Peison (Pherekydes (BNJ 3 F 51), as cited by Jacoby), Ares, and Phlegyas (see Vergil, Aen. 6.618; Strabo 9.5.21). The quoted portion from Asklepiades’s third book of the Tragoidoumena in Jacoby’s edition begins with the comment that some writers like Pherekydes replaced the story of Ixion’s punishment on the wheel in Hades (for Pindar it is ‘feathered’: Pythian 2.21; for others it is fiery: see the scholiast on Eur. Ph. 1185) with one that claims he was destroyed by a whirlwind (a story found in Pseudo-Apollodoros, Epitome E 1). Given that what comes next in the scholion is the entire backstory for Ixion’s punishment (including his betrothal of Dia, daughter of Deioneus; his murder of Deioneus in order to avoid the bride price, which was also the first kin-slaying in Greek lore; the refusal of anyone to purify him of his crime; Zeus’s pity on him and Ixion’s clearly ungrateful attempt to rape Hera) it is perhaps not surprising that Jacoby limited Asklepiades’s contribution as debate over Ixion’s punishment; however, the quotation itself – the extent to which it is verbatim, its delimiation, and its position – is highly problematic. As for the first, N. Villagra has shown that some of the vocabulary in the direct quote (προσιστορέω, παρεγχειρέω, and κόλασις) is in too late Greek to belong to the 4th-century Asklepiades, and thus is at best only a paraphrase of him; Villagra also discusses the important issues of the position and delimitation of the quotation, which has consequences for how we interpret Asklepiades’s concerns: if we take the οὕτω in the line Ασκληπιάδης δὲ ἐν τρίτωι Τραγωιδουµένων οὕτω γράφει as analeptic, for example, we see Asklepiades concerning himself with genealogy (i.e. calling Ixion son of Phlegyas) as he often does; if we instead postpone the reference to Asklepiades until after the line ὑπὸ γὰρ δίνης καὶ θυελλῶν αὐτὸν ἐξαρπασθέντα φθαρῆναί φασιν and place the quotation marks around the sentence οὗτος ἔγηµε Δίαν τὴν Δηιονέως θυγατέρα, as R. Fowler does, Asklepiades’s concern, again plausible, is with Dia’s marriage. The fact that Euripides and Aischylos both deal with Ixion does not help to decide between these and other emendations. For discussion see N. Villagra, ‘Commenting on Asclepiades Of Tragilos: Methodological Considerations on A Fragmentary Mythographer’ (in press in BAR, 290-7). BNJ 12 F 4 FGrH Harpokration s.v. Δυσαύλης Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: 2nd century AD Historian's Date: 4th century BC Δυσαύλης· … ᾽Ασκληπιάδης δ᾽ ἐν δ̄ Τραγωιδουµένων τὸν Δυσαύλην αὐτόχθονα εἶναί φησι, συνοικήσαντα δὲ Βαυβοῖ σχεῖν παῖδας Πρωτονόην καὶ Μίσαν. Παλαίφατος δ᾽ ἐν πρώτηι Τρωικῶν σὺν τῆι γυναικί φησιν αὐτὸν ὑποδέξασθαι τὴν Δήµητρα. Translation Dysaules: ... Asklepiades in the Tragoidoumenasays that Dysaules was indigenous and that having married Baubo he had two children,Protonoē and Misa. Palaiphatos in the first book of his Troika (BNJ 44 F 1) says that along with his wife he was host to Demeter. Commentary In his Lexicon of the Ten Orators, the 2nd-century AD Alexandrian grammarian Harpokrationcites Asklepiades as the source for Dysaules’s origin (‘indigenous’, presumably to Eleusis) as well as for his marriage to Baubo and the names of two daughters, Protonoē and Misa. He names another 4th-century mythographer, Palaiphatos (BNJ 44 F 1, identical to this passage), as the source for the story that Dysaules along with his wife were hosts of Demeter (compare Homeric Hymn to Demeter, where Keleos and Metenaira of Eleusis are her hosts), although Palaiphatos does not specifically name Baubo. The reference to Dysaules points to what we call the ‘Orphic’ version of the myth, that is, the versions of the story of the rape of Persephone, Demeter’s search, her discovery of corn, and its dissemination, that were attributed in antiquity to Orpheus, Mysaios and Eumolpos (see H. Richardson, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Oxford 1974) 77-86). Pausanias says that according to fragments of so-called Orpheus (whose authorship he rejects), Dysaules was the father of Eubuleus and Triptolemos, who gave Demeter information about her daughter Persephone/Kore, who had been stolen by Hades (Description of Greece 1.14.3). Dysaules also appears in Clement of Alexandria (Exhortation to the Heathen 2) as part of a group of characters including Baubo, Eubouleus, Triptolemos (not here Dysaules’s son), and Eumolpos. Triptolemos and Eumolpos are mentioned by Keleos’s daughters in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter hymn, among those whose wives managed the royal palace (153-154). On Orpheus’s connection to Thrace and its possible implications for Asklepiades’s overall interest, see Biographical Essay below. As N. Villagra has pointed out, given Harpokration’s practice of defining unfamiliar terms from classical oratory, the figure of ‘Dysaules’ must have been unknown to his Roman audience; the wider context of the scholion shows that he appeared in Deinarchos. Since oratory often used figures from tragedy as exempla it is certainly credible that a 4th-century mythographer like Asklepiades might have mentioned him, perhaps in reference to a lost play on Dysaules and Baubo for which we possess no notice (‘Commenting on Asclepiades of Tragilos: Methodological Considerations on a Fragmentary Mythographer’ (in press in BAR, 290-97)). Baubo, on the other hand, was apparently widely known in antiquity and beyond. At times she takes on the role thatIambe occupied in Homeric Hymn to Demeter, among other places – that of making the grieving goddess laugh – although whereas Iambe tells jokes, Baubo exposed her genitals, at least according to the Church Fathers like Clement who saw her action as a symbol of pagan impiety (Exhortation 2). That Baubo was associated with Demeter as early as the 4th-century BC is shown by this Asklepiades fragment as well as an inscription from Naxos of a dedication to Demeter, Kore, Zeus Eubouleus and Baubo (SEG 16 (1959), no. 478): for the inscription and full discussion of Baubo’s range of ancient literary associations as well as the modern association of her with a series of terracottas found in the sanctuary to Demeter in Priene that depict the lower half of a female body with a face, see M. Olender, ‘Aspects of Baubo: Ancient Texts and Contexts’, in D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin, Before Sexuality (Princeton 1990), 83-114 (for the inscription see 87 and n. 18). An inscription from Samurlu (Turkey) shows the daughter ‘Misa’ identified with Kore herself ( T. Heinze, Mise , BNP 9 (Leiden 2006) , 59). BNJ 12 F 5 FGrH Photios s.v. ῾Ρησός (= Suda and Hesychios s.v. ῾Ρησός) Subject: genre: literary criticism; genre: mythology Source Date: 9th century AD Historian's Date: 4th century BC ῾Ρῆσος· ἀρχός, ὃς θροεῖ1 τὰ θέσφατα, παρ᾽ ᾽Επιχάρµωι· ἤτοι παρὰ τὴν ῥῆσιν εἴρηται ἤ, ὡς ᾽Ασκληπιάδης ἐν ς̄ Τραγωιδουµένων, ἄριστον αὐτὸν γεγονέναι ἀλήθειαν εἰπεῖν. ἐγένετο δὲ καὶ ἕτερος. Translation Rhesos: a king who pronounces prophetic utterances, occurring in Epicharmos (fr. 206 K.-A.). Either he was named for his speaking style or, as Asklepiades says in the sixth book of theTragoidoumena, because he was the best at speaking the truth. And there was also another Rhesos. Apparatus Criticus 1 θροεῖ Vayos Liapis (‘Epicharmus, Asklepiades of Tragilus, and the Rhesus: Lessons from a Lexicographical Entry’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 143 (2003), 19) † αἱρέσει Jacoby Commentary This fragment, a gloss on a figure Rhesos the prophet-king, is important for its potential to provide evidence for a Rhesos play, whether or not the one we possess, and whether or not byEuripides. Vayos Liapis (‘Epicharmus, Asklepiades of Tragilus, and the Rhesus: Lessons from a Lexicographical Entry’, ZPE 143 (2003), 19-22) has posited that if αἱρέσει is emended to θροεῖ, the lemma ἀρχός, ὃς θροεῖ τὰ θέσφατα can be read as an iamb and is thus perhaps a direct quote from an unknown comedy of the 6th/5th century poet. Since Asklepiades deals with tragedy and not comedy, however, we should take him as refering to a tragedy concerning a king named Rhesos. Kaibel (followed by Jacoby and Kassel-Austin in the app. crit. to Epicharmos fr. 206) took this as an explanation of Rhesos’s name in reference to a fragment Rhesos 970-93, which refers to Rhesos as a prophet. If this were so, the date of the fragment would reasonably line up with Euripides’s dates, and yet as Liapis points out there is no way of being sure that Asklepiades is refering to those very lines (for example, this fragment F 5 shows that the conflation of king and prophet is a feature of comedy as well as tragedy; it could reasonably also therefore appear in more than one tragic context). For a second reference to a Rhesos play by Asklepiades, see F 10 below. References in Asklepiades to Rhesos are perhaps related to the Orphic theme we see in F 4 and F 6a-c as well as the ‘Thracian’ interest that seems detectable in other fragments; see Biographical Essay and T 1, F 1, F 10, F 14, F 18, F 22 and F 31. BNJ 12 F 6a FGrH Scholia ad Pindari Pythia 4.313a Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC ἐξ ᾽Απόλλωνος δὲ φορµικτάς] ᾽Απόλλωνος τὸν ᾽Ορφέα φησὶν εἶναι, ὅν καὶ αὐτὸς ὁ Πίνδαρος καὶ ἄλλοι Οἰάγρου λέγουσιν. ᾽Αµµώνιος δὲ σύµφωνον τὴν ἱστορίαν θέλων εἶναι … ὥσπερ … ἐκ Διὸς λέγουσιν εἶναι τοὺς βασιλεῖς, οὐχ ὅτι γόνος εἰσὶ τοῦ Διός, ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι τὸ βασιλεύειν ἐκ Διὸς ἔχουσιν, οὕτως ἐξ ᾽Απόλλωνος φορµικτὴν αὐτὸν εἶπεν· ἡγεµὼν γὰρ ὁ θεὸς τῆς κιθαρωιδίας. ὁ µέντοι Χαῖρις … ᾽Ορφέα διὰ τὸ ᾽Απόλλωνος εἶναι υἱὸν γόνωι. παρατίθεται δὲ καὶ χρησµόν τινα, ὅν φησιν Μέναιχµον ἀναγράφειν ἐν τῶι Πυθικῶι … «Πιέρες αἰνοπαθεῖς, στυγνὴν ἀποτίσετε λώβην ᾽Ορφέ᾽ ἀποκτείναντες ᾽Απόλλωνος φίλον υἱόν». καὶ ῾Ασκληπιάδης ἐν ἕκτωι Τραγωιδουµένων ἱστορεῖ ᾽Απόλλωνος καὶ Καλλιόπης ῾Υµέναιον, ᾽Ιάλεµον, ᾽Ορφέα. Translation ‘a harpist from Apollo’: they say that Orpheuswas the son of Apollo, but Pindar (F 139) himself and the others say he was the son of Oiagros. But Ammonius, wishing for the story to be consistent...just as…they say that kings are born from Zeus, not because kings are born of Zeus, but because people consider ruling to be from Zeus, in this way he said he was a lyre-player from Apollo; for the god is the leader of the art of kithara-playing. Chairis however…that Orpheus because he is the son of Apollo by descent. And he adduces as evidence some oracle, which he says Menaichmos (BNJ 131 F 2) recorded in his Pythian monograph … ‘dire-suffering Pieres, having killed Orpheus, the beloved son of Apollo, you will suffer a hateful punishment.’ And Asklepiades tells ofHymenaios, Ialemos and Orpheus the sons of Apollo and Kalliope in the sixth book of hisTragoidoumena. Commentary See also below on F 6c. BNJ 12 F 6b FGrH Scholia ad Euripidis Rhesum 895 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC ἰαλέµωι] καὶ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης ἐν ἕκτωι Τραγωιδουµένων πλείους τῆς Καλλιόπης λέγει παῖδας ἐν τούτωι· «Καλλιόπηι γὰρ τὸν ᾽Απόλλωνα µιχθέντα γεννῆσαι Λίνον τὸν πρεσβύτατον καὶ τρεῖς µετ᾽ ἐκεῖνον, ῾Υµέναιον <᾽Ιάλεµον> ᾽Ορφέα. τῶι δὲ νεωτάτωι τὴν µὲν ἐπιθυµίαν <τῶν τῆς µητρὸς ἐπιτη>δευµάτων ἐµπεσεῖν καὶ περὶ τὴν µουσικὴν π<εριγενέσθ>αι πάντων· οὐ µὴν τοιοῦτό γε πάθος, <οἷον λέγεται>, γενέσθαι». Commentary See below on F 6c. BNJ 12 F 6c Translation ‘Ialemos’: and Asklepiades in the sixth book of his Tragoidoumena mentions numerous children of Kalliope thus: ‘for Apollo having had intercourse with Kalliope fathered Linos the Eldest and three sons after him, Hymenaios, Ialemos, and Orpheus. And he says that a desire for his mother’s pursuits fell upon the youngest and that he was superior to all in the art of music; he did not at all suffer the fate he is claimed to have done.’ FGrH Scholia ad Apolloni Rhodii Argonautica 1.23 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC ἔστι δὲ ὡς ᾽Ασκληπιάδης, ᾽Απόλλωνος καὶ Καλλιόπης˙ ἔνιοι Οἰάγρου καὶ Πολυµνίας. Translation He (sc. Orpheus) is, as Asklepiades says, son ofApollo and Kalliope; others say son of Oiagrosand Polymnia. Commentary These three quotes on Orpheus relate to his genealogy and come from three separate sources (the scholia of Pindar, Euripides, and Apollonios of Rhodes) suggesting that Asklepiades was known for the particular variant in which Orpheus was the son of Apollo and Kalliope. Two of these, F 6a and F 6b, indicate that Asklepiades discussed Orpheus’s lineage in Book Six of hisTragoidoumena, and F 6b appears as a direct quote from that book. We also learn in F 6a that Asklepiades discussed Orpheus alongside Hymenaios and Ialemos, and according to F 6b Asklepiades tells us that Orpheus’s brothers from Apollo and Kalliope were Linos, Hymenaios, and Ialemos. The overall picture gleaned from these three passages is consistent and points to the scholiasts’ close and perhaps even direct access to the Tragoidomena (notwithstanding sensible caveats on taking ‘direct quotation’ at face value; see chapter 5 (‘Historiae and Source References’) in A. Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World (Oxford 2004), 89-123. N. Villagra, ‘Commenting on Asclepiades of Tragilos: Methodological Considerations on a Fragmentary Mythographer’, in press in BAR, 291-93) Orpheus appears no where in Homer. Variations on Orpheus’s family members abound. According to the Pindar scholiast in F 6a (onPythian 4.313 = Boekh 177; see commentary on F 3 on the line numbers in Pindar’s odes), the poet made Oiagros, king of Thrace, the father of Orpheus; this appears also in Plato, Symposium 179D and Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheka Historika 4.25.2; the reference is perhaps to Pindar F 139, as Jacoby indicates. Among others, Apollonios of Rhodes 1.23-27 agrees on Orpheus’s descent from Oiagros and Kalliope, as does Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 1.3.2 (although the latter includes the phrase κατ᾽ ἐπίκλησιν δὲ Ἀπόλλωνος (‘nominally from Apollo’)). Asklepiades, then, represents the minority view (T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth (Baltimore 1993), 725). Pausanias however rejects Kalliope in favor of an unnamed ‘daughter of Pieros’ (9.30.4); the scholion for Apollonios 1.23 names Polymnia (another musical muse) as his mother. To the brother are attributed various other fathers and/or mothers: for Linos, e.g. Hesiod F 192 names Ourania; Nonnos, Dionysiaca24.8 names Ourania as Hymenaios’s mother but Proklos 321 names Terpsichore; the Suda (s.v.Thamyris) names Kalliope, with Magnetos as father. Ialemos (who is sometimes identified with Linos (Schol. Eur. Or. 1390)) is called son of Kalliope (Hesychios s.v. Ialemos) or simply ‘a muse’ (Schol. Ap. Rh. 4.1304). Asklepiades makes Linos the oldest brother of Orpheus, but Diodorus Siculus 3.67 makes him the teacher of Orpheus as well as of Thamyris and Herakles, and Pausanias (9.29.6) tells us he was killed by Apollo. The Rhesos scholion in Vat. gr. 909 says thatApollodoros made Orpheos the maternal grandfather of the ‘older of two Thamyrises’ (see F 10commentary). Even by Asklepiades’s time at least some of this variation seems to have existed (see PherekydesBNJ 3 F 167, Damastes BNJ 5 F 11, Euagon BNJ 535 F 2, Hellanikos BNJ 4 F 5); but, at any rate, nowhere else do all four figures appear together as brothers from the same mother and father. It seems that Asklepiades’s main interest here is musical: by creating a fraternity of singers (Linos and Ialemos both associated with the dirge, Hymenaios with the wedding-song, and Orpheus with kitharoidia) with the parentage of the musical divinities Apollo and Kalliope, he can make a clean connection among musical genres. The musical context is made additionally clear in F 6b, in which Asklepiades connects Orpheus’s ardent desire for, and superiority in, music specifically to the fact that Kalliope was his mother. (The musical theme also runs very strong in F 6a with the discussion of whether Orpheus’s descent ‘from Apollo’ is to be taken literally or figuratively, as (in Stoic fashion) Ammonius apparently believes, that just as kingship comes from Zeus, lyre-playing – and hence the kitharode himself – comes from Apollo; we cannot necessarily extrapolate from the scholiast’s discussion, however, to Asklepiades himself, who is simply mentioned here for having told of Hymenaios, Ialemos and Orpheus in his Tragoidoumena). The fact that the Asklepiades material on Orpheus (F 6a-c) and on Rhesos (F 5; note too that F 6bis from the scholion to the Rhesos play attributed to Euripides) both occur in Book Six and that the Orphic theme also occurs in F 4 on Baubo and the Orphic Demeter myth (where no specific book is mentioned) may point to a particular interest in Orpheus and Orphism; note too that Orpheus makes an appearance in the Rhesos, where the protagonist’s ‘Muse’ mother mentions the mysteries of Orpheus as one of the benefits Athens received from Thrace (lines 941-8: see Z. Archibald, The Odrysian Kingdom of Thrace: Orpheus Unmasked (Oxford, 1998), 101). On the connection between Orpheus and Asklepiades’s possible larger interest in Thracian myth, seeBiographical Essay below and T 1, F 1, F 5, F 10, F 14, F 18, F 22 and F 31. BNJ 12 F 7a FGrH Athenaios, Deipnosophists 10.456b Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: 3rd century AD Historian's Date: 4th century BC καὶ τὸ τῆς Σφιγγὸς δὲ αἴνιγµα ᾽Ασκληπιάδης ἐν τοῖς Τραγωιδουµένοις τοιοῦτον εἶναί φησιν· «ἔστι δίπουν ἐπὶ γῆς καὶ τετράπον, οὗ µία φωνή, καὶ τρίπον, ἀλλάσσει δὲ φύσιν µόνον ὅσσ᾽ ἐπὶ γαῖαν ἑρπετὰ γίνονται καὶ ἀν᾽ αἰθέρα καὶ κατὰ πόντον. ἀλλ᾽ ὁπόταν πλείστοισιν ἐρειδόµενον ποσὶ βαίνηι, ἔνθα τάχος γυίοισιν ἀφαυρότατον πέλει αὑτοῦ». Translation And as for the riddle of the Sphinx, Asklepiadesin the Tragoidoumena says it goes like this: ‘there is on land a two-footed, four-footed and three-footed creature who has one voice, but out of all the creatures who creep on land and are in the sky and in the sea, it alone changes its nature. But when it walks supported by the most feet, it is then that the speed in its limbs is feeblest.’ Commentary In this passage from the Deiphnosophists, Athenaios quotes Asklepiades for the riddle of the Sphinx (which Sophokles in OT 391-8 mentions with the presumption of its familiarity). Asklepiades’s version is in hexameters and appears in identical form, e.g. in Schol. Euripid. Phoin. 50 and Tzetzes, Schol. ad Lycophronem 7, where we learn the answer to the riddle as well; this suggests that a standard verse form was in circulation by Asklepiades’s time. It appears in prose elsewhere, e.g. Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 3.5.8, quoted at length by Jacoby. BNJ 12 F 7b FGrH Scholia ad Euripidis Phoinissas 45 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC τὴν δὲ Σφίγγα οἱ µὲν ἔχειν πρόσωπον µὲν παρθένου, στῆθος δὲ καὶ πόδας λέοντος, πτερὰ δὲ ὄρνιθος. Σωκράτης δὲ ἐγχωρίαν αὐτὴν χρησµολόγον φησὶ δύσγνωστα µαντευοµένην, ἅπερ ἀγνοοῦντες οἱ Translation Some say that the Sphinx has the face of a virgin, the torso and feet of a lion, and the wings of a bird. And Sokrates (BNJ 310 F 8) says that she was an oraclemonger from the region, who uttered prophecies that Θηβαῖοι καὶ ἐναντίως αὐτοῖς χρώµενοι ἀπώλοντο. ᾽Ασκληπιάδης δὲ λέγει τοὺς Θηβαίους εἰς ἐκκλησίαν καθ᾽ ἑκάστην ἀθροίζεσθαι διὰ τὸ δυσαίνιγµα τῆς Σφιγγός· λόγιον γὰρ ἦν αὐτοῖς µὴ ἀπαλλαγήσεσθαι τῶν κακῶν, πρὶν ἂν τοὺς τῆς Σφιγγὸς λύσειαν χρησµούς. ὁπότε δὲ µὴ συνίοιεν, ἁρπάζειν αὐτὴν ὅντινα ἂν βούλοιτο τῶν πολιτῶν. were hard to understand. Being ignorant of these things and making ill use of them the Thebans were destroyed. And Asklepiades says that the Thebans were gathered in the assembly every day on account of the woeful riddle of the Sphinx. For there was an oracle among them that they would not have relief from evils until they solved the oracles of the Sphinx, and that as long as they did not understand, she would snatch whomever she wished of the citizens. Commentary This scholion to Euripides, Phoenissai gives a version of the Sphinx’s appearance similar to that ofPseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 3.5.8: Pseudo-Apollodoros says that the Sphinx had the face of a woman, the chest and feet and tail of a lion (εἶχε δὲ πρόσωπον µὲν γυναικός, στῆθος δὲ καὶ βάσιν καὶ οὐρὰν λέοντος; c.f. Peisander F 10: τὴν οὐρὰν ἔχουσα δρακαίνης) and bird-wings. He adds the content of the riddle itself (τί ἐστιν ὃ µίαν ἔχον φωνὴν τετράπουν καὶ δίπουν καὶ τρίπουν γίνεται); that the Sphinx learned the riddle from the Muses and sat on Mt. Phikium riddling the Thebans; and that upon Oedipus solving the riddle the Sphinx leapt to her death (for the death of the Sphinx, see also Diodorus Siculus 4.64.4 and Hyginus, Fabulae 67.5). The scholiast here also cites Sokrates of Argos for the view that the Sphinx as an oracle-monger from the region whose messages were hard to understand (= BNJ 310 F 8). BNJ 12 F 8 FGrH Harpokration s.v. Μελανίππειον Translation Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: 2nd century AD Historian's Date: 4th century BC Melanippeion: ... ss Asklepiades in hisTragoidoumena says, Μελανίππειον· … Μελανίππου τοῦ Θησέως this is the heröon ofMelanippos the son ἡρῶιόν ἐστιν, ὥς φησιν ᾽Ασκληπιάδης Τραγωιδουµένοις. Κλείδηµος δ᾽ ἐν ᾱ ᾽Ατθίδος ἐν of Theseus. Kleidemos in the first book of the Atthis (BNJ 323 F 2) says that this was in Melite. Μελίτηι αὐτὸ εἶναι λέγει. Commentary This reference to a heröon called Melanippeion for Melanippos son of Theseus is the only extant one, found in Harpokration who cites both Asklepiades and Kleidemos (as well as Lykourgos in his Against Lykophron, reference to whom Jacoby omits here; see William Morison on Klei(to)demos, BNJ 323 F 2). Kleidemos in his Attic history mentions that this was in the deme ofMelite; Photios (s.v. Μύρµηκος ἀτραπὸς) calls Theseus the father of Myrmex, whose daughter is the nymph Melite (see E. Kearns, The Heroes of Attica = BICS Suppl. 57 (London 1989), 184). Asklepiades may be refering here to a play on Theseus (perhaps with Phaidra) like, for example, the one of Aischylos that is represented by 86 fragments found in P.Oxy. 2425; see H. LloydJones,Sophocles 3 (Cambridge, MA 1996), 344-45 on F 730; 391 on F 905 and commentary below on Asklepiades F 21 and F 28. BNJ 12 F 9 FGrH Scholia ad Euripidis Alcestim 1 Translation Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC Ζεὺς γὰρ κατακτὰς παῖδα τὸν ἐµὸν αἴτιος ᾽Ασκληπιόν, στέρνοισιν ἐµβαλὼν φλόγα· οὗ δὴ χολωθεὶς τέκτονας Δίου πυρὸς κτείνω Κύκλωπας· καί µε θητεύειν πατὴρ θνητῶι παρ᾽ ἀνδρὶ τῶνδ᾽ ἄποιν᾽ ἠνάγκασεν] ἡ διὰ στόµατος καὶ δηµώδης ἱστορία περὶ τῆς ᾽Απόλλωνος θητείας παρ᾽ ᾽Αδµήτωι αὕτη ἐστίν, ἧι κέχρηται νῦν Εὐριπίδης· οὕτως δέ φησι καὶ ῾Ησίοδος καὶ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης ἐν Τραγωιδουµένοις. Φερεκύδης δὲ … ‘For Zeus, having killed my son Asklepios, throwing a thunderbolt into his chest, was responsible. Indeed, angered by him, I killed the Kyklopes, children of the fire of Zeus. And the father forced me to work for hire for a mortal man as penance for these things.’ The popular story that’s been passed down orally about the service of Apollo to Admetos is this one which now Euripides has used. So too do Hesiod (F 127) and Asklepiades tell the story, the latter in the Tragoidoumena. And Pherekydes (BNJ 3 F 35) … Commentary This scholion to the opening of Euripides’s Alcestis – where Apollo describes a series of retributive exchanges between himself and Zeus – explicates the god’s reference to Zeus’s enslavement of him to a mortal man in retaliation for killing the Kyklopes. The scholiast suggests, plausibly enough, that Euripides’s story is the same as that appearing in both Hesiod and Asklepiades (with Pherekydes (BNJ 3 F 35a) providing the alternative story that Apollo did not kill the Kyklopes but their children). BNJ 12 F 10 FGrH Scholia ad Euripidis Rhesum 916 (G. Merro, Translation ‘Apollodoro, Asclepiade di Tragilo ed Eschilo in scholl. Eur. Rh. 916 e 922’, in RFIC 134 (2006), 50) Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC ‘The son of Philammon’: he says that Thamyriswas the son Φιλάµµωνος παῖ· τὸν Θάµυριν λέγει Φιλάµµονος γεγενῆσθαι παῖδα, <καθά>περ καὶ Σοφοκλῆς. εἰσὶ of Philammōn, just as Sophoklesalso said (p. 181 N2). δὲ οἳ διττούς φασι Θαµύριδας γεγονέναι, καθάπερ There are those who say that there were two Thamyrises, likeApollodoros in the seventh book of theCatalogue and ἄλλοι τε ἱστοροῦσι καὶ ᾽Απολλόδωρος ἐν ζ̄ Καταλόγου … ἔνιοι δὲ τὰ περὶ τὸν Θάµυριν καὶ <τὰς others say … but some explain the story of Thamyris and the Muses in a more unusual way. Asklepiades, for Μούσας ἰδιώ>τερον ἀφήγηνται1. ὁ γοῦν instance, in the second book talks about these things in ᾽Ασκληπιάδης ἐν β΄2 περὶ αὐτῶν φησι τὸν τρόπον this way: ‘They say that Thamyris is astonishing in τοῦτον· «τὸν µὲν Θάµυριν περὶ τὸ εἶδός φασι θαυµαστόν, τῶν δὲ ὀφθαλµῶν τὸν µὲν δεξιὸν λευκὸν appearance, that his right eye is white, and his left eye is black, and that he believes he is a better singer than εἶναι, τὸν δὲ ἀριστερὸν µέλανα, περὶ δὲ τὴν ὠιδὴν οἴεσθαι διαφέρειν τῶν ἄλλων ἁπάντων. ἀφικοµένων anyone else. When the Muses came to Thrace, Thamyris δὲ τῶν Μουσῶν εἰς Θράικην τὸν µὲν Θάµυριν µνείαν made mention to them (for the sake of sleeping with all of ποιήσασθαι πρὸς αὐτὰς ὑπὲρ τοῦ συνοικεῖν ἁπάσαις them) that it was customary among the Thracians for one φάσκοντα τοῖς Θραιξὶ νόµιµον εἶναι πολλαῖς τὸν ἕνα man to have sex with many women. So the Muses in response to this challenge of his proposed a contest of συνεῖναι· τὰς δὲ προκαλεσαµένωι ἐπὶ τούτωι ποι<εῖσ>θαι τὴν δι᾽ ὠιδῆς ἅµιλλαν, ἐφ᾽ ὧι, ἐὰν µὲν superiority in singing on the terms that, if they won, they αὐταὶ νικήσωσιν, ὅτι ἂν θέλωσιν αὐτὸν ποιεῖν, εἰ δὲ would do to him whatever they wished, but that if he won, he would take as many wives as he wished. The terms ἐκεῖνος, ὅσας ἂν αὐτὸς βούληται, τοσαύτας having been agreed, the Muses won and they removed his λήψεσθαι γυναῖκας· συγχωρη θέντων δὲ τούτων eyes.’ And Homer (Iliad 2.594) says that the events νικῆσαι τὰς Μούσας καὶ τοὺς ὀφθαλµοὺς ἐξελεῖν involving Thamyris took place near Dorion. <αὐ>τ̣ό̣υ» ῞Οµηρος δὲ <πε>ρὶ Δώ<ριόν ἄι<δει>4συστῆναι τὰ κατὰ Θάµυριν. Apparatus Criticus ἔνιοι δὲ τὰ περὶ τὸν θάµυριν καὶ <τὰς Μούσας ἰδιώ>τερον ἀφήγηνται Fowler <παρ᾽ Αἰσ>χύλωι δὲ τὰ περὶ τὸν Θάµυριν καὶ <τὰς Μούσας ἀκριβέσ>τερον (?) ἀφήγηνται· Jacoby (after H. Rabe, ‘Euripideum’, Rheinisches Museum 63 (1908), 420) 2 Τ̣ρ̣α< ̣ γωιδουµένοις> Jacoby Rabe 3 <αὐ>τ̣ό̣ν̣ Jacoby Rabe 4 φησι Jacoby Rabe 1 Commentary With the help of ultraviolet technology (‘Wood’s lamp’), G. Merro has re-edited this scholion forRhesos 916, which was found in deteriorated condition at the end of a single source (Vat. g. 909, the ms containing all nine Euripidean plays) and has deteriorated further since the original reconstruction by H. Rabe (‘Euripideum’, Rheinisches Museum 63 (1908), 419-22), which Jacoby follows. (G. Merro, ‘Apollodoro, Asclepiades di Tragilo ed Eschilo in scholl. Eur. Rh. 916 e 922’,RFIC 134 (2006), 26-51). The scholion tells the story of Thamyris, contrasting the views of Apollodoros in the seventh book of his commentary on the Homeric Catalogue of Ships and Asklepiades. The ‘Apollodoros’ passage cited by the scholiast for the story of ‘two Thamyrises’ is not extant, nor is this story found elsewhere. Thamyris had, apparently, a reasonably strong presence in tragedy. The scholion tells us thatSophokles agrees with Euripides in attributing Thamyris’s parentage to Philammon (presumably based on a play by Sophokles named Thamyris, from which we have fragments: see 237-245 in S. Radt, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta 4 (1977)), as we see elsewhere (e.g. Pseudo-Apollodoros,Bibliotheca 1.16-17; see G. Merro, ‘Apollodoro, Asclepiades di Tragilo ed Eschilo’, 29 n. 4 for additional references). (According to the scholiast, Apollodoros makes Thamyris the maternal grandson of Orpheus.) Jacoby’s tentative reconstruction based on Rabe’s edition also suggested that Aischylos also wrote a Thamyris (… <παρ᾽ Αἰσ>χύλωι δὲ τὰ περὶ τὸν Θάµυριν καὶ <τὰς Μούσας ἀκριβέσ>τερον (?) ἀφήγηνται). It seems strange, however, that if such a play had existed the scholiast would be our only evidence, and Merro rejects the reading for ἔνιοι δὲ τὰ περὶ τὸν Θάµυριν καὶ <τὰς Μούσας…….