User:Paul August/Catreus

Catreus

Sources

Ancient

Alcidamas

Alcidamas, Odysseus 14-16 (Garagin and Woodruff, p. 286 [in folder Telephus])

[14] Now, Ales, king of Tegea, consulted the oracle at Delphi and was told that if a son was born to his daughter, this son was destined to kill Aleus' sons. When he heard this, Aleus quickly went home and made his daughter a priestess of Athena, telling her he would put her to death if she ever slept with a man. As fortune (tuchē) would have it, Heracles came by during his campaign against Augeas, king of Elis, [15] and Aleus entertained him in the precinct of Athena. Heracles saw the girl in the temple, and, in a drunken state, he slept with her. When Aleus saw she was pregnant, he sent for this man's father Nauplius, since he knew he was a boatman and a clever one. When Nauplius arrived, Aleus gave him his daughter to cast into the sea. [16] He took her away, and when they reached Mt. Parthenius, she gave birth to Telephus. Nauplius ignored the orders Aleus had given him and took the girl and her child to Mysia, where he sold them to king Teuthras, who was childless. Teuthras made Auge his wife, and giving the child the name Telephus, he adopted him and later gave him to Priam to be educated at Troy.

Apollodorus

2.7.4

Passing by Tegea, Hercules debauched Auge, not knowing her to be a daughter of Aleus.1 And she brought forth her babe secretly and deposited it in the precinct of Athena. But the country being wasted by a pestilence, Aleus entered the precinct and on investigation discovered his daughter's motherhood. So he exposed the babe on Mount Parthenius, and by the providence of the gods it was preserved: for a doe that had just cast her fawn gave it suck, and shepherds took up the babe and called it Telephus.2 And her father gave Auge to Nauplius, son of Poseidon, to sell far away in a foreign land; and Nauplius gave her to Teuthras, the prince of Teuthrania, who made her his wife.

3.2.1

But Catreus, son of Minos, had three daughters, Aerope, Clymene, and Apemosyne, and a son, Althaemenes.¹ When Catreus inquired of the oracle how his life should end, the god said that he would die by the hand of one of his children. Now Catreus hid the oracles, but Althaemenes heard of them, and fearing to be his father's murderer, he set out from Crete with his sister Apemosyne, and put in at a place in Rhodes, and having taken possession of it he called it Cretinia.

1 The tragic story of the involuntary parricide of Althaemenes is similarly told by Diod. 5.59.1-4, who says that this murderer of his father and of his sister was afterwards worshipped as a hero in Rhodes.

3.2.2

And Catreus gave Aerope and Clymene to Nauplius to sell into foreign lands; and of these two Aerope became the wife of Plisthenes, who begat Agamemnon and Menelaus; and Clymene became the wife of Nauplius, who became the father of Oeax and Palamedes. But afterwards in the grip of old age Catreus yearned to transmit the kingdom to his son Althaemenes, and went for that purpose to Rhodes. And having landed from the ship with the heroes at a desert place of the island, he was chased by the cowherds, who imagined that they were pirates on a raid. He told them the truth, but they could not hear him for the barking of the dogs, and while they pelted him Althaemenes arrived and killed him with the cast of a javelin, not knowing him to be Catreus. Afterwards when he learned the truth, he prayed and disappeared in a chasm.

3.9.1

Arcas had two sons, Elatus and Aphidas, by Leanira, daughter of Amyclas, or by Meganira, daughter of Croco, or, according to Eumelus, by a nymph Chrysopelia.1 These divided the land between them, but Elatus had all the power, and he begat Stymphalus and Pereus by Laodice, daughter of Cinyras, and Aphidas had a son Aleus and a daughter Stheneboea, who was married to Proetus. And Aleus had a daughter Auge and two sons, Cepheus and Lycurgus, by Neaera, daughter of Pereus. Auge was seduced by Hercules2 and hid her babe in the precinct of Athena, whose priesthood she held. But the land remaining barren, and the oracles declaring that there was impiety in the precinct of Athena, she was detected and delivered by her father to Nauplius to be put to death, and from him Teuthras, prince of Mysia, received and married her. But the babe, being exposed on Mount Parthenius, was suckled by a doe and hence called Telephus. Bred by the neatheards of Corythus, he went to Delphi in quest of his parents, and on information received from the god he repaired to Mysia and became an adopted son of Teuthras, on whose death he succeeded to the princedom.

E.2.10

The sons of Pelops were Pittheus, Atreus, Thyestes, and others. Now the wife of Atreus was Aerope, daughter of Catreus, and she loved Thyestes. And Atreus once vowed to sacrifice to Artemis the finest of his flocks; but when a golden lamb appeared, they say that he neglected to perform his vow,

E.3.3

For nine days he was entertained by Menelaus; but on the tenth day, Menelaus having gone on a journey to Crete to perform the obsequies of his mother's father Catreus, Alexander persuaded Helen to go off1 with him. And she abandoned Hermione, then nine years old, and putting most of the property on board, she set sail with him by night.2

E.3.12

Of the Mycenaeans, Agamemnon, son of Atreus and Aerope: a hundred ships. Of the Lacedaemonians, Menelaus, son of Atreus and Aerope: sixty ships.

