This will be the last “mythological puzzle” that we’ll do in this series of blog posts. Next year, I’ll be offering some thoughts about how to strengthen the CANE community. We are in a very crucial moment when, despite everyone being overworked (and generally overstimulated), we will need to redouble our efforts to ensure that CANE and Classics has another century to go. But we’ll put that tense feeling aside for one last “who am I” from the mythological world. This one comes from one of the most obscure and allusive poems in the ancient world, the Alexandra of Lycophron. If you’ve never looked into Lycophron, do yourself a favor and do so—but make sure you have plenty of time to reason out all of the allusions based on genealogy, geography, and mythical details. 

Lycophron’s Alexandra, dated likely to about 190 BC (see Hornblower’s critical edition and commentary), is an intricate poem structured as a series of prophetic pronouncements by Cassandra (hence “Alexandra”), reported by a guard who “overheard” Cassandra’s ravings while she was imprisoned. Cassandra weaves the mythical past and future in her attempt to inform her fellow Trojans what is to come, but does so in a way that almost defies interpretation. Indeed, perhaps it is because she speaks in dark, cryptic language that no one believes her, or at least can’t understand what she’s trying to say.

For instance, Cassandra predicts that Paris will return home, which was already once buried in ash (by Heracles), “embracing in thine arms the wraith of the five-times-married frenzied descendant of Pleuron.” That’s a heck of a way to say Helen, who is daughter of Leda, daughter of Thestius, son of Agenor, son of Pleuron. Plus, the reader has to divine who were the five different mates for Helen. Can you name them? We’ll give the answer at the end of the blog post. 

One of Helen’s husbands, the fifth and last, may surprise you. It’s none other than Achilles, who pines for her “in a dream:”

And the fifth she shall cause to pine upon his bed, distracted by her phantom face in his dreams; the husband to be of the stranger-frenzied lady of Cyta; even him whom one day the exile from Oenone fathered, turning into men the six-footed host of ants, to be a Pelasgian Typhon, out of seven sons consumed in the flame alone escaping the fiery ashes.

It’s not immediately apparent who Lycophron alludes to—one has to piece it together through neat clues: 1) Achilles’ wife (after his fever-dream) will be Medea on the White Isle (the “lady of Cyta” = maiden of Colchis); 2) the “exile from Oenone” is Peleus father of Achilles, who was exiled from Aegina (Oenone is the original name of the island), where 3) men grew from ants (Myrmidons); 4) Thetis tried to burn off the immortality of her first children with Peleus, fatally, but Achilles, the seventh, survived when Peleus intervened. (Incidentally, the version where Achilles “marries” Helen in a dream is also reported in the scholia [ancient notes] to Homer’s Iliad [schol. (b) 3.140]; Pausanias reports that Achilles marries Helen on the White Isle [3.19]).

That’s a long introduction to our own puzzle, but it gives you a sense how Lycophron refers to his mythological characters and events. So, in the following passage, Cassandra refers to the early myth of her city very allusively. Who is the diver grandson of Atlas who in a leather sack migrated to a new home during the rains of Deucalion’s flood?

I mourn for thee, my country, and for the grave of Atlas’ daughter’s diver son, who of old in a stitched vessel, like an Istrian fish-creel with four legs, sheathed his body in a leathern sack and, all alone, swam like a petrel of Rheithymnia, leaving Zerynthos, cave of the goddess to whom dogs are slain, even Saos, the strong foundation of the Cyrbantes, what time the plashing rain of Zeus laid waste with deluge all the earth.

Cyrbantes is another form of the Corybantes, one of the many primeval sacred groups like the Couretes that were often associated with islands in the Aegean. Does that help? Send your answer to me! We love seeing people engage with the CANE Blog.