>τερον ἀφήγηνται (which I follow here). The earliest mention of the young singer appears in Homer (Il. 2.594-600), in a passage from the Catalogue of Ships dealing with Pylos, near whose village Dorion Homer places, in a digression, the story of Thamyris the Thracian, whom the Muses met, whose singing they destroyed and whom they ‘maimed’ (no details are given) because he boasted he he could ‘conquer’ (νικησέµεν, used intransitively) against the Muses if they had a singing contest. (The scholiast mentions here Dorion, as doesPausanias 4.33.7, also citing Homer.) Thamyris’s two different colored eyes also appears inEustathios (on Iliad 2.595); Merro suspects a scribal error (G. Merro, ‘Apollodoro, Asclepiades di Tragilo ed Eschilo’, 43). Asklepiades’s account is fuller than the other sources; Pausanias 4.33 and Eustathios (on Iliad2.595) both mention the boast against the Muses but no romantic entanglements (Pausanias adds the detail that he died of illness like Homer – assimilating one singer to another). If there are sexual overtones to Homer’s use of ‘conquest’, they are not apparent; the idea seems first fleshed out here with Asklepiades, who according to the scholiast gives as Thamyris’s motivation for the singing contest a desire to have sexual intercourse with all the Muses – for which he goes as far as to cite a bogus ‘Thracian custom’ of polygamy (φάσκοντα τοῖς Θραιξὶ νόµιµον εἶναι πολλαῖς τὸν ἕνα συνεῖναι). Pseudo-Apollodoros 1.3.3 also mentions Thamyris’s motivation to bed all the Muses, as well as citing him as the first man to fall in love with another man; a scholiast to Homer’s Il. 2.595 on the other hand mentions that the reward would only be one of the Muses). Another peculiarity is the Thracian setting itself as opposed to Homer’s Dorion. Asklepiades’s particular embellishment on the sexual aspects of the Thamyris story, concerning a supposed Thracian custom of polygamy, may be an indication of particular Thracian interest on the writer’s part. Merro (‘Apollodoro, Asclepiades di Tragilo ed Eschilo’, 43) attributes the choice to Asklepiades’s possible reliance on Sophokles’s version, which fragments indicate may have been set in Thrace (in which case the mythographer’s choice of that variant could support the theory of Thracian interest.) Thracian sexuality figures again in F 14 on the Lemnian men, about which fragment Jacoby made a reference to local history (see on F 14, and Biographical Essay below). For a ‘Freudian’ reading of Thamyris as an incest myth that considers the un-namedness of the Muses, Thamyris’s homosexuality and his dual eye color (mentioned here and by the scholiast at Il. 2.595), see G. Devereux, ‘Thamyris and the Muses’. AJP 108:2 (1987), 199-201. BNJ 12 F 11 FGrH Scholia ad Hesiodi Theogoniam 223 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC τίκτε δὲ καὶ Νέµεσιν … Νὺξ ὀλοή] ´Οµηρος τὸ µὲν πρᾶγµα οἶδε, τὴν δὲ θεὸν οὐ. ᾽Ασκληπιάδης δὲ ἐν τοῖς Τραγωιδουµένοις φησὶν εἰς κύκνον µεταβληθέντα τὸν Δία Νεµέσει µιγῆναι. Translation ‘And the one who gave birth to Nemesis was the deadly Night’: Homer was aware of ‘nemesis’, but not of the goddess Nemesis. AndAsklepiades says in his Tragoidoumena that, having changed his shape to that of a swan,Zeus had intercourse with Nemesis. Commentary The scholiast to Hesiod here notes that Homer knows of Nux’s birthing of the concept of nemesis, but did not recognize Nux as a goddess. According to the Cypria (F 10 = Athenaios, Deipnosophists334b), Helen was the result of the rape of Nemesis by Zeus. Pseudo-Apollodoros (Bibliotheca3.10.7; repeated for example by John Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lykophron 88) combines the stories of Nemesis and Leda, citing anonymous sources for the story that, pursued by Zeus, Nemesis turned herself into a goose; then consorting with swan-Zeus she laid an egg that was eventually found by a shepherd, given to Leda for safekeeping, and eventually hatched Helen, whom Leda raised as her own. F 66 of the Catalogue of Women states that Hesiod made Helen the daughter neither of Nemesis nor of Leda, but of Ocean and Zeus, implying, as Jacoby observed, that the story of Leda’s rape by Zeus and the resultant birth of Helen would have already been known by the time of the Catalogue. Give the uncertainty that surrounds the Catalogue’s dating, as well as that of theCypria, however, there does not seem much more we can say about the relative dating of these stories. BNJ 12 F 12 FGrH Scholia ad Homeri Iliadem 3.325 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC Πάρις ὁ ᾽Αλέξανδρος ἐκλήθη παρὰ τὸ ἐκτεθῆναι αὐτὸν ἐν τῆι ῎Ιδηι εὐθὺς τεχθέντα, καὶ αὐξηθέντα παρελθεῖν τὸν µόρον οὕτως. κατὰ γαστρὸς αὐτὸν ἔχουσα ἡ ῾Εκάβη ἐνόµισε κατ᾽ ὄναρ καιόµενον δαλὸν τίκτειν, ὅστις κατέφλεξε πᾶσαν τήν τε πόλιν καὶ τὴν ἐν τῆι ῎Ιδηι ὕλην ἑστῶσαν. τοῦτο δὲ Translation Alexander was called Paris because he was left to die on Mount Ida right after he was born, and having grown up he escaped his fate thusly: when Hekabe was pregnant with him, she believed from a dream that she was giving birth to a burning torch which engulfed the entire city in flames and the forest standing on Ida. When the soothsayers and others who were knowledgeable about dreams heard about it, they τὸ ἐνύπνιον ἀκούσαντες οἱ µάντεις καὶ οἱ περὶ said that when the child was born and was still an infant he τοὺς ὀνείρους δεινοὶ εἶπον τὸ τεχθὲν παιδίον εὐθέως µικρὸν ὂν ῥιφῆναι θηρσὶ βοράν· τεχθέντα should be thrown to the beasts as meat. And when Alexander was born they exposed him on Ida. A shepherd, seeing that δὲ τὸν ᾽Αλέξανδρον ἐξέθηκαν ἐν τῆι ῎Ιδηι· ὃν he was exceedingly beautiful, took him up and raised ποιµὴν ἑωρακὼς σφόδρα εὐειδέστατον him. Porphyrios says that the one who wrote ἀνελόµενος ἀνέθρεψεν. Πορφύριός φησιν the Tragoidoumena narrated that the shepherd who raised ἱστορεῖν τὸν γράψαντα τὰ Τραγωιδούµενα ὅτι ὁ θρέψας τὸν Πάριν νοµεὺς † ᾽Αρχιάλας ἐκαλεῖτο. Paris was called Archialas. Commentary Asklepiades is cited second hand, via Porphyrios (3rd century AD) by the scholiast for Il. 3.325 for the name of the shepherd who raised the youth, an otherwise unknown ‘Archialas’ (PseudoApollodoros (Bibliotheca 3.12.5) calls this man ‘a slave named Agelaus’; the rescuing figure’s name seems otherwise not to be given.) This reference is found only in the prime witness to the major scholia, A. (See H. Erbse, Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem (scholia vetera) 1 (Berlin 1969), 417). The source for the rest of the story is the D-class (or so-called ‘minor’) Homeric scholion, which is from the compilation Mythographicus Homericus whose sources, even if not securely attributed in that work, are substantially earlier than Porphyrios. The story of Hekabe’s dream (first found in a fragment from Pindar, Paians (F 52i(A).14-15, her exposure of Paris and his rearing as a shepherd’s son, and the recognition of his identity twenty years later (after he won athletic contests she had persuaded Priam to hold in her son’s honor after his presumed death, after which she attempted to kill him), appears in the hypothesis to Euripides’s Alexandros (P. Oxy. 3650 col. I); C. Collard and M. Cropp have collected numerous probable and possible fragments of the play itself (Euripides VII: Fragments: Aegeus-Meleager (Cambridge, MA 2008), 40-75; see 33-9 for background); a fragment from Sophokles (F 93 in H. LloydJones, Sophocles: Fragments(Cambridge, MA 1996), 42-3) also refers to a shepherd defeating city dwellers. Hekabe’s consultation of the µάντεις appears in a number of places (e.g. Schol. Eurip. Androm. 293), but the earliest version of this aspect of the story, in Euripides’s Andromache 296, names Kassandra as the intepreter of Hekabe’s dream (she shows up in the hypothesis of Euripides’s Alexandros as the one who recognizes him after Priam’s contest; another tradition names Aisakos son of Priam (e.g. PseudoApollodoros, Bibliotheca 3.12.5). For the burning torch (complete with emanating serpents) see Hyginus, Fabulae F 91. Of course missing from this presumable aition for how Hekabe and Priam’s son came to be called Paris is the etymological cause itself, which is supplied by in the D-scholia at Il. 15.341: he was carried home in a knapsack (πήρα) (See H. van Thiel, Scholia D in Iliadem (Cologne 2000), 442). BNJ 12 F 13 FGrH Scholia AB ad Homeri Iliadem 6.155 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC Βελλεροφόντην· οὗτος πρότερον ἐκαλεῖτο ῾Ιππόνους, ἀνελὼν δὲ Βέλλερον τὸν Κορινθίων δυνάστην Βελλεροφόντης ἔκλήθη. ἦν δὲ φύσει µὲν παῖς Ποσειδῶνος, ἐπίκλησιν δὲ Γλαύκου. λαβὼν δὲ παρὰ Ποσειδῶνος τὸν Μεδούσης τῆς Γοργόνος Πήγασον πτερωτὸν ἵππον – διὰ γὰρ τοῦτο ἔσχε καὶ τὴν προσηγορίαν, ὅτι ἐκπεπηδήκει ἐκ τοῦ τῆς Γοργόνος τραχήλου – τούτωι ἐπωιχεῖτο. δράσας δὲ ἐµφύλιον Translation ‘Bellerophontes’: this man was previously calledHipponous, but after he killed Belleros king of the Corinthians he was called Bellerophontes. As for his origin, he was the son of Poseidon, but by repute son of Glaukos. Having received from Poseidon the winged horse of Medusa the Gorgon, Pegasos – for he also had this name because he had leapt out of the neck of the Gorgon – Bellerophon rode around on him. Having φόνον – Βέλλερον γάρ τινα, ὡς ἔφην, τῶν πολιτῶν ἀποκτείνας – φεύγει εἰς ῎Αργος. τυχὼν δὲ καθαρσίων παρὰ Προίτου τοῦ βασιλέως, µετ᾽ αὐτοῦ διέτριβεν. ῎Αντεια δὲ ἡ Προίτου γυνή, ἐρασθεῖσα τοῦ Βελλεροφόντου, ἐδέετο ὅπως αὐτῆι συνευνασθῆι· ὁ δὲ δεξιούµενος τὸ ὅσιον ἀντέλεγεν, ἡ δὲ ῎Αντεια δείσασα µὴ τῶι Προίτωι προλαβὼν ἐξείποι τοὺς αὐτῆς ἔρωτας, ἔφθασε τὸν Βελλεροφόντην κατείπασα, ὡς ἄρα εἴη βεβιασµένη πρὸς αὐτοῦ. ὁ δὲ Προῖτος αὐτόχειρ µὲν οὐκ ἐβουλήθη τὸν Βελλεροφόντην ἀποκτεῖναι, πέµπει δὲ αὐτὸν εἰς Λυκίαν πρὸς τὸν πενθερὸν ᾽Ιοβάτην, ἀδοκήτως καθ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ κοµίζοντα γράµµατα. ὁ δὲ πολλοῖς αὐτὸν ἐγγυµνάσας ἄθλοις, ὡς οὐχ ἑώρα φθειρόµενον, ὑπετόπησε τὴν κατ᾽ αὐτοῦ στρατηγηθεῖσαν δεινὴν καταβολήν· τοσοῦτον γὰρ κακῶν ὄχλον τῆι δυνάµει κατηγωνίσατο. ἔδωκε δὲ αὐτῶι πρὸς γάµον τὴν ἰδίαν θυγατέρα Κασάνδραν καὶ τῆς βασιλείας µοῖράν τινα. λέγεται δὲ αὐτὸν ἐπαρθέντα ἐφ᾽ οἷς ἔπραξε θελῆσαι ἐπὶ τοῦ Πηγάσου τὸν οὐρανὸν κατοπτεῦσαι. τὰ γὰρ νῶτα, ὡς ἔφαµεν, πτερωτὰ εἶχεν ὁ ἵππος. τὸν δὲ Δία µηνίσαντα οἶστρον ἐµβαλεῖν τῶι Πηγάσωι, ὥστε ἐκπεσεῖν µὲν τὸν Βελλεροφόντην καὶ κατενεχθῆναι εἰς τὸ τῆς Λυκίας πεδίον τὸ ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ καλούµενον ᾽Αλήιον πεδίον, ἀλᾶσθαι δὲ κατὰ τοῦτο πηρωθέντα· τὸν δὲ ἵππον λαβεῖν τὴν ᾽Ηῶ δεηθεῖσαν τοῦ Διὸς δῶρον πρὸς τὸ ἀκόπως περιιέναι τὰς τοῦ κόσµου περιόδους. ἡ δὲ ἱστορία παρὰ ᾽Ασκληπιάδηι ἐν Τραγωιδουµένοις. committed kin-murder – for, as I said, having killed Belleros one of his fellow-citizens – he fled to Argos. Obtaining purifications fromProitos the King, he spent time with him. Anteiathe wife of Proitos lusted after Bellerophon and asked him to sleep with her. But honoring what was right he refused, and Anteia, fearing that he would get a chance beforehand to tell Proitos about her lustful advances, she made the first move by denouncing him, claiming that she was violated by him. Proitos did not wish to kill Bellerophon by himself, so he sent him to Lykiato his father-in-law Iobates, unwittingly carrying a letter denouncing him. But Iobates, putting Bellerophon through many physical trials, when he saw that Bellerophon was not killed, suspected that the fearsome accusation was a stratagem. For Bellerophon struggled valiantly against so great a throng of evils. So he gave his own daughter Kasandra to him in marriage and some portion of his kingdom. They say that, having been encouraged by the deeds he performed, Bellerophon wished to see the heavens, riding on Pegasos. (For as we mentioned, the horse had a winged back.) ButZeus got angry at him so he afflicted Pegasos with a gadfly so that Bellerophon fell off the horse and landed on the plain of Lykia (the one called the ‘Wandering Plain’ after him), and he roamed over it, maimed; but Eōs begged Zeus that she receive the horse as a gift, so she could make her rounds of the world without becoming weary. This story is told byAsklepiades in his Tragoidoumena. Commentary This scholiast for Iliad 6.155 paraphrases many details from the Homeric story of Bellerophontes but contains a number of embellishments, the most elaborate of which is the story of the hero’s flight on Pegasos, with which his gloss begins and ends. According to the scholiast, Bellerophontes’s action so enrages Zeus that he sends a gadfly to make the hero fall off the horse, resulting in his wandering lamely around Lykia on the Wandering Plain, or ‘Aleion’ (PseudoHyginus has him fall to his death out of terror at looking down on earth: Astronomica 2.18). (Homer says only that Bellerophontes became hated by the gods, then wandered alone on the Aleian plain: Il 6.200-2). From Hesiod (Theog. 325) onwards, Pegasos is a fixture in the Bellerophon story; other details not found in Homer tend to be Hesiodic (in addition to the presence of Pegasos, the claim that Bellerophontes was Poseidon’s son as well as perhaps the names of the father-in-law and his daughter, Iobates and Kasandra) or Pindaric or tragic (e.g. the hero’s ascension to the heavens is seen in Pindar, Isthmian 7.43-47 and F 306-312 of Euripides’s fragmentary play Bellerophontes (see C. Collard, M.J. Cropp & K.H. Lee, Euripides: Selected Fragmentary Plays 1 (Warminster, 1995), 98-120, esp. 98-99 and 111, it is also supported by a scholion to Aristophanes, Peace 147a and b). Divine ascension is accomplished by Pegasos himself in Pindar, Olympian 13.92. Bellerophontes’s ‘original’ name Hipponous appears in the Scholia T ms for Iliad 6.155 (it is otherwise ‘Leophontes’); apparently only here and in Asklepiades is an aition given for Bellerophontes’s name. The would-be adulterous Anteia, whose name is Homeric (Il. 6.160), is elsewhere called Stheneboia; Euripides named a play after her (see Collard, Cropp and Lee, Euripides: Fragmentary Plays 1, 79-97). Jacoby thinks that the story of Pegasos’s employment by Eōs at the very end of the scholion, which is found elsewhere only in Lykophron(Alexandra 17), may be Hellenistic. At the end of his quite cohesive summary of Bellerophon’s story, the scholiast attributes ‘ἡ ἱστορία’ to Asklepiades. Given the variety of sources apparently present here, including a probable Hellenistic one, we should be wary of taking such ‘blanket references’ as giving an indication of what material actually belongs to the named author (see A. Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World (Oxford 2004), 93-4 and 159-63 and N. Villagra, ‘Commenting on Asclepiades ofTragilos: Methodological Considerations on a Fragmentary Mythographer’ (in press in BAR, 290-7). Jacoby however drew attention to another recension of the scholion, MS Z in van Thiel’s list of D-scholia, coming from Mythographicus Homericus, that has Proitos as king of Phrygia rather than Argos; Bellerophon wandering in Kilikia rather than Lykia; and Pegasos becoming the guardian of lightning rather than the carrier of Eōs (on Il. 6.155; see H. van Thiel, Scholia D in Iliadem (Cologne 2000), 265). N. Villagra suggests that the lectiones difficiliores in two of those cases (Phrygia, Eōs) may show that Asklepiades’s version is represented partially by each recension, and that Lykia is likely an early error for Kilikia based on the location of Bellerophontes’s physical trials. (N. Villagra, ‘Pègasos i el fragment 13 d’Asclepiades de Tràgilos’,Artes ad Humanitatem in E. Borrell & L. Ferreres (eds.), Artes ad Humanitatem (Barcelona 2010)). BNJ 12 F 14 FGrH Scholia AD Gen. II ad Homeri Iliadem 7.468 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC ᾽Ιησονίδης ᾽Εύνηος, τόν ρ᾽ ἔτεχ᾽ ῾Υψιπύλη ὑπ᾽ ᾽Ιήσονι· Λήµνιοι τὰς ἐξ ἔθους τῆι ᾽Αφροδίτηι θυσίας µὴ ἀποδιδόντες καθ᾽ αὑτῶν θάνατον ἐνοµοθέτησαν· τὴν γὰρ θεὸν ὀργισθεῖσαν λέγεται τοῖς µὲν ἀνδράσιν ἵµερόν τινα τῶν Θραικίων ἐµβαλεῖν γυναικῶν, τῶν δὲ ἰδίων ἀµελῆσαι καὶ καθέζεσθαι ἐφ᾽ ἡσυχίας. διέβαινον οὖν εἰς τὴν Θράικην περιέποντες καὶ σεβόµενοι1 τὰ ἐνταῦθα, ταῖς δὲ γυναιξὶ τῶν Ληµνίων ἔκτοπον λύσσαν ἐµπεσεῖν ὥστε ψηφίσασθαι πάσας ἀνδροκτονεῖν. καὶ µὴ τῆς ἐπιβουλῆς ταύτης ἀποτυχεῖν. γενοµένου δὲ τούτου τοῦ ἀτυχήµατος περὶ τοὺς ἄνδρας, λέγεται τὸν ᾽Ιάσονα µετὰ τῆς ᾽Αργοῦς ἐξοκείλαντα τῆι κρατίστηι πασῶν ῾Υψιπύληι µιγῆναι· ἐξ ἧς φασι γενέσθαι τὸν Εὐνηον. ἡ δὲ ἱστορία παρὰ ᾽Ασκληπιάδηι ἐν τοῖς Τραγωιδουµένοις. Translation ‘Eunēos son of Jason, to whom Hypsipyle gave birth by Jason’: the Lemnians had a law amongst themselves that, if they did not offer the customary sacrifices to Aphrodite, they would be put to death. It is said that the goddess, enraged at the men, afflicted them with a desire for Thracian women, and to neglect their own women; and then sat quietly by. So the men kept going to Thrace taking care of and honoring matters there, but an extraordinary rage came upon the wives of the Lemnians, with the result that they passed a vote to murder them all. And they did not fail in this plan. After this misfortune concerning the men, it is said that Jason, putting ashore with his ship the Argo, had intercourse with Hypsipyle, the most powerful of the women, from whom they say Eunēos was born. This story is found inAsklepiades in the Tragoidoumena. Apparatus Criticus 1 σεβόµενοι Jacoby, Dindorf : †σιµώµενοι van Thiel Commentary The scholiast for Iliad 7.468 attributes to Asklepiades what is perhaps a unique take on the story of the Lemnian women, who according to the 4th-century orator Kaukylos had been cursed by Aphrodite with an odor (δυσοσµία) that made them repulsive to their menfolk because they had slighted the goddess (BNJ 38 F 2). In the context of Jason’s meeting with the Lemnian Hypsipyle,Apollonios Rhodios tells us of the murder of the Lemnian men by their womenfolk and repeats the story that the Lemnian women had insulted Aphrodite (Argonautica 1.609-15). Asklepiades also tells of the murder of the Lemnian men, but blames them for not doing the customary sacrifices to Aphrodite, for which she imbued them with an uncontrollable lust for the Thracian women which caused them to reject their own women and thereby incur their deadly wrath. Jacoby’s commentary hints to the possibility of local myth here: since the motive of lust for the Thracian women is superfluous with their motive to escape the bad smell of their own women, perhaps the former belongs to a ‘selbständige lokale Geschichte’. Note too the absence of mention of Medea; she is also presumably behind Asklepiades’s interest in the story of the Argo and the Thracian king Phineus (F 22 and F 31) but she is not mentioned there either, again suggesting the possibility of a motivation beyond a mere interest in Medea as a stock character of tragedy. It is perhaps is worth mentioning that at least one ancient writer, Myrsilos of Methymna– who was in fact from Lesbos – claimed that Medea had caused the Lemnian women to become odorous out of rivalry with Jason’s Lemnian lover Hypsipyle (BNJ 477 F 1a); it is not impossible that this is an ‘authoritative’ local version against which Asklepiades posits his own. In his classic article, ‘Jason, Hypsipyle, and New Fire at Lemnos: a Study in Myth and Ritual’ (CQ2 20(1) (1970), 1-16), W Burkert reads the myth of the Lemnian women’s ‘bad smell’, with its bringing about of an ‘abnormal’ period in Lemnian social life, as a parallel myth to one found in Philostratos about a ‘new fire’ – which in turn may have reflected a purification ritual at Lemnos requiring the separation of women and men (similarly to the Thesmophoria). BNJ 12 F 15 FGrH Scholia ad Pindari Nemea 7.62 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC ᾽Ασκληπιάδης διὰ τῶν Τραγωιδουµένων φησὶν οὕτω· «περὶ µὲν οὖν τοῦ θανάτου (sc. τοῦ Νεοπτολέµου) σχεδὸν ἅπαντες οἱ ποιηταὶ συµφωνοῦσι, τελευτῆσαιµὲν αὐτὸν ὑπὸ Μαχαιρέως, ταφῆναι δὲ τὸ µὲν πρῶτον ὑπὸ τὸν οὐδὸν τοῦ νεώ, µετὰ δὲ ταῦτα Μενέλαον ἐλθόντα ἀνελεῖν καὶ τὸν τάφον ποιῆσαι ἐν τῶι τεµένει.» τὸν δὲ Μαχαιρέα φησὶν υἱὸν εἶναι <τοῦ> Δαίτα. Translation Asklepiades says this in the Tragoidoumena: ‘so then, about the death of Neoptolemos, nearly all the poets say the same thing, that he died at the hand of Machaireus, and that he was buried at first at the threshhold of the temple, and that after this, Menelaos came along and and took him up, and put the tomb in the sacred precincts.’ And he says that Machaireus is the son of Daitas. Commentary This scholion refers to Pindar, Nemean 7.62 (= Boekh 43: see commentary on F 3 above for numeration in Pindar), which reads ἔλασεν ἀντιτυχόντ᾽ ἀνὴρ µαχαίρᾳ, ‘a man struck [Neoptolemos] with a knife as he met him in a quarrel’. Neoptolemos’s murder by a man with a knife is also found in Euripides’s Andromache, where Orestes, out of rivalry over Hermione, lies about Neoptolemos to the Delphians, who as a result slay him (Asklepiades is also mentioned in a scholion to Euripides’s play, in the context of Neoptolemus and Orestes (see F 23)). R. Fowler points out in his forthcoming Early Greek Mythography 2 that, while most accounts of Neoptolemos’s murder present him in a negative light (e.g. in Pindar Paian 6.112-17 he is struck dead by Apollo at Delphi for killing Priam), Nemean 7 is part of a more positive tradition in which Neoptolemos has been killed in a quarrel that ensued over the flesh of his sacifice. Within this tradition there is controversy as to whether he was killed by the sacrificial knife, or µαχαίρα (perhaps in Pherekydes as a madness-induced suicide: see Fowler, Early Greek Mythography 2 on frr. 64, 135A), or by a man whose name connects clearly with it through popular etymology: Machaireus. As the wider context from which Jacoby’s fragment is excerpted shows (see N. Villagra, ‘Fragmentary Mythography as a Source: Neoptolemos at Delphi in the Tragodoumena’ (unpublished)), the scholiast for Nemean 7 upholds the story of the knife, and attributes to Asklepiades the claim in the Tragoidoumena that ‘nearly all the poets’ say that Neoptolemos was killed by a man named Machaireus. The death of Neoptolemos at the hands of Machaireus is extant only in later sources, Strabo, Geography 9.3.9 and Pseudo-Apollodoros, Epitome 6.24, but it turns up in scholia from Odyssey 4.4, which show that it was part of the plot of Sophokles’sHermione. Asklepiades’s next claim according to the scholiast – that Neoptolemos was buried at first under the threshhold of the temple (of Apollo) and then moved into the precints by Menelaos – is consistent with other accounts (Pherekydes, BNJ 3 F 64b and Pindar Nemean 7.44-7). The detail that he was buried under the threshhold of the temple exists elsewhere only in Pherekydes; given the frequency with which the Asklepiades and Pherekydes appear together in BNJ 12 (F 3, F 9, F 16, F 18, F 22, and F 31) it is plausible that Asklepiades included it. To him alone is given the detail of Menelaos’s removal of the body, reflecting perhaps the mythological cult motif of treating dead enemies as heroes (M. Visser, ‘Worship Your Enemy: Aspects of the Hero Cult in Ancient Greece’,HThR 75:4 (1982), 409-10; point and reference found in N. Villagra, ‘Neoptolemos at Delphi’). L. Woodbury (‘Neoptolemus at Delphi: Pindar, ‘Nem.’ 7.30 ff.’, Phoenix 33.2 (1979), 101 n. 28; 129) suggests that we are seeing traces of the earliest Neoptolemos cult here, before he had become a prominent figure of worship at Delphi. Jacoby ends the quote at τεµένει, but the φησὶ in the next line must refer to ‘Asklepiades’, and also gives a popular-etymological name for Machaireus’s father: Daitas, or ‘the feast-man’ (Callim. fr. 229.7, Strabo 9.3.9). Whether or not we believe any of this is a direct quote is a different matter. Telling against this is a number of factors, including the reliance of the Pindar scholia on Hellenistic compilers, most prominently Didymos and through him Aristarchos (H. Deas, ‘The Scholia Vetera to Pindar’, HSCP 42 (1931), 1-78), and the looseness with which the scholia refer to ancient authors in general (M. Lefkowitz’s comparison of two scholia of the A and V traditions on Olympic 10.45 demonstrates well ‘what has been lost in both traditions in the course of compilation and condensation’: M. Lefkowitz, ‘The Pindar Scholia’, AJP106.3 (1985), 270). BNJ 12 F 16 FGrH Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 2.6 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: 1st century BC Historian's Date: 4th century BC ῞Ηρα δὲ αἰτησαµένη παρὰ Διὸς τὴν βοῦν φύλακα αὐτῆς κατέστησεν ῎Αργον τὸν πανόπτην, ὃν Φερεκύδης µὲν ᾽Αρέστορος λέγει, ᾽Ασκληπιάδης δὲ ᾽Ινάχου. Translation Hera, having asked for the cow [i.e. Io] fromZeus, set the all-eyed Argos as guard over her, whom Pherekydes (BNJ 3 F 67) calls son ofArestor and Asklepiades calls son of Inachos. Commentary This is part of a larger passage in Pseudo-Apollodoros’s Bibliotheka that gives various genealogies for Argos πανόπτης, including those of Pherekydes, who says he was the son of Arestor (see Pherekydes BNJ 3 F 66 and commentary of W. Morison); Kekrops, who says he was son of Argos and Ismene; and Akousilaus, who says he was earth-born, as did Aischylos in Suppliants (305) andPrometheus Bound (567)) (see Akousilaus of Argos, BNJ 2 F 27 and commentary by D. Toye). Pseudo-Apollodoros cites Asklepiades for the story that Argos was the son of Inachos, whom he himself makes the distant ancestor of Argos; he also claims that the annalist Kastor and many tragedians say Io was daughter of Inachos. Since Inachos was the name of a river god local to Argos, the link between Inachos and Argos the all-seer itself suggests autochthony; it is perhaps not surprising that both Io, as priestess of the Argive Heraion, and Argos could be seen in various contexts as offspring of ‘Inachos’. For the complex role of the Io myth as both Argive and panHellenic, see e.g. J. Davison in D. Pozzi & J. Wickersham, Myth and the Polis (Ithaca, NY 1991) 52-65. BNJ 12 F 17 FGrH Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 3.7 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: 1st century BC Historian's Date: 4th century BC Μίνως … γήµας Πασιφάην τὴν ῾Ηλίου καὶ Περσηίδος ὡς <δὲ> ᾽Ασκληπιάδης φησί, Κρήτην τὴν ᾽Αστερίου θυγατέρα … Translation Minos … having married Pasiphae the daughter of Helios and Perseis. But Asklepiades says he married Krētē the daughter of Asterios ... Commentary Pseudo-Apollodoros follows the common view that Minos married Pasiphae (who is here called a daughter of Helios as she is elsewhere in Hellenistic and Roman literature: see, e.g. Apollonios,Argonautica 3.999; Pausanias 5.25.9; Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.736). The alternate story for which Pseudo-Apollodoros cites Asklepiades – that Minos married Krētē – is otherwise unknown. Pseudo-Apollodoros 3.1.2 tells us that Asterios was childless and married Europa after her abandonment by Zeus, adopting her three sons Minos, Sarpedon and Rhadymanthos. Diodoros4.60, on the other hand, makes Minos the son of Asterios, descendant of Doros, which gives KrētēDorian associations; he also makes Pasiphae the daughter of Helios and Krētē, which would make the latter Minos’s mother-in-law. (As Jacoby points out, the union of Minos and Asterios’s daughter Krētē in Pseudo-Apollodoros would be a marriage between step-siblings.) Pseudo-Apollodoros (Bibliotheca 3.11) gives Asterios as an alternate name of the Minotauros; Pausanias calls Minos’s offspring Asterion (2.31.1), as does the 4th-century BC writer Andron of Halikarnassos, BNJ 10 F 16b. If P. Andrews is correct that the Minos myth in all its variations is an astrological myth based on its sun and moon elements (‘The Myth of Europa and Minos,’ Greece & Rome2 16.1 (1969), 60-6), the union of Minos with Krētē daughter of Asterios would strengthen the connection between the island of Crete and the cosmos. It is unclear within which tragic context Asklepiades refers to Minos: Aischylos, Sophokles and Euripides all wrote plays on various aspects of Cretan myth. The link may be Pasiphae, seen e.g. in Sophokles Kretes, F 472e; with Daidalos, the subject of Sophokles’s Kamikoi (which may or may not be identical to hisDaedalus and/or Minos; see H. Lloyd-Jones, Sophocles Fragments (Cambridge, MA 1996, 65)); or Minos’s missing son Glaukos, which probably lies behind Aischylos’s Kressai (Cretan Women), Sophokles’s Manteis (‘Seers’) and Euripides’s Polyidus. For discussion see C. Collard, M. Cropp, and K. Lee, Euripides: Selected Fragmentary Plays 1 (Warminster 1995), 59. Two fragments from Asklepiades (F 8 and F 28) suggest yet another popular figure of tragic myth: Theseus. Of these four connections perhaps only Glaukos, whose myth is not strongly associated with theMinotaur, best fits the picture of a union between Minos and a woman other than Pasiphae. BNJ 12 F 18 FGrH Hyginus, Poeticon Astronomicon 2.21 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: 2nd century AD Historian's Date: 4th century BC Hyades … has autem Pherecydes Atheniensis Liberi nutrices esse demonstrat numero septem, quas etiam antea nymphas Dodonidas appellatas. harum nomina sunt haec: Ambrosia Eudora Phaesyle Coronis Polyxo Phaeo Dione. hae dicuntur a Lycurgo fugatae et Translation Hyades … Pherekydes of Athens (BNJ 3 F 90) says that these are nurses of Liber, seven in number, nymphs who were previously called Dodonidae. These are their names: Ambrosia,Eudora, Phaesyles, Coronis, Polyxo, Phaeo, andDione. These nymphs are said to have been praeter Ambrosiam omnes ad Thetym profugisse, ut put to flight by Lykourgos and, with the exception of ait Asklepiades; sed ut Pherecydes dicit, ad Thebas Ambrosia, all fled to Thetis, as Asklepiadessays. Liberum perlatum Inoni tradiderunt. However, Pherekydes says that they brought Liber to Thebes and handed him over to Ino. Commentary Hyginus’s (c. 64 BC-AD 17) discussion of the Hyades in Book 2.21 of his astronomical work, which he organized by constellations (on his authorship of this and the Fabulae see R. Smith and S. Trazaskoma, Apollodoros’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae (Indianapolis 2007), xlii-lv), dominates his entry on Taurus. He gives as one aition for the Bull (as an alternative to Euripides’s claim that the constellation was created when Europa safely made it to