Diodorus Siculus

4.33.7–12

From this campaign Heracles returned into Arcadia, and as he stopped at the home of Aleos the king he lay secretly with his daughter Augê, brought her with child, and went back to Stymphalus. [8] Aleos was ignorant of what had taken place, but when the bulk of the child in the womb betrayed the violation of his daughter he inquired who had violated her. And when Augê disclosed that it was Heracles who had done violence to her, he would not believe what she had said, but gave her into the hands of Nauplius his friend with orders to drown her in the sea. [9] But as Augê was being led off to Nauplia and was near Mount Parthenium, she felt herself overcome by the birth-pains and withdrew into a near-by thicket as if to perform a certain necessary act; here she gave birth to a male child, and hiding the babe in some bushes she left it there. After doing this Augê went back to Nauplius, and when she had arrived at the harbour of Nauplia in Argolis she was saved from death in an unexpected manner. [10] Nauplius, that is, decided not to drown her, as he had been ordered, but to make a gift of her to some Carians who were setting out for Asia; and these men took Augê to Asia and gave her to Teuthras the king of Mysia. [11] As for the babe that had been left on Parthenium by Augê, certain herdsmen belonging to Corythus the king came upon it as it was getting its food from the teat of a hind and brought it as a gift to their master. Corythus received the child gladly, raised him as if he were his own son, and named him Telephus after the hind (elaphos) which had suckled it. After Telephus had [p. 453] come to manhood, being seized with the desire to learn who his mother was, he went to Delphi and received the reply to sail to Mysia to Teuthras the king. [12] Here he discovered his mother, and when it was known who his father was he received the heartiest welcome. And since Teuthras had no male children he joined his daughter Argiopê in marriage to Telephus and named him his successor to the kingdom.

4.60.4

And marrying Pasiphaê, the daughter of Helius and Cretê, he [Minos] begat Deucalion and Catreus and Androgeos and Ariadnê and had other, natural, children more in number than these.

5.59.1–4

[1] At a later time than the events we have described Althaemenes, the son of Catreus the king of Crete, while inquiring of the oracle regarding certain other matters, received the reply that it was fated that he should slay his father by his own hand. [2] So wishing to avoid such an abominable act, he fled of his own free will from Crete together with such as desired to sail away with him, these being a considerable [p. 259] company. Althaemenes, then, put ashore on Rhodes at Cameirus, and on Mount Atabyrus he founded a temple of Zeus who is called Zeus Atabyrius; and for this reason the temple is held in special honour even to this day, situated as it is upon a lofty peak from which one can descry Crete. [3] So Althaemenes with his companions made his home in Cameirus, being held in honour by the natives; but his father Catreus, having no male children at home and dearly loving Althaemenes, sailed to Rhodes, being resolved upon finding his son and bringing him back to Crete. And now the fated destiny prevailed: Catreus disembarked by night upon the land of Rhodes with a few followers, and when there arose a hand-to‑hand conflict between them and the natives, Althaemenes, rushing out to aid them, hurled his spear, and struck in ignorance his father and killed him. [4] And when he realized what he had done, Althaemenes, being unable to bear his great affliction, shunned all meetings and association with mankind, and betook himself to unfrequented places and wandered about alone, until the grief put an end to his life; and at a later time he received at the hands of the Rhodians, as a certain oracle had commanded, the honours which are accorded to heroes.

Pausanias

8.48.7

The Tegeans surname Eileithyia, a temple of whom, with art image, they have in their market-place, Auge on her knees, saying that Aleus handed over his daughter to Nauplius with the order to take and drown her in the sea. As she was being carried along, they say, she fell on her knees and so gave birth to her son, at the place where is the sanctuary of Eileithyia. This story is different from another, that Auge was brought to bed without her father's knowing it, and that Telephus was exposed on Mount Parthenius, the abandoned child being suckled by a deer. This account is equally current among the people of Tegea.

8.53.4

It is also said that all the surviving sons of Tegeates, namely, Cydon, Archedius and Gortys, migrated of their own free will to Crete, and that after them were named the cities Cydonia, Gortyna and Catreus. The Cretans dissent from the account of the Tegeans, saying that Cydon was a son of Hermes and of Acacallis, daughter of Minos, that Catreus was a son of Minos, and Gortys a son of Rhadamanthys.

Sophocles

Sophocles, Ajax 1295–1297.

Jebb's translation

And you yourself were born from a Cretan mother, whose father found a stranger straddling her and who was consigned by him to be prey for the mute fish.

