Last week we heard about Ariadne, whose
story concludes with Dionysus marrying her and rescuing her from abandonment on
the island of Naxos. Legend has it that after the wedding, Dionysus and Ariadne
honeymooned on the island of Lemnos, so let’s follow them there and discuss the
local legends; it’s an intriguing place. But rather than Dionysus and Ariadne,
I’d like to approach Lemnos from the perspective of another famous visitor,
namely Jason.
So imagine that you’re Jason, captaining
the Argo alongside a crew of spectacular heroes, on your way out of mainland
Greece and off to the outer reaches of known civilization: the far eastern shore
of the Black Sea. (I don’t usually encourage people to identify with Jason,
since he’s a self-absorbed sociopath, but let’s run with this for now.) Your
uncle has usurped your father’s kingship and sent you on the supposedly
impossible mission of obtaining the Golden Fleece from Colchis, but it’s a long
trip from your hometown and you have to make plenty of rest stops along the
way. You come in at the port at Lemnos, which is a good-sized island in the
north Aegean, and you see people running in from all over town to meet your
boat. Even the queen of the island, Hypsipyle, comes down to meet you,
accompanied by a cohort of beautiful women, and invites you and your men to a
banquet. You accept, though you may be a little confused to see that no men are
in sight. So you’re whisked down to the banquet hall and entertained by the
island’s prettiest and wittiest ladies, and Queen Hypsipyle keeps making salacious
double entendres. Whenever you ask where all the men are the ladies laugh with
affected casualness and say something evasive, and it becomes clear that they’re
hiding something about their past--something ominous. And maybe you grow so
disconcerted by the increasingly sinister vibe that you don’t even notice that
all the women in sight smell terrible.
There is a fascinating backstory, as
related by Apollodorus, an absolutely insane series of mass crimes and gender
warfare. Starting back at the peaceful beginning, Dionysus and Ariadne took
their honeymoon on Lemnos, and in fact had four sons there, the oldest of which
(Thoas) became king of the native population. It seems that everything was fine
for a generation or so, and Thoas’ daughter Hypsipyle grew up to be a very
brave and competent young woman. But, as is so often the case in mythology,
this peaceful state couldn’t go on forever; at some point the Lemnian women
decided to neglect the worship of Aphrodite. (This is always a bad idea. There
are five million and two cautionary tales in mythology in which some idiot
neglects the worship of a particular god and the god attacks with a curse,
although personally I think this one is the most entertaining.) Aphrodite gets
revenge by cursing the Lemnian women with unbearable body odor. The Lemnian men
find the smell so intolerable that they refuse to get near the women for any
reason. They abandon their wives and decide to redirect their sexual attentions
toward women who don’t smell, i.e. foreign women imported from Thrace. In response,
the Lemnian women massacre the Lemnian men, every single last one of them.
I’m sorry to say that no one records what
happened to the Thracian women; this isn’t their story and apparently we don’t
care about them. One hopes they weren’t killed alongside the Lemnian men, but
the Lemnian women seem so consumed with disproportionate rage (mass adultery is
certainly a matter of concern, but I’m not sure mass murder is an appropriate
response), I wouldn’t put it past them. Also no one records how exactly the
Lemnian women killed the Lemnian men down to the last one without any difficulties
or collateral damage--it would be a tricky feat to pull off.
Anyway, I exaggerated a bit; they didn’t
kill every single man on the island. Hypsipyle, that brave and competent girl,
collaborator with the patriarchy and traitor to her own gender, hid her father
during the massacre and smuggled him off the island afterward. Accounts diverge
at this point: according to some, he was put on a boat or floated off in a
chest like Danae; according to others, he was eventually found by the Lemnian
women and murdered anyway. But if he did escape, he reached the island of Oenoe
and took up with a water-nymph; their son eventually became king of Oenoe. It
was the style of the time, for exiled kings and princes and aristocrats to
wander off to distant locations and marry local princesses or nymphs and make
their sons kings. It worked for Peleus, it worked for Diomedes, it worked for
Perseus, it worked for Oedipus--well, maybe ‘worked’ is the wrong word in his
case. But there are plenty of stories on this model.
But back to Hypsipyle, who was now Queen
of foul-smelling Lemnos and totally out of men (at least, if any others were
smuggled away in closets or sent off in chests, no one mentions it), almost as
big a problem as Romulus being king of a city with no women. So you can
imagine, when Jason and his crew of heroes came into port, the Lemnians were extremely glad to see them and eager to
create some little mini-heroes to continue their civilization. I would love to hear how they explained away
their massacre of all the men on the island, and also persuaded the Argonauts
to sleep with them after they admitted to mass murder, particularly in light of
their (one presumes, persistent) body odor. They must have done it somehow,
since Hypsipyle herself had a number of children by Jason, and the other women
had children with the other heroes--but then, Jason was never one to let good
judgment interfere with his plans to sleep with various women. Eventually the
Argonauts tired of the baby-making free-for-all on Lemnos and sailed off into
the sunset. It seems that the Lemnian women successfully repopulated their
island with the heroes’ children, and totally got away with their mass murder;
there is no account of their smell ever being cured, but presumably that went
away when the murderers died.
Herodotus mentions the massacre of the
Lemnian men in the context of another massacre on Lemnos, this one from the
historical period. According to him, Lemnos was populated by an ethnic group
(the Pelasgians) that were smaller and weaker and generally inferior to the
mainland Doric-infused Greeks. Meanwhile on the mainland, there was an annual
festival in Athens in which young girls would be secluded at the exurban sanctuary
of Artemis at Brauron. The Lemnians took advantage of this festival to kidnap
the girls and force them into chattel slavery, which resulted in a cohort of
half-Athenian slave children on Lemnos. This time it wasn’t the Lemnian women
who were upset about the circumstances (I guess the Lemnian women didn’t object
to their husbands sleeping with other women as long as they were still sleeping
with them too). On the contrary, it was the slave children who were upset: Herodotus
claims that these slave children naturally perceived their own superiority to
the Pelasgians and held themselves apart from Lemnian society. The Lemnians
grew worried about what these physically superior slave children, who bonded
with each other and united into a community against the Lemnians, might do when
they reached maturity. Therefore they decided to nip the problem in the bud by
massacring the slave children. Again, there is no statement on what happened to
the kidnapped Athenian women, now slaves--were they ever ransomed back to
Athens, did they have any reaction to spending years in captivity and seeing
their children murdered. Hypsipyle herself was sold into slavery when the other
Lemnian women discovered the fact that she had rescued her father, and her
adventures as a slave are well known since she interacted with the Seven
against Thebes and was involved in the founding of the Nemean Games. But her
fate as a slave is really only considered of interest because of her contact
with heroes: her own story is not at issue.
See you in Waco! Next week's post may come late Sunday evening.
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