Crete) that Zeus put the image into the sky as an apology to Io, and that the Hyades comprise the outline its face (cuius oris effigiem quae continent stellae, Hyades appellantur; see also the scholiast (A, D codd. CHVLa+) on Homer,Iliad 18.486 (H. van Thiel, Scholia D in Iliadem (Cologne 2000), 499). For the origin of their name see LIMC 5.1, 544. Hyginus says that Pherekydes claimed there were seven Hyades (the accounts range from 2-7, from Hesiod to Servius: see LIMC 5.1, 544 for references) and was probably the first to conflate them with the Dodonidae, who suckled Dionysos (Pherekydes is followed by PseudoApollodoros, Bibliotheca 3.4.3 here). He also said that Zeus made them into stars to thank them for bringing Dionysos to Thebes and delivering him to Ino (see the longer fragment of this passage given at Pherekydes, BNJ 3 F 90d2). Pherekydes is cited as an authority as well in Photios, in two Homeric scholia, and in Eratosthenes (see Pherekydes BNJ 3 F 90a, 3 F 90b, 3 F 90c, F 90d1with William Morison’s commentary) for other aspects of the Hyades story, among which is the conflicting aition for the Hyades’s transformation into stars: that he pitied for them being pursued by Lykourgos (Scholiast (A, D codd. CHVLa) on Homer, Iliad 18.486 = BNJ 3 F 90b), the king of the Edonians whom Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 3.5.1, tells us rejected Dionysos and his followers. The latter story in fact connects well with the story Hyginus attributes here to Asklepiades: that all the Hyades except for Ambrosia had been expelled by Lykourgos and fled to Thetis. Nonnos, Dionysiaca Book 21 gives an expanded story of Ambrosia’s clash with Lykourgos and her status as Dionysos’s wet nurse. BNJ 12 F 19 FGrH Pseudo-Probus, Ad Vergilii Georgica 2.84 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: unknown Historian's Date: 4th century BC Idaeis Cyparissis] Cyparissum dicit cypressum. quidam dicunt a Cyparisso, qui in insula Cea, cum haberet cervum mansuetum quem unice diligebat et errantem in silvis ignarus iaculo traiecisset, inedia se necavit. quem quia nec consilio a morte nec viribus medicinae Apollo, qui eum inmoderate diligebat, revocare poterat, convertit in cupressum, arborem luctuosam. quidam putant, ut Asklepiades ait, Boream fuisse Celtarum regem, qui filiam Cyparissam amiserit et novum arboris huius genus primus in tumulo eius severit, ob eamque causam esse luctuosam cypressum. Translation ‘Idaeis Cyparissis’: Vergil calls the cypress Cyparissus. Some people say it was named for Cyparissus, on the island of Cea, who had a domesticated deer whom he adored above all and whom, wandering in the woods, he unknowingly struck with a javelin, upon which event he starved himself to death. BecauseApollo, who was exceedingly in love with him, was not able to call him back to life from death either by a plan of action nor by the strength of medicine, he converted him into a cypress, a weeping tree. Some believe, as Asklepiades says, that Boreas was the king of the Celts who lost his daughter Cyparissa and was the first to plant this new type of tree on her tomb, and that because of this the cypress is ‘weeping’. Commentary On Probus and Pseudo-Probus, see above on F 1. Alan Cameron in Greek Mythography in the Roman World (Oxford 2004), 186-7) emphasizes the popularity and diversity of versions (in different locales: e.g. Chios, Crete, Italy and Cea) of the Cyparissus tale in antiquity. Vergil mentions the cypress eight times, five of which produced commentary on the death of Cyparissus, only two of which commentaries are inspired by the wellknown funerary associations of the cypress tree: ‘The lack of consistency [among the commentaries] is one factor that leaps to the eye, but more significant…is the obvious importance attached to dinning at least one version into the heads of late Roman schoolboys.’ (Cameron, Greek Mythography, 187). All versions, however, seem to involve a male Cyparissus, a dead deer, a lover/lovers (Apollo, Silvanus, Apollo and Silvanus together, or with Zephyros added), and the dead Cyparissus transformed into a tree – except for Asklepiades’s (if his, early) version, in which the king of the Celts plants a new tree on the tomb of his daughter Cyparissa, henceforth producing an association between the cypress and mourning. Jacoby, however, finds the attribution to Asklepiades of Tragilos here doubtful, presumably because we have no evidence for Cyparissus (Kyparissos) until Roman times. BNJ 12 F 20 FGrH Bodleian Proverbs 374 Translation (Leutsch,Paroemiographus (Zenobius) 1, 83) Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC You pull down the moon for ἐπὶ σαυτῶι τὴν σελήνην καθαιρεῖς· ᾽Ασκληπιάδης φησὶ τὰς Θετταλὰς ἐκµαθούσας τὰς τῆς σελήνης κινήσεις προαγγέλλειν, ὡς yourself:Asklepiades says that the Thessalian women, having learned about ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν µέλλοι κατάγεσθαι, τοῦτο δὲ πράττειν οὐ χωρὶς τῆς αὐτῶν κακώσεως· ἢ γὰρ καταθύειν τῶν τέκνων ἢ τὸν ἕτερον τῶν the movements of the moon, announce that it is going to be dragged down by them, that ὀφθαλµῶν ἀπολλύειν· λέγεται γοῦν ἐπὶ τῶν κακὰ ποριζοµένων. they do not do this without their own Δοῦρις δέ φησιν ἀστρολόγον προαγορεύοντα τὰς τῆς σελήνης misfortune. For either they sacrificed one of ἐκλείψεις οὐκ εὖ ἀπαλλάξαι. their children or lost one of their eyes. The proverb applies, then, for those who bring evil upon themselves. And Douris says (BNJ 76 F 85) that an astrologer predicting the eclipses of the moon does not end up faring well. Commentary The association of the so-called ‘Thessalian trick’ of ‘pulling down the moon’ with the occurrence of eclipse is found in this passage of the 15th-century Bodleian codex of proverbs and in a shorter version in the collections of the 2nd-century AD paroemiographer Zenobios, Cent. 4.1 (E.L. von Leutsch, F.G. Schneidewin, Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum 1 (Göttingen 1839) 83); compare also Pseudo-Plutarch, Proverbs 2.13 (CPG 1.338); and the scholiast of Apollonios 4.59– 61a (although the proverb is not in Apollonios himself). On the paroemiographical tradition see W. Bühler, Zenobii Athoi proverbia 1 (Göttingen 1982). The quotations from Asklepiades and Douris together imply an interpretation of the Thessalian women as pretending to pull down (καθαιρεῖν) the moon during the opportune time of an lunar eclipse in order to trick unsuspecting audiences. A similar rationalization of the witches’ actions occurs in two passages in Plutarch (Coniugalia Praecepta 48 and De Defectu Oraculorum 13) and it has been assumed by, e.g., E.R. Dodds in his commentary on Plato, Gorgias 513a that ancient people believed the Thessalian women caused eclipses. Refuting this view, D.E. Hill has shown convincingly that the ancient sources (including a number of Roman sources like Martial, Horace and Propertius) do not on the whole demonstrate an ancient belief that women caused eclipses or did anything other than appear to pull the moon downwards (presumably through mirror tricks), as καθαιρεῖν must denote; furthermore, among other things, ancient witches would probably not have had the knowledge to predict eclipses, which were also less frequent than it is implied in the sources that the trick itself took place. (D.E. Hill, ‘The Thessalian Trick’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 116 (1973), 221-38; Dodds reference on 229). BNJ 12 F 21 FGrH Scholia ad Apollonii Translation Rhodii Argonautica 1.152 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC Νηλεὺς δὲ ἔσχεν παῖδας Neleus had three sons with Chloris: Nestor,Periklymenos, and Chromios. But from ἐκ µὲν Χλωρίδος Νέστορα different women he Περικλύµενον Χρόµιον· had Tauros, Asterios, Pylaon,Deimachos, Eurybios, Epileon, Phrasis,Antimenes, ἐκ δὲ διαφόρων γυναικῶν and Euagoras; and as Asklepiadessays, Alastor as well. And the Poet (Iliad 11.692) says: ‘for blameless Neleus had twelve sons.’ Ταῦρον ᾽Αστέριον Πυλάωνα Δηίµαχον Εὐρύβιον ᾽Επιλέοντα Φράσιν ᾽Αντιµένη Εὐαγόραν· ὡς δὲ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης φησί, καὶ ᾽Αλάστορα. καὶ ὁ Ποιητής «δώδεκα γὰρ Νηλῆος ἀµύµονος υἱέες ἦµεν». Commentary As the scholiast on Apollonios, Argonautica 1.156-60 notes, Homer mentions that Neleus had twelve sons (Iliad 11.692), although he appears to name thirteen figures (perhaps through scribal error; see below). Asklepiades is given as the source for the final name listed, Alastor. Here alone do we see the claim that Neleus had children with women other than Chloris. Homer provides additional information about Neleus and Chloris’s offspring in the Odyssey (11.285-9): δὲ Πύλου βασίλευε, τέκεν δέ οἱ ἀγλαὰ τέκνα, Νέστορά τε Χρόµιον τε Περικλύµενόν τ᾽ ἀγέρωχον. τοῖσι δ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἰφθίµην Πηρὼ τέκε, θαῦµα βροτοῖσι (‘[Khloris] was queen of Pylos, and bore for [Neleus] splendid children, Nestor and Chromios and lordly Periklymenos; in addition to these she bore the strong Pero, a wonder to mankind.’) Chloris is also identified as Meliboia, one of the Niobids, in Odyssey 11.281-2. Given the fact that the Odyssey passage and this scholion isolate the same three names – Nestor, Periklymenos and Chromios – we can perhaps imagine that our scholiast’s assertion that Khloris gave birth only to them represents a mere leap of logic from Homer’s words. More intriguing are the discrepancies among the sons’ names. The only other source that gives a complete list of the names of Neleus and Chloris’s offspring, including the daughter Pero, isPseudo-Apollodoros (Bibliotheca 1.9.9). The sons’ names as given by Pseudo-Apollodoros overlap very closely with those found in the scholiast’s, even with respect to order: Tauros, Asterios, Pylaon, Deimachos, Eurybios, Epilaos, Phrasios, Eurymenes, Euagoras, Alastor, Nestor and Periklymenos. (Modern scholars have naturally chosen the mss name-variants that allow these lists to line up, but the similarity in order is nonetheless suggestive). The only name missing from Pseudo-Apollodoros’s list is one of the three named by both Homer and the Apollonios’s scholiast: Chromios. Nestor is of course, as everywhere, the sole survivor among the brothers ofHerakles’s slaughter, and Apollonios describes the Argonaut Periklymenos as a strong man who was given the gift of shape-shifting by Poseidon (Argonautica 1.156-160); Pseudo-Apollodoros caps his list of Neleus’s sons with a short digression on Periklymenos’s gift and how he turned himself into a lion, a snake and a bee before being slain alongside all his brothers (except for Nestor) by Herakles. How did Chromios get lost between the time of the scholiast and Pseudo-Apollodoros? Asklepiades’s Alastor may give us a clue. Wendel adds the word ἤ to the phrase ὡς δὲ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης φησί to make the total properly twelve (‘ne tredecim filii sint pro duodecim’) so that the Greek reads ‘or as Asklepiades says, Alastor’; this is certainly plausible, although the scholiast perhaps simply miscounted from his sources. In any event, one wonders whether the distinction in word order between the scholiast and Pseudo-Apollodoros as well as the loss of Chromios is a consequence of displacement: in Pseudo-Apollodoros’s list, it looks as if the three names Nestor, Periklymenos and Chromios were added in the order found in the scholiast (but not in Homer) after Alastor, with the count of twelve sons causing the thirteenth name (Chromios) to drop off, suggesting that Pseudo-Apollodoros, who relied much on Apollonios ofRhodes, may have gotten the list directly from a source shared with the scholion and let go of a ‘thirteenth’ name he deemed least important. There is at least some evidence that by Hellenistic times Alastor had outstripped Chromios in mythological importance: Homer mentions three Alastors, only one of which is connected to Neleus, and there rather remotely: he is follower of Nestor (Iliad 4.295); however, in the 1st century BC Parthenios of Nikaia’s Erotica Pathemataappears a long story about an Alastor who was of the race of Neleus and desired Harpalyke, to whom Neleus had been betrothed, apparently partly based on Thrax by the Hellenistic poetEuphorion. Asklepiades’s interest in Neleus in this scholion is obviously in connection with Jason and Medea. He is also mentioned as part of Jason’s lineage in F 31 on the Argo; see below. BNJ 12 F 22 FGrH Scholia ad Apollonii Rhodii Argonautica 2.178 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC ᾽Αγηνορίδης ἔχε Φινεύς· ᾽Αγήνορος γὰρ παῖς ἐστιν, ὡς ῾Ελλάνικος, ὡς δὲ ῾Ησίοδός φησιν Φοίνικος τοῦ ᾽Αγήνορος καὶ Κασσιεπείας. ὁµοίως δὲ καὶ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης καὶ ᾽Αντίµαχος. καὶ Φερεκύδης φησίν … Translation ‘Phineus son of Agenor holds’: for he is a son ofAgenor, as Hellanikos (BNJ 4 F 95) says, but asHesiod (F 31) says, he is the son of Phoenix the son of Agenor and Kassiepeia. And likewiseAsklepiades and Antimachos. And Pherekydes(BNJ 3 F 86) says … Commentary Phineus figures elsewhere in Asklepiades’s fragments, most directly in F 31 on the Argo, but perhaps also indirectly to F 1 on Glaukos, who may have been part of an Aischylean tetralogy that included Glaukos Potnieus, the Persians, and a satyr-play on Prometheus (see F 1 commentary). The Apollonios scholiast is as in F 22 concerned with genealogy: he asserts that Phineus was the son of Agenor (as does Hyginus, Fabulae 19), while Hellanikos, Asklepiades and Antimachos (and perhaps Pherekydes: see discussion at V. Matthews, Antimachus of Colophon (Leiden 1996), 215) agree that he is the son of Phoenix, and therefore Agenor’s grandson. Pseudo-Apollodoros says that some say Phineus is son of Agenor, others that he is a son of Poseidon. (For the very long list of Poseidon’s offspring (mostly sons, with some daughters and some horses, see A Pease, ‘The Son of Neptune’, HSCP 54 (1943), 77-82). BNJ 12 F 23 FGrH Scholia ad Euripidis Andromacham 32 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC λέγει γὰρ ὥς νιν (sc. ῾Ερµιόνην) φαρµάκοις κεκρυµµένοις τίθηµ᾽ ἄπαιδα· ὁ µὲν Εὐριπίδης ἄπαιδα ἐκ Νεοπτολέµου φησὶν εἶναι. τὴν ῾Ερµιόνην. ὁ δὲ Λυσίµαχος † ταύτην παρ᾽ αἰνείου1 ὃς γράφει2«γήµαντα δ᾽ ῾Ερµιόνην τὴν Μενελάου καὶ Ἑλένης καὶ µετὰ ταῦτα Λεώνασσαν τὴν Κλεοδαίου τοῦ ῞Υλλου, ἐξ ἐκείνης µὲν γενέσθαι Μολοσσόν, ὧι ὁνωνυµον τὴν χώραν καὶ τοὺς ἄνδρας Μολοσσοῦς κληθῆναι, ἐκ δὲ τῆς Λεωνάσσης Πάνδαρον Γένοον Δωριέα Πέργαµον Εὐρύλοχον»· ταῦτα µὲν Λυσίµαχος οὕτως. Φιλοκλῆς δὲ ὁ τραγωιδοποιὸς καὶ Θέογνις προεκδοθῆναί φασιν ὑπὸ Τυνδάρεω τὴν ῾Ερµιόνην τῶι ᾽Ορέστηι καὶ ἤδη ἐγκυµονοῦσαν ὑπὸ Μενελάου δοθῆναι Νεοπτολέµωι καὶ γεννῆσαι ᾽Αµφικτύονα· ὕστερον δὲ Διοµήδει συνοικῆσαι. Σωσιφάνης δὲ καὶ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης φασὶν ἐξ αὐτῆς Νεοπτολέµωι ᾽Αγχίαλον γενέσθαι· Δεξιὸς δὲ Φθῖον· ᾽Αλέξανδρος δὲ Πηλέα· Σκληριὰς δὲ ἐκ µὲν ᾽Ανδροµάχης Μεγαπένθην, ἐκ δὲ ῾Ερµιόνης ᾽Αγέλαον. Translation For she says that I make her childless with secret poisons: Euripides says that Hermionewas childless from her union with Neoptolemos. But Lysimachos (BNJ 382 F 10b) … (corrupt) who writes that having married Hermione the daughter of Menelaos and Helen, and after that having married Leonassa the daughter ofKleodaios the son of Hyllas, from HermioneMolossos was born, after whom Molossia and the Molossian people were named, but from Leonassa Pandaros, Genoos, Dorieus, Pergamos, and Eurylochos were born. Lysimachos says these things thusly. But Philokles the tragic poet (TGrF 24 F 2) and Theognis (TGrF 28 F 2; alsoBNJ 526 F 2 (dub.)) say Hermione was already betrothed by Tyndareus to Orestes and that was given, pregnant, by Menelaos to Neoptolemos and gave birth to Amphiktyon, and that later she lived with Diomedes. But Sosiphanes (TGrF92 F 7) and Asklepiades say from her Neoptolemos fathered a son Anchialos. Dexiossays that she had a son Phthion, Alexander that the son was ‘Peleus’. Sklerias says that fromAndromache was born Megapenthes, and from Hermione he fathered Agelaos. Apparatus Criticus 1 2 ταὺτα ἱστορεῖ Schwartz; τὸν δεῖνα παρατίθεται Wilamowitz οὕτως γράφων Schwartz Commentary This scholion to Euripides’s Andromacha lists a long number of counter-claims to the tragedian’s assertion that Hermione died childless – attesting for one to the great popularity of her love triangle with Orestes and Neoptolemos (and her other possible husbands), and to the fact that disagreement on the matter was as old as the earliest tragedians or writers about tragedy. The beginning of the quotation of Lysimachos is corrupt. According to Wilamowitz’ emendation (see the footnote), the scholion would mean ‘But Lysimachos adduces X (name lost), who writes ...’, and the fragment could only indirectly be attributed to Lysimachos (an ‘Alexandrian’ scholar either by trade or by ethnicity (see G. Damschen, Lysimachus [6] , BNP 8 (Leiden 2006) , 42); it is therefore not possible to know whether Lysimachos agreed or disagreed with the writer he is quoting. The 5th-century tragedians Philokles and Theognis claim that Hermione was already pregnant with Orestes’s child (named Amphiktyon) when she was given to Neoptolemos (similarly to the fragmentary Hermione of Sophokles (see A. Sommerstein, D. Fitzpatrick and T. Talboy, Sophocles: Selected Fragmentary Plays 1 (Oxford 2006), 6-7); Sosiphanes (whether of Syracuse or the one named among the ‘Pleias’, or Alexandrian constellation of Seven Poets: both are from the second half of the 4th century) and the 4th-century Asklepiades both agree that her child came from Neoptolemos and was named Anchialos; we are also given variants from two tragedians of uncertain date, Dexios and Sklerias, as well as an Alexander who was perhaps the 3rd-century poet. There does not seem to me to be a compelling reason to doubt the inclusion of this fragment under Asklepiades of Tragilos, as Jacoby does. BNJ 12 F 24 FGrH Scholia ad Euripidis Hecubam 1273 (Tzetzes,Lycophron 315 ) Subject: genre: epigram Source Date: various Historian's Date: 270 BC Κυνὸς ταλαίνης σῆµα, ναυτίλοις τέκµαρ· περὶ τοῦ κυνὸς σήµατος καὶ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης φησίν ὅτι «κυνὸς καλοῦσι δυσµόρου σῆµα.» Translation ‘A tomb of a wretched dog, a sign for sailors’: about the tomb of a dog, and Asklepiades says ‘they call it a tomb of an ill-fated dog.’ Commentary Scholars from E. Schwartz (Scholia in Euripidem 1 (Berlin 1887), 90) onward, including Jacoby, have accepted this as a fragment of the epigrammatist Asklepiades of Samos. For discussion see A. Sens, Asclepiades of Samos (Oxford 2010), 341-2. BNJ 12 F 25 FGrH Scholia ad Euripidis Orestem 1645 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: unknown Historian's Date: 4th century BC ὁ δὲ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης ἐν ᾽Αρκαδίαι φησὶ τὸν ᾽Ορέστην ὑπὸ ὄφεως ἀναιρεθῆναι ἑβδοµήκοντα ἐτῶν. Translation Asklepiades says that Orestes was killed by a snake when he was seventy. Commentary At Euripides’s Orestes 1645, Apollo tells Orestes that he must go into a year-long exile in theParrhasian Plain (in Arkadia) before returning to Athens to stand trial for his mother’s murder. Our scholion provides the detail that he died at 70, and of a snake-bite. Another scholiast forOrestes 1645 quotes Asklepiades as saying that Orestes died ‘here’, meaning Arkadia (= 1.236.23 Schwartz; the fragment appears in Pherekydes, BNJ 3 F 135); Herodotos 1.67 also tells us that Orestes died in Arkadia. Pherekydes himself however says he died in Argos (BNJ 3 F 135). Pseudo-Apollodoros, Epit. 6.28 recorded the snake-bite death. As for Orestes’s age at death: the number 70 appears in Velleius Paterculus 1.1.3 but as the number of years Orestes reigned (he died at 90). Jacoby calculated Orestes’s age against other mythical events (e.g. the Trojan war, Agamemnonand Aigisthos’s deaths) in his commentary on Hellanikos of Lesbos, BNJ 4 F 32. The idea of Orestes’s exile presumably spawned the idea that he and/or his son and grandson Penthilos and Gras were colonizers: for various versions, see J. Hall, Hellenicity (Chicago 2002), 72. For Orestes’s possible importance in Spartan-(Arkadian) Tegean political relations, see I. Malkin,Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (Cambridge 2003), 29. BNJ 12 F 26 FGrH Scholia Q ad Homeri Odysseam 10.2 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC Αἴολος ῾Ιπποτάδης· τρεῖς γὰρ Αἰόλους φασὶ γεγενῆσθαι· πρῶτον τὸν τοῦ ῞Ελληνος· δεύτερον τὸν ἐξ ῾Ιππότου καὶ Μελανίππης· τρἰτον τὸν ἐκ Ποσειδῶνος καὶ ῎Αρνης. πρὸς τοῦτον δέ φησιν ὁ ᾽Ασκληπιάδης <τὸν ᾽Οδυσσέα ἐλθεῖν>, τὸν ἐκ Ποσειδῶνος. φυλάσσει δὲ ῞Οµηρος τὸ εἰπεῖν ἐξ ῾Ιππότου. Translation ‘Aiolos son of Hippotes’: for they say that there were three Aioloi. The first was the son ofHellen. The second was the son of Hippotes andMelanippe. The third was the son of Poseidonand Arne. Asklepiades says that Odysseus came to the latter, the one born from Poseidon. ButHomer keeps the story of his parentage from Hippotes. Commentary ‘They say that there were three Aioloi’: the scholiast does not give an attribution for Aiolos son of Hellen, but here we see the standard view found in, e.g. Hesiod, Catalogue of Women F 9.2 (and possibly F 10a.31); Euripides, Melanippe F 481.2l and Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 1.7.3. Aiolos son of Hippotes is found in Homer, although he does not mention Melanippe. The third Aiolos, son of Poseidon, is found in Asklepiades; whether he also mentions Arne is uncertain, since the scholiast tells us only that Odysseus came to him. In the course of making Boiotos and Aiolos (eponymous ancestors of the Boiotians and Aiolians, respectively) brothers, Diodorosrationalizes the genealogical relationship among the three Aioloi (4.67): the oldest is the son of Hellen; the second is his great grandson through his son Mimas’s son Hippotes, with Melanippe; and through Aiolos’s daughter Arne and Poseidon a third Aiolos and his twin Boiotos were born. Asklepiades’s mention of Odysseus in this fragment has figured in the debate over the interpretation of a fragment of Stesichoros (?) which refers to ‘Aiolos’s cousin’ tending a corpse; H. Lloyd-Jones interprets this ‘cousin’ as Odysseus himself, which depends on interpreting the corpse as that of Aiolid Misenos (originally Odyssean, then transferred to Aeneas), which might explain the oddness of refering to Odysseus in terms of Aiolos, as well as also taking Odysseus as the son of the Aiolid Sisyphos (rather than, most commonly, Laertes) and Sisyphos as the halfbrother of Melanippe (‘The Cousin of Aiolos Hippotades (Stesichorus (?), P.Oxy. 3876, Fr. 62)’,ZPE 1991 bd 87 297-300); M. Haslam is skeptical on a number of counts, including the fact that a ‘Sisyphean’ Odysseus would not be a positive figure: ‘Aiolos’s Cousin,’ ZPE 1991 bd 88, 2979; G. Schade concurs (G. Schade, Stesichoros: Papyrus Oxyrhyncus 2359, 3876, 2619, 2803 (Leiden 2003), 107 n. 122). BNJ 12 F 27 FGrH Scholia TV ad Homeri Odysseam 11.269 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC καὶ Μεγάρην Κρείοντος ὑπερθύµοιο θύγατρα, τὴν ἔχεν ᾽Αµφιτρύωνος υἱός· γηµαµένη ῾Ηρακλεῖ παῖδας ἴσχει Θηρίµαχον καὶ Κρεοντιάδην καὶ Δηικόωντα· βαδίζοντος δὲ αὐτοῦ εἰς ῞Αιδου ἐπὶ τὸν τοῦ κυνὸς ἆθλον, Λύκος ὁ τῶν Θηβῶν βασιλεὺς πεισθεὶς ῞Ηραι καταστέφει τοὺς ῾Ηρακλέους παῖδας ἵνα θύσηι· οὐ γὰρ αὐτὸν ἐπανη´ξειν ὤιετο. παραγενόµενος δὲ ῾Ηρακλῆς ἀναιρεῖ αὐτὸν καὶ τοὺς ἐκείνου παῖδας· µανεὶς δὲ διὰ τὴν ῞Ηραν κτείνει τοὺς ἰδίους· ἔµελλε δὲ καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν ᾽Ιφικλέα, εἰ µὴ ἔφθασεν ᾽Αθηνᾶ κωλύσασα. ἡ δὲ ἰστορία παρὰ ᾽Ασκληπιάδηι Translation ‘And Megara, the daughter of haughty Kreion, who was married to the son of Amphitryon’: having married Herakles, Megara gave birth to sons Therimachos and Kreontiades andDeikoon. When Herakles went to Hades for the labor of the hound, Lykos the king of Thebeswas persuaded by Hera to wreathe the sons of Herakles in order to sacrifice them. For he did not think that Herakles would return. When Herakles was back, he killed Lykos and his children. But driven mad by Hera Herakles also killed his own children. He would also have killed his brother Iphikles if Athena had not prevented it. And this story comes fromAsklepiades. Commentary As Jacoby points out, it is not clear what part of this Homeric scholiast’s story about Megara and Herakles belongs to Asklepiades, but the story that Herakles almost killed his brother Iphikles is not found elsewhere (although according to Pseudo-Apollodoros Herakles killed two of Iphikles’s sons: Bibliotheca 2.4.12; Diodoros mentions that Herakles almost killed Iolaos, a seer and son of Iphikles: 4.11.1). Furthermore, this particular list of Megara’s sons Therimachos, Kreontiades and Deikoon is unique to this scholion, although the combinations of names, identities, and number of the children vary throughout Herakles’s mythography; see, e.g. the Scholiast (BD) onPindar, Isthmian 4.104g (= Pherekydes, BNJ 3 F 14) with W. Morison’s commentary and T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth (Baltimore 1993), 380. Lykos first appears in Euripides’s Herakles as usurper to the Theban throne; P. Grimal (The Dictionary of Classical Mythology [trans. with corrections] (Oxford 1996), 265) suggests that this character is based on a mythical ancestor who once ruled Thebes, the Euboian Lykos, brother ofNykteus (see Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 3.5.5). In all versions Herakles is driven insane by Hera and kills his children, but while in Euripides this occurs amidst his labors for Eurystheus(not fully explained), elsewhere Herakles’s murder of his children is what led to the labors (e.g. Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 2.4.12). Nowhere else is the murder of Lykos’s children mentioned. Euripides, however, presents Herakles’s murder of his own children as a case of (maddened) mistaken identity: he believed they belonged to Eurystheus, who assigned him his labors. The scholiast seems to have simply conflated Herakles’s two tormentors, who both appear in Euripides’s play. BNJ 12 F 28 FGrH Scholia V ad Homeri Odysseam 11.321 Translation Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC Φαίδρην· Θησεὺς ὁ Αἰγέως ἔχων παῖδα ῾Ιππόλυτον ἐξ ‘Phaidra’: Theseus son of Aigeus, who had a sonHippolytos from the Amazon Antiope, wed Phaidra, ᾽Αµαζόνος ᾽Αντιόπης ἔγηµε Φαίδραν τὴν Μίνωος θυγατέρα τοῦ τῶν Κρητῶν βασιλέως. εὐλαβούµενος δὲ the daughter of Minos king of theCretans. On guard against any treachery on the part of the stepmother, µητρυιᾶς ἐπιβουλὴν πέµπει ἐξ ᾽Αθηνῶν τὸν υἱὸν ῾Ιππόλυτον Τροιζηνίων ἄρχειν – ἦν γὰρ αὐτῶι διὰ τὴν Theseus sends his son Hippolytos from Athens to rule Πιτθέως Αἴθραν µητρώια τις ἀρχὴ δεῦρο. Φαῖδρα δὲ over the Troizenioi, for he had some maternal right of ἐρωτικῶς διατεθεῖσα τοῦ ῾Ιππολύτου, σφοδρῶς ἐπ᾽ αὐτῶι τηκοµένη τὸ µὲν πρῶτον ἱερὸν ᾽Αφροδίτης ἐν ᾽Αθήναις ἱδρύσατο τὸ νῦν ῾Ιππολύτειον καλούµενον, εἰς Τροιζῆνα δὲ ὕστερον παραγενοµένη διενοεῖτο πείθειν τὸν νεανίσκον ὅπως αὐτῆι µιγείη. χαλεπῶς δ᾽ ἐκείνου προσδεξαµένου τὸν λόγον, λέγεται φοβηθεῖσαν αὐτὴν ἀντιστρέψαι τὴν αἰτίαν καὶ πρὸς Θησέα διαβάλλειν ὡς ῾Ιππολύτου πειρῶντος αὐτήν. ὁ δὲ τριῶν ὥς φασιν αὐτῶι παρὰ τοῦ Ποσειδῶνος εὐχῶν οὐσῶν, ὁµολογήσαντος ὅτι ἂν εὐξηται συντελέσειν, πιστεύσας τῆι Φαίδραι µίαν τούτων ἠιτήσατο παρ᾽ α<ὐτοῦ τὸν> τοῦ παιδὸς ὄλεθρον. ἐκεῖνον µὲν οὖν ὁµολογοῦσι τὸ ἅρµα γυµνάζοντα παραφανέντος ἐξαίφνης ἀπὸ τῆς θαλάσσης ταύρου καὶ ταραχθέντων τῶν ἵππων ἑλκόµενον ἀποθανεῖν· τὴν δὲ Φαίδραν φανερᾶς γενοµένης τὴς διαβολῆς ἀπάγξασθαι. ἡ δὲ ἱστορία παρὰ ᾽Ασκληπιάδηι. rule there through Aithra the daughter ofPittheos. Phaidra, having become lustful towards Hippolytos and seriously consumed with love of him, at first built a shrine dedicated to Aphrodite in Athens (the one now called the Hippolyteion), and later when she was inTroizen she cultivated a plan to persuade the young man to have intercourse with her. Hippolytos responded harshly to her overture, and it is said that Phaidra, having become afraid, turned the blame onto him, and slandered him to Theseus, saying that he made an attempt on her. They say Theseus had three wishes from Poseidon, who had agreed to do whatever he prayed for; believing Phaidra, Theseus asked for one of these wishes from him: the destruction of his child. So, as is generally agreed, while Hippolytos was training on his chariot a bull suddenly appeared from the sea, the horses were panicked, and he was dragged to his death. But when her slander came to light, Phaidra hanged herself. This is the story told byAsklepiades. Commentary If we understand Asklepiades as the main source for this scholiast’s version of the Phaidra story, it seems that the mythographer took his cue not from the single extant Greek tragedy on the subject, Euripides’s Hippolytos Stephanopheros, but rather from one of two lost plays, Euripides’sHippolytos Kalyptomenos and Sophokles’s Phaidra. The hypothesis to Hippolytos Kalyptomenossuggests that, unlike in the extant play, Phaidra is cast in quite a negative light as a relentessly lustful, vengeful stepmother rather than a victim of Aphrodite who feels threatened by a chaste but also intolerant Hippolytos. Asklepiades’s summary also has much in common with Seneca’sPhaedra, presumably influenced by the same lost Athenian plays (see T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth(Baltimore 1993), 285-7). Diodoros’s version (4.62) also presents the ‘negative’ Phaidra, as doesApollodoros (Epitome 1.18-19), although he mentions Hippolytos’s hatred for women. Plutarch in his Theseus, while dismissing the story that the Amazon Antiope brought an army against Theseus after he left her for Phaidra, verifies that the historians and tragedians are in agreement on the story of Phaidra and Hippolytos, but calls it simply ‘the disasters that befell [Theseus’s] wife and son’ (τὰς δὲ περὶ ταύτην καὶ τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ δυστυχίας) so it is unclear to which version he is referring. The Hippolytos Stephanopheros also has a different setting from the lost plays, which take place in Athens: Troizen, where Hippolytos was historically a very important cult figure (W.S. Barrett, Hippolytos (Oxford 1964), 7-9). H. Jeny suggests that Euripides’s change in setting was meant to exalt Hippolytos in the land that esteemed him most (H. Jeny, ‘Troizen as the Setting of Hippolytos Stephanephoros’, AJP 110:3 (1989), 400-4). (Asklepiades and Diodoros mention Troizen only as a partial setting: the former says that Hippolytos was sent to rule over its citizens (Τροιζηνίων ἄρχειν); the latter that he was sent to be raised among the brothers of Aithra (Theseus’s mother) (4.62.1).) Pausanias 1.22.1, 3) suggests that there was a cult of Aphrodite Pandemos near the grave of Hippolytos; this is corroborated by two inscriptions found on the face of the Akropolis to a temple of Aphrodite ‘near Hippolytos’ (IG 13, 383, l. 234-5; IG 12, 324, 1. 66). Whether these were separate buildings or identified as one, as the scholiast suggests, is not certain. Asklepiades makes Phaidra the daughter of Minos. The line in question, Odyssey 11.321 (Φαίδρην τε Πρόκριν τε ἴδον καλήν τ᾽ Ἀριάδνην), does not make the relationship between Phaidra and Minos clear, although the labelling of Ariadne as the daughter of Minos in the next line (11.322: κούρην Μίνωος ὀλοόφρονος) perhaps suggests that the audience would construe or know Phaidra as his daughter as well. T. Gantz points to the oddness of having Theseus marry Ariadne’s sister after his treatment of her and notes that it ‘has the look of a political union fostered by Athenian mythographers’ (Gantz, Early Greek Myth, 285), which is validated by Diodoros’s emphasis on Deukalion’s role in the marriage of his sister to Theseus as part of an alliance between Crete and Athens (4.62.1). According to Pausanias (1.18.8), the Athenians believed that Deukalion built the sanctuary of Olympian Zeus in Athens and that he was buried in a nearby grave. As for Theseus’s wish from Poseidon: T.D. Kohn suggests that Theseus’s ‘three wishes’ from Poseidon – which appear first in Euripides’s Hippolytos Stephenopheros and thereafter only in Seneca’s Phaedra (where the playwright refers to Theseus’s wish for the death of Hippolytos as his ‘final wish’ (supremum … munus, l. 949–50), a scholion to Euripides, and this scholion), and all only in the context of Hippolytos – were invented by Euripides and used for different strategic purposes by Euripides and Seneca (T.D. Kohn, ‘The Wishes of Theseus’, TAPA 138:2 (2008) 37992). BNJ 12 F 29 FGrH Scholia V ad Homeri Odysseam 11.326 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC στυγερήν τ᾽ ᾽Εριφύλην, ἣ χρυσὸν φίλου ἀνδρὸς ἐδέξατο τιµήεντα· ᾽Αµφιάραος ὁ Οἰκλέους γήµας ᾽Εριφύλην τὴν Ταλαοῦ καὶ διενεχθεὶς ὑπέρ τινων πρὸς ῎Αδραστον καὶ πάλιν διαλυθεὶς ὁρκούµενος ὡµολόγησεν ὑπὲρ ὧν ἂν διαφέρωνται πρὸς ἀλλήλους αὐτός τε καὶ ῎Αδραστος ἐπιτρέψειν ᾽Εριφύλην κρίνειν καὶ πείθεσθαι αὐτῆι. µετὰ δὲ ταῦτα γινοµένης τῆς ἐπὶ Θήβας στρατείας, ὁ µὲν ᾽Αµφιάραος ἀπέτρεπε τοὺς ᾽Αργείους καὶ τὸν ἐσόµενον ὄλεθρον προεµαντεύετο, <῎Αδραστος δὲ ἤθελε µάχην>. λαβοῦσα δὲ ἡ ᾽Εριφύλη τὸν ὅρµον παρὰ τοῦ Πολυνείκους τὸν τῆς ᾽Αρµονίας, προσέθετο τοῖς περὶ τὸν ῎Αδραστον βιαζοµένοις τὸν ᾽Αµφιάραον. <τὸν δὲ ᾽Αµφιάραον> ἰδόντα τὴν τῶν δώρων ὑποδοχὴν καὶ πολλὰ τὴν ᾽Εριφύλην αἰτιασάµενον, αὐτὸν µὲν ἐξορµῆσαι πρὸς τὴν στρατείαν, ᾽Αλκµαίωνι δὲ προστάξαι µὴ πρότερον µετὰ τῶν ἐπιγόνων ἐπὶ Θήβας πορεύεσθαι πρὶν ἀποκτεῖναι τὴν µητέρα. ταύτα δὲ πάντα δρᾶσαι λέγεται τὸν ᾽Αλκµαίωνα, καὶ διὰ τὴν µητροκτονίαν µανῆναι. τοὺς δὲ θεοὺς ἀπολῦσαι τῆς νόσου αὐτὸν διὰ τὸ ὁσίως ἀπαµύνοντα τῶι πατρὶ τὴν µητέρα κατακτεῖναι. ἡ ἱστορία παρὰ ᾽Ασκληπιάδηι. Translation ‘hated Eriphyle, who accepted gold as a price for her beloved husband.’: Amphiaraos, the son ofOikles, having married Eriphyle the daughter ofTalaos and quarrelled about something or other with Adrastos, and then made up with him, agreed on oath to refer to Eriphyle for arbitration on whatever matters he and Adrastos differed towards each other, and follow her decision. Afterwards, when the campaign against Thebes was under way, Amphiaraos tried to deter the Argives and prophesied the coming destruction but, <Adrastos wished for war.> Eriphyle, accepting the necklace of Harmonia from Polyneikes, Adrastos who were pressuring Amphiaros. <Amphiaros> seeing the reception of the gifts and with many recriminations against Eriphyle, himself set out on the campaign, but commanded his son Alkmaion not to go with the Epigonoi to Thebes before killing his mother. It is said that Alkmaion did all of this, and went insane because of the matricide. But the gods released him from his illness because in killing his mother he was avenging his father in a pious way. This story is told by Asklepiades. Commentary In addition to the line from the Odyssey on which this scholiast is commenting, the story of Eriphyle is mentioned only one other time in Homer, in reference to Amphiaros’s death because of ‘gifts to a woman’ (Od. 15.246-7). The motif of the necklace appears in sixth-and 5th-century vases (T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth (Baltimore 1993), 507). The story attributed to Asklepiades here is perhaps that found in the lost Aischylos’s Epigonoi and Sophokles’s Epigonoi (the persistent scholarly view being that the Eriphyle of which we have fragments is the same play as theEpigonoi, but Lloyd-Jones leaves open the possibility of a trilogy including Epigonoi, Eriphyle, andAlkmaion with Amphiaraus as the satyr-play: H. Lloyd-Jones, Sophocles: Fragments (Cambridge, MA 1996; reprinted with corrections and additions 2003), 723); Euripides’s Alkmaion is also a likely source. Pindar mentions the marriage of Eriphyle and Amphiaros (Nem. 9.16-17) after the conflict between Adrastos and Amphiaros is established; in Asklepiades Eriphyle and Amphiaros are already married before the conflict. More interesting perhaps is the placement of the murder of Eriphyle. Asklepiades put it before the expedition against Thebes. Reconstructing Sophokles’s play from Accius, who also wrote an Epigoni or Eriphyle, A. Kiso follows Asklepiades and rejectsPseudo-Apollodoros’s view that Alkmaion was convinced to do this only after Eriphyle had taken a second bribe (A. Kiso, The Lost Sophocles (New York 1984), 27-8). The story of the expiation of Alkmaion is found only in Asklepiades and in Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 3.7.5, where he is purified twice, first by Phegeus and then by Acheloos. BNJ 12 F 30 FGrH Scholia V ad Homeri Odyssey 11.582 Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC καὶ µὴν Τάνταλον εἰσεῖδον· Τάνταλος Διὸς καὶ Πλουτοῦς συνδιατρίβων τοῖς θεοῖς καὶ συνεστιώµενος αὐτοῖς ἀπλήστως διετέθη. κλέψας γὰρ τὸ νέκταρ καὶ τὴν ἀµβροσίαν, οὐκ ἐξὸν αὐτῶι, ἔδωκε τοῖς ὁµήλιξιν. ἐφ᾽ οἷς ἀγανακτήσαντα τὸν Δία ἐκβαλεῖν αὐτὸν τῆς ἐν οὐρανῶι διαίτης καὶ ἐξαρτῆσαι ἐπ᾽ ὄρους ὐψηλοῦ ἐκδεδεµένον τῶν χειρῶν, καὶ τὴν Σίπυλον, ἔνθα ἐκεκήδευτο, ἀνατρέψαι. ἡ ἱστορία παρὰ ᾽Ασκληπιάδηι. Translation ‘and indeed they saw Tantalos’: Tantalos the son of Zeus and Plouto, although he passed time with the gods and feasted alongside them, he was insatiable. For, having stolen their nectar and ambrosia – which was forbidden, he gave them to his age-mates. Enraged, Zeus banished him from his heavenly existence, and hung him on a high mountain, chained up by his hands, and overturned Sipylos, where he was buried. This story comes from Asklepiades. Commentary Tantalos son of Zeus and Plouto appears in Homer only in Odyssey 11.528-92, to which this scholiast refers. In Homer’s version, Tantalos is punished eternally by being forced to stand in a pool that disappears when he tries to sip from it, and by an overhanging tree whose branches continually lift fruit out of his grasp. The Nostoi (fr. 4 PEG) appears to have a completely different story, in which Tantalos, favored by the gods and granted a wish by Zeus, request to live like the gods. Zeus grants this wish while also devising a punishment that prevents him from enjoying it: Tantalos cannot reach towards the items sitting on the table before him lest a rock suspended above his head fall on him, found in a host of other early authors such as Archilochos (F 91 in M. West, Iambi et Elegi Graeci 1 (Oxford 1990)), Alkman (F 79 in M. Davies, Poetae Melici Graeci Fragmenta (Oxford 1991)), Alkaios (F 365 in E.-M. Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus (Amsterdam 1971)), and Pherekydes (BNJ 3 F 38); for full references and Tantalos’s complex mythography, see T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth (Baltimore 1993), 531-36. In Pindar’s much more highly embellished version of Tantalos’s story (complete with his attempt to kill his son Pelops) in Olympian 1.54-64, Tantalos is again punished by the rock, this time for sharing the food of the gods with his friends – as Jacoby notes, a seeming variation on the Prometheus story, and present in this Homeric scholion. Asklepiades’ punishment fits neither Homer’s nor Pindar’s version but is possibly inspired byEuripides’s Orestes (although he perhaps had access to some other version: Gantz, Greek Myth, 533). The play begins with Elektra’s lament over the house of Atreus, beginning with Tantalos who floats in the air with a rock hanging over his head. Asklepiades includes the bodily suspension mid-air, but no suspended rock, although one may wonder whether the notion of the ‘overturned Sipylos’ is a stand-in of sorts for the threatening rock, as it is only found here. BNJ 12 F 31 FGrH Scholia V ad Homeri Odysseam 12.69 Translation Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC ᾽Αργὼ πασιµέλουσα· Τυρὼ ἡ Σαλµωνέως ἔχουσα ‘Argo, a care to all’: Tyro the daughter ofSalmoneus, having two children from Poseidon– Neleus and Peleus – δύο παῖδας ἐκ Ποσειδῶνος, Νηλέα τε καὶ Πελίαν, ἔγηµε Κρηθέα καὶ ἴσχει παῖδας ἐξ αὐτοῦ married Kretheus and had three children from him, Aison, Pheres andAmythaon. According to Hesiod (F τρεῖς, Αἴσονα καὶ Φέρητα καὶ ᾽Αµυθάονα. 18), Jasonwas the son of Aison and Polymele, but according Αἴσονος δὲ καὶ Πολυµήλας καθ᾽ ῾Ησίοδον to Pherekydes (BNJ 3 F 104) he was the son of Aison and γίνεται ᾽Ιάσων, κατὰ δὲ Φερεκύδην ἐξ ᾽Αλκιµέδης. τελευτῶν δὲ οὗτος καταλείπει τοῦ Alkimede. When Aison died he left his brother Pelias as the guardian of the child, also entrusting the kingdom to him, in παιδὸς ἐπίτροπον τὸν ἀδελφὸν ΙΙελίαν, order that he give it to his son when he was grown. But ἐγχειρίσας αὐτῶι καὶ τὴν βασιλείαν, ἵνα αὐξηθέντι τῶι υἱῶι παράσχηι. ἡ δὲ τοῦ ᾽Ιάσονος Jason’s mother Alkimede, out of fear gave him to Cheiron the Centaur to raise. When he had grown to be a young man, µήτηρ ᾽Αλκιµέδη δείσασα δίδωσιν αὐτὸν τρέφεσθαι Χείρωνι τῶι Κενταύρωι. τραφεὶς δὲ Jason went toIolkos demanding his ancestral kingdom from Pelias. But Pelias said that he first had to bring the golden καὶ ἡβήσας ἔρχεται εἰς ᾽Ιωλκὸν ἀπαιτῶν τὴν πατρώιαν ἀρχὴν τὸν Πελίαν. ὁ δὲ ἔφασκε χρῆναι fleece from Kolchoi and to capture the fire-breathing bulls. Upon hearing this, Jason told Cheiron, so Cheiron sent some αὐτὸν πρότερον διακοµίσαι τὸ χρυσοῦν δέρος youths along with him, and Athena prepared the Argo. ἀπὸ Κόλχων καὶ τοὺς πυριπνόους ἀνελεῖν Sailing, they came to the land of theBithynians, and ταύρους. ἀκούσας δὲ ταῦτα ὁ ᾽Ιάσων λέγει τῶι Χείρωνι. καὶ αὐτῶι ὁ Χείρων συνεκπέµπει τοὺς saw Phineus, who had been blinded for this reason: having ἠιθέους. κατασκευάζει δὲ ἡ ᾽Αθηνᾶ τὴν ᾽Αργώ. children byKleopatra, the daughter of Boreas, and next marrying Eurytia, he gave them to their stepmother to be πλέοντες δὲ ἀφικνοῦνται ἐπὶ τὴν τῶν Βιθυνῶν killed, because they had been traduced. Zeus was angry at this χώραν, καὶ ὁρῶσι τὸν Φινέα πηρὸν διὰ ταύτην τὴν αἰτίαν· ἔχων γὰρ παῖδας ἐκ Κλεοπάτρας τῆς and asked him whether he wanted to die or be blind. And he Βορέου καὶ ἐπιγήµας Εὐρυτίαν δίδωσιν αὐτοὺς chose not to see Helios, but Helios was offended and sent τῆι µητρυιᾶι διαβληθέντας πρὸς ἀναίρεσιν. Ζεὺς the Harpies against him, who whenever he was about to eat anything would ruin it by depositing some kind of corruption δὲ χαλεπήνας λέγει αὐτωι πότερον βούλεται ἀποθανεῖν ἤ τυφλὸς γενέσθαι. ὁ δὲ αἱρεῖται µὴ upon it; and in this way Phineus was punished. So Jason’s crew, catching sight of this Phineus, asked for advice on how ὁρᾶν τὸν ῞Ηλιον. ἀγανακτήσας δὲ ὁ ῞Ηλιος ῾Αρπυίας ἐπιπέµπει αὐτῶι, αἵτινες εἴ ποτε µέλλοι to sail through the so-called Planktai [‘Wandering’] Rocks. He said he would help if they put an end to the Harpies’ attacks. ἐσθίειν † αὐτοῦ διέπρασσον ἐµβάλλουσαι Making a pact with him, they promised to do this, and he said φθοράν τινα· καὶ οὕτω Φινεὺς ἐτιµωρεῖτο. to him: ‘How much speed can the Argo attain?’ When they τοῦτον οὖν τὸν Φινέα θεωρήσαντες οἱ περὶ τὸν said, as much as a pigeon, he commanded them to release a ᾽Ιάσονα παρεκάλουν ὑποθέσθαι πῶς δεῖ pigeon as the rocks were coming together, and if it was caught <δια>πλεῦσαι τὰς Πλαγκτὰς λεγοµένας πέτρας. mid-way, not to sail, but if it got safely through, then they ὁ δὲ εἶπεν ἐὰν τὰς ῾Αρπυίας ἀπαλλάξωσι τῆς could accomplish the passage. They did what they were told, πρὸς αὐτὸν ὁρµῆς. θέντες δὲ συνθήκας and when the pigeon was caught by the tail, they attached a ἐπαγγέλλονται αὐτῶι τοῦτο δρᾶσαι, ὁ δὲ λέγει sternpiece two fathoms long to the Argo. The Symplegades αὐτοῖς πόσον δύναται ἔχειν τάχος ἡ ᾽Αργώ; clipped the edge of this as they came together; the ship passed φάντων δὲ πελειάδος ἐκέλευσεν ἀφεῖναι through, the crew was saved, and the rocks closed for good. περιστερὰν κατὰ τὴν συµβολὴν τῶν πετρῶν, κἂν The Boreadai Zetes and Kalais chased the Harpies away from µὲν µεσολαβηθῆι µὴ πλεῖν, ἐὰν δὲ σωθῆι τότε Phineus’ dinners. And so they came to Kochoi. The story is περαίνειν τὸν πλοῦν. οἱ δὲ ταῦτα ἀκούσαντες told byAsklepiades. ποιοῦσι. κατασχεθείσης δὲ τῆς περιστερᾶς διὰ τῆς οὐρᾶς, προσβάλλουσι τῆι ᾽Αργοῖ δυοῖν <ὀργυιῶν ἄφλαστον καὶ τούτου τὰ ἄκρα περικόψασαι αἱ Συµ>πληγάδες πέτραι συνελθοῦσαι <περαιωθείσης> τῆς νεὼς συµµύουσιν, αὐτοὶ δὲ σώιζονται. οἱ δὲ Βορεάδαι Ζήτης καὶ Κάλαις ἀποδιώκουσι τὰς ῾Αρπυίας ἀπὸ τῶν Φινέως δείπνων. καὶ οὕτω παραγίνονται εἰς Κόλχους. ἡ δὲ ἱστορία παρὰ ᾽Ασκληπιάδηι. Commentary Jason figures in a number of Asklepiades’ fragments: F 14 discusses the Lemnian women in the context of Jason’s siring of Euneos with the Lemnian Hypsipyle, but most important for F 31 are a number of references to Phineus, the Symplegades, and the pigeon that helped the Argonauts cross (F 2a and F 2b, which reference to the Symplegades and the pigeon, and F 22 which discusses Phineus’s genealogy). Since Asklepiades is evidently interested in the story of Phineus and the Argonauts, it is not unreasonable to think, as Jacoby does, that Asklepiades is the witness for this particular story of Phineus and the Harpies in this scholion. (See below). This scholion on the Homeric line on the Argo in Od. 12.69 begins with the genealogy of Jason, from his grandmother Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus (son of Aiolos), who after giving birth to Neleus and Peleus had three more children with Kretheus, one of whom, Aison, was Jason’s father, either through Polymela (Polymele is the name given in the Catalogue of Women, Hes. F 38 (in R. Merkelbach & M.L. West, Fragmenta Hesiodea (Oxford 1990)) or Alkimede, the latter of which may be attributed to Asklepiades here (since she is named again as the mother in this passage) as well as Pherekydes to whom the scholiast explicitly gives the attribution (see also BNJ3 F 104a, according to which also Herodoros names Polypheme and Andron names Theognete). Alkimede’s removal of Jason to Cheiron from Pelias (here as legitimate king in the wake of his brother Aison’s death, similarly to the scholia to Theogony 993, where, however, Pelias himself delivered Jason to Cheiron) reflects the early tradition found in e.g. Catalogue of Women F 13 andPindar, Nemean 3.53ff. Missing here but present in Pherekydes (quoted by a scholiast to Pythian4.133a, BNJ 3 F 105) is the story of an omen that indicated to Pelias that Jason would replace him as king, resulting in his sending Jason off in search of the Golden Fleece of Kolchis and fire-breathing bulls. Our scholiast picks up the story with Cheiron offering youths to man the Argo, provided by Athena (Aischylos’s fragmentary Argo is more specific: in F 20, 20aR Athena offers a speaking timber to be part of the ship; in Apollonios the ship is built with Athena’s help by Argosson of Arestor: Pseudo-Apollodoros 1.111-13). T. Gantz describes the Phineus of the Argo as an ‘atrociously complicated figure, blinded for a variety of reasons and both aided and (in one story at least) punished by the Argonautai’ (T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth (Baltimore 1993), 350). Asklepiades seems to be the first source that shows the Harpies as a specifically god-sent punishment (in Apollonios the punishment of the blinding and the Harpies comes from Zeus who had granted a wish but whose wish allows Phineus to understand his intentions too well: 2.178-93). Gantz speculates that this story may have come from Sophokles – although Aischylos had written a similar play (T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth 1-2 (Baltimore, MD 1993), 352). For the Symplegades/Planktai (here conflated) see F 2b and commentary. BNJ 12 F 32 FGrH Scholia ad Pindari Pythia 3.14 Translation Subject: genre: mythology Source Date: various Historian's Date: 4th century BC τὸν µὲν Εὐίππου Φλεγύα θυγάτηρ· τὸν ᾽Ασκληπιὸν οἱ ‘Whom [Asklepios] the daughter of Phlegyas son of Euippos [bore]’: Some say that Asklepios is the son µὲν ᾽Αρσινόης, οἱ δὲ Κορωνίδος φασὶν εἶναι. of Arsinoe; others say that he is the son of Koronis. And ᾽Ασκληπιάδης δέ φησι τὴν ᾽Αρσινόην Λευκίππου εἶναι τοῦ Περιήρους, ἧς καὶ ᾽Απόλλωνος ᾽Ασκληπιὸς καὶ θυγάτηρ ᾽Εριῶπις. ** «ἡ δ᾽ ἔτεκ᾽ ἐν µεγάροις ᾽Ασκληπιὸν ὄρχαµον ἀνδρῶν, Φοίβωι ὑποδµηθεῖσα, ἐυπλόκαµόν τ᾽ ᾽Εριῶπιν». καὶ ᾽Αρσινόης † ὁµοίως· «᾽Αρσινὁη δὲ µιγεῖσα Διὸς καὶ Λητοῦς υἱῶι τίκτ᾽ ᾽Ασκληπιὸν υἱὸν ἀµύµονά τε κρατερόν τε». καὶ Σωκράτης γόνον ᾽Αρσινόης τὸν ᾽Ασκληπιὸν ἀποφαίνει, παῖδα δὲ Κορωνίδος εἰσποίητον. ἐν δὲ τοῖς εἰς ῾Ησίοδον ἀναφεροµένοις ἔπεσι φέρεται ταῦτα περὶ τῆς Κορωνίδος· «τῆµος ἄρ᾽ ἦλθε κόραξ, φράσσεν δ᾽ ἄρα ἔργ᾽ ἀίδηλα Φοίβωι ἀκερσεκόµηι, ὅτ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ῎Ισχυς γῆµε Κόρωνιν Εἰλατίδης Φλεγύαο Διογνήτοιο θύγατρα». ἐν δὲ τοῖς ῾Οµηρικοῖς ὕµνοις «ἰητῆρα νόσων ᾽Ασκληπιὸν ἄρχοµ᾽ ἀείδειν, υἱὸν ᾽Απόλλωνος, τὸν ἐγείνατο δῖα Κορωνίς Δωτίωι ἐν πεδίωι, κούρη Φλεγύα βασιλῆος». ᾽Αριστείδης δὲ ἐν τῶι Περὶ Κνίδου Κτίσεως συγγράµµατί φησιν οὕτως· «᾽Ασκληπιὸς ᾽Απόλλωνος παῖς καὶ ᾽Αρσινόης. αὕτη δὲ παρθένος οὖσα ὠνοµάζετο Κορωνίς, Λευκίππου δὲ θυγάτηρ ἦν τοῦ ᾽Αµύκλα τοῦ Λακεδαίµονος … Asklepiades says that Arsinoe was the daughter of Leukippos (who was son of Perieres), and that by Apollo she bore a son Asklepios and a daughter Eriopis. [name of author quoted by Asklepiades missing:] ‘Put under the yoke of marriage to Phoibos, she gave birth in the palace to Asklepios, leader of men, and to beautifulhaired Eriopis’. And similarly [author’s name] [says] of Arsinoe: ‘Arsinoe, having had intercourse with the son of Zeus and Leto, gave birth to Asklepios, their blameless and powerful son.’ Sokrates of Argos (BNJ 310 F 12) also says that Asklepios was the son of Arsinoe, but that he was the adopted son of Koronis. In the poems attributed to Hesiod there is the following reference to Koronis (F 123 [?]): ‘Thereupon a crow came, and revealed dreadful doings to Phoibos of the unshorn locks – that Ischys son of Eilatos had an affair with Koronis the daughter of Phlegyas son of Diognetos.’ And in the Homeric hymns (16.1) ‘I begin to sing of the healer of the sick, Asklepios, the son of Apollo, whom divine Koronis bore in the Dotian plain, daughter of king Phlegyas.’ But Aristeidesin his book On the Foundation of Knidos speaks thus: ‘Asklepios is the son of Apollo and Arsinoe. But when she was a maiden she was called Koronis, and she was the daughter of Leukippos the [son] of Spartan Amyklas … Commentary Jacoby is doubtful that the Asklepiades quoted in this discussion in the Pindar scholia of the mother of Asklepios is Asklepiades of Tragilos, since other Pindar scholia mentioning the name belong to Asklepiades of Mirlea, who commentated on Homer. Asklepios, however, does not appear in Homer (at least under that name), only in the Homeric Hymn (16) that was dedicated to him and cited by this scholiast. Furthemore, Asklepiades of Tragilos is cited (see F 9 above) in the context of Zeus’s murder of Asklepios and Apollo’s consequent revenge murder of Zeus’s children the Kyklopes, which caused Apollo to be enslaved to the mortal Admetos. N. Villagra has also argued for a new fragment of Asklepiades in Sextus Empiricus on Asklepios’s curing ofHippolytos (N. Villagra, ‘Hipòlito curado por Asclepio: un nuevo fragmento de Asclepiades de Tragilo’, in J. Pàmias (ed.), Parua Mythographica (Oberhaid 2011), 131-44). Biographical Essay A very small amount of biographical information on Asklepiades is provided by T 1, T 2, and T 3. Most straightforward perhaps is T 1: Stephanos links the name of the town of Tragilos to Asklepiades author of the Tragoidoumena, and identifies it as Thracian. As noted above, the designation of Tragilos as Thracian (rather than Macedonian as some modern scholarship has it) is unproblematic given the subjectivity of such designations especially in pre-modern times. See below on the possible significance of Thrace for Asklepiades. T 2 and T 3 are intriguingly suggestive if inconclusive. T 2 (Pseudo-Plutarch, Vitae Decem Oratorum) names Asklepiades as a student of Isokrates. If one could prove that this anonymous author’s claim of a student-teacher relationship with Isokrates was true of Theopompos and (or) Ephoros, then perhaps one might believe that this was true of Asklepiades as well. And yet even for Theopompos and Ephoros, for whom there is much more testimony for such a relationship than there is for Asklepiades (for Theopompos see BNJ 115 Τ 1, Τ 5a and 115 T 20a; for Ephoros seeBNJ 70 T 1, 70 T 2a, T 3, T 4, T 5, T 7, T 8, T 27 and T 28; for Theopompos and Ephoros together as students of Isokrates, see BNJ 115 T 1 and 115 T 5a and BNJ T 3a and T 5), the evidence is inconclusive. The question is important because, as Michael Flower points out in the case of Theopompos, for most of the 20th century it was assumed that Isokrates ‘told Theopompus what to write and how to write it’ (Theopompus of Chios: History and Rhetoric in the 4th century BC(Oxford 1994), 44; for the detailed argument against this, see in particular Chapter 3 (‘Theopompus and Isocrates’, 42-62), which builds on the early work of E. Schwartz on Ephoros inRE 6.1 (1907), cols. 1-2, and contains detailed bibliography of the mostly ‘positive’ tradition that began with, e.g., R. Laqueur’s rebuttal of Schwartz in ‘Ephoros’, Hermes 46 (1911), 161-206. Against the tradition with regard to Ephoros, see the detailed discussion of Victor Parker’s commentary on BNJ 70 T 1 (cf. F. Pownall, ‘Rationalization as a Moral Tool: Ephorus and the Foundation of the Delphic Oracle,’ Mouseion 6 (2006), 353-69). It is perhaps best to concede aporia in the case of Asklepiades, who is only connected to Isokrates in this single late (9th century AD or later) source. That said, taking into account both Pseudo-Plutarch’s claim and the evidence of T 3. it is plausible enough that Asklepiades at least lived in the time of Isokrates, which chimes with our sense of where he fits into the mythographical tradition in general: T 3 refers to a 4th- or 3rd-century polemic against Asklepiades in a scholion to Euripides’s Hekabe. As noted above, we can easily identify this figure with the Atthidographer Philochoros (died ca. 261 BC), who in addition to local history apparently wrote works on tragedy. The contents of this polemic are needless to say indeterminable. Jacoby presumably started compiling this collection of 4 testimonia and 32 fragments under the name ‘Asklepiades of Tragilos’ (which in the 19th century were appended to the corpus of Asklepiades of Mirlea) based on Stephanos (T 1), who linked the town Tragilos with the name Asklepiades as well as the title of his work Tragoidoumena. Stephanos also mentions that this work was in six books. The title is not doubtworthy, as it appears in 3 of the 4 testimonia and in 17 of Jacoby’s 32 fragments (T 1, T 2, T 4, F 1, F 2a, F 2b, F 3, F 4, F 5, F 6a, F 6b, F 7a, F 8, F 9, F 10, F 11,F 12, F 13, F 14, and F 15); no other title is given for Asklepiades’s work. As for the number and contents of the books: Jacoby accepts the number six, rejecting Boeckh’s reading in F 15 of ῑᾱ (implying 11 books) for δία in F 15. The sixth book itself is referenced in F 4, F 6a and F 6b. As for content, however, the references to particular books are too paltry to reveal the logic behind the organization of Tragoidoumena (Book 1 is cited for Glaukos’s man-eating horses (F 1) and Dysaulos (F 4); Book 2 is cited for the Argonauts and the Symplegades (F 2a) and perhaps for Thamyris (F 10; see G. Merro, ‘Apollodoro, Asclepiades di Tragilo ed Eschilo in scholl. Eur. Rh. 916 e 922’, RFIC 134 (2006), 41-2); F 3 cites Book 3 for Ixion; Book 6 is cited for Rhesos (F 5), the musicians Orpheus and Ialemos (F 6a and F 6b). Jacoby suggests that we are dealing with legendary history rather than plots of particular plays, but the presumed attraction of later mythograhers to a work called Tragoidoumena and other known works (including, for example, Philochoros, Dikaiarchos, Heraklides Pontikos, and Glaukos, all like Asklepiades from the 4thcentury) was that it contained plots summaries from various tragedies (see A. Cameron, Greek Mythographers in the Roman World (Oxford 2004), 58-9. Genealogies loom large in the extant fragments of Asklepiades. As R. Fowler has shown, the prose genre of mythography grew from poetic genres like that typified by the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (‘Genealogical Thinking, Hesiod’s Catalogue, and the Invention of the Hellenes’, PCPhS 44 (1988), 2-3), and the 6th- and 5th-century prose writers who wrote geneaologies like Hekataios, Akousilaos, and Pherekydes, the last of whom is often quoted alongside Asklepiades, and three times with Hesiod as well (Pherekydes appears in Asklepiades fragments F 3, F 9, F 16, F 18, F 22and F 31, with Hesiod in F 9, F 22 and F 31; see N. Villagra, ‘Commenting on Asclepiades ofTragilos’, 290). It is, however, naturally difficult to tell from the fragments themselves the proportion of genealogical to non-genealogical material in this work, as many of those who cite Asklepiades show a general interest in genealogy to begin with (N. Villagra, ‘Commenting onAsclepiades of Tragilos: Methodological Considerations on a Fragmentary Mythographer’, in press in BAR, 290-1). The differences between Pherekydes of Athens and his 4th-century mythographic successor, however, are instructive. William Morison (in his Biographical Essay on Pherekydes, BNJ 3) emphasizes that Pherekydes is a transitional figure who links traditional stories to contemporary history. The fragments of Asklepiades by contrast do not show an historical consciousness, with the possible exception of a reference to Sophokles’s death (itself dubiously attributable to Asklepiades; see T 4). Thus he tends to be seen more as an academic collector of variants on those myths that were used by the tragedians, recording both agreements and disagreements regarding particular myths with general phrases such as φασίν, ἔνιοι and ἅπαντες ὁι ποιηταί (C. Wendel, ‘Mythographie’, RE 16 (1935), cols. 1353-54). That said, there is a small amount of evidence that Asklepiades may have had, if not a historical interest, a local interest, in Thracian myth (see S. 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Whitehead (ed.), From Political Architecture to Stephanus Byzantius: Sources for the Ancient Greek Polis (Stuttgart 1994) , 99-124 L. Woodbury, ‛Neoptolemus at Delphi: Pindar, ‘Nem.’ 7.30 ff.’ , Phoenix 33 .2 ( 1979 ) , 95133; reprinted in C.G. Brown, R.L. Fowler, E.I. Robins and P.M. Wallace Matheson, Leonard E. Woodbury: Collected Writings (Atlanta 1990) , 286-324 R. Asirvatham, Sulochana (Montclair, NJ) Cite this page R. Asirvatham, Sulochana. "Asklepiades of Tragilos (12)." Brill’s New Jacoby. Editor in Chief: Ian Worthington (University of Missouri). Brill Online, 2015.Reference. BNJ-contributors. 25 October 2015 <http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-new-jacoby/asklepiades-of-tragilos-12-a12>