Lloyd-Jones' translation:

And you yourself are the son of a Cretan mother, whom your father, finding a lover with her, sent to be destroyed by dumb fishes.

Modern

Collard and Cropp

p. 520

αὐτὸς δὲ μητρὸς ἐξέφυς Κρήσσης, ἐφ᾽ ᾗ | λαβὼν ἐπακτὸν ἄνδρ᾽ ὁ φιτύσας πατὴρ | ἐφῆκεν ἐλλοῖς ἰχθύσιν διαφθοράν. ...

Sophocles, Ajax 1295-7 and Schol. on 1279a

p. 521

'You (Menelaus [should be Agamemnon!]) were yourself born from a Cretan mother, whom her own father (Catreus) caught with a man taken into her bed, and sent her to death and destruction by dumb fishes':¹ the story is in Euripides' Cretan Women, that when (Aerope) had been secretly violated by her servant her father handed her over to Nauplius with orders to drown her; Nauplius did not do this, however, but pledged her in marriage to Pleisthenes.

¹ 'Dumb fishes': to consume her totally, so that nothing of her disgrace should ever be told.

Gantz

p. 271

The other son [of Minos] is Katreus, whose problems with his daughter Aerope were at least alluded to in Euripides' Kressai of 438 B.C., although he is not attested as Minos' offspring until Diodorus (DS 40.60.4). Euripides' play seems to have concerned Aerope's infidelity in Mykenai,¹⁴ in which case the background to her story was probably related in the prologue. We know at any rate that this play [Euripides' Kressai] told how Katreus discovered his daughter Aerope to have been seduced by a servant, and gave her to Nauplios to drown; the latter instead gave her to Pleisthenes to wife (Σ Ai 1297). In Apollodorus, Katreus hands over two daughters, Aerope and Klymene, to Nauplios to be sold (not drowned); Nauplios gives Aerope to Pleisthenes, as in Euripides, but keeps Klymene for himself, and she becomes the mother of Palamedes and Oiax (ApB 3.2.2).

p. 554

Turning to Sophocles' Aias ... He adds too (by way of insult to Agamemnon) Thyestes' feast, and then Agamemnon's Kretan mother, "in whose bed finding an alien man the father enjoined that she be quarry for the fishes." As these words stand the [cont.]

p. 555

reference would seem to be Katreus, Aerope's father, who found her with a slave and gave her to Nauplios to kill. But the word here translated as alien (epaktos) would more naturally refer to an adulterer, since in the bed of an unmarried woman any man would be inappropriate, and only a small ajustment to the text (involving the word father) would produce rather a reference to Aerope and Thyestes. Either way, Aerope must be the Kretan mother, married to Atreus, but if the manuscript correction is accepted we would have here our first reference to Aerope being thrown from a cliff as punishment for her adultery. The account of the Byzantine Orestia scholia at line 812, where Sophokles is said to attest that fate for Aerope, seems to guarantee that it appeared somewhere in his work, but of course the scholiast might be referring to this same passage of the Aias, where the meaning is as we have seen controversial.

... The scholia for the Aias passage tell us that in Euripides' Kressai Nauplios (as usual disobeying Katreus' order to drown Aerope) gave her to Pleisthenes in marriage (Σ Ai 1279). ...

Grimal

s.v. Catreus, p. 92

(Κατρεύς) One of the four children, born of Pasiphae, whom Minos had fathered and his successor on the throne of Crete (table 28). An oracle had warned that Catreus would die at the hand of one of his children; he had four, three daughters Aerope, Clymene and Apermosyne, and one son, Althamenes. Catreus had kept the oracle secret from his children, but his son and Apemosyne were aware of it. ...

Hard

p. 354

Katreus and his children; ...

KATREUS, the eldest son and successor of Minos, had four children, a son ...

p. 355

Katreus had come to fear that his daughters KLYMENE and AEROPE might present a danger to him, and therefore handed them over to Nauplios to be sold abroad. Nauplios treated them more generously, however, as in the similar story of Auge (see p. 543), by offering Aerope to Pleisthenes, king of Mycenae, as a wife and taking Kymene as his own wife.¹⁰⁵ Or according to a conflicting tale from a lost play by Euripides, Katreus asked Nauplios to drown Aerope at sea after discovering that she had been seduced by a slave, but Nauplios took her to Pleisthenes instead¹⁰⁶ Although there was disagreement on whether she married Atreus of Pleisthenes (an obscure figure who was sometimes interposed into the Mycenean king-list between Atreus and Agamemnon, see p. 508), she became the mother of Agamemnon and Menelaos in either case. It so happens that Nauplios is said to have deliveried her to Pleisthenes in surviving accounts of that story. ... As for Klymene, she bore two or more sons to Nauplios, including the prince of inventions, Palamedes (see p. 236).

¹⁰⁵ Apollod. 3.2.2

¹⁰⁶ Schol. Soph. Ajax 1279 citing Eur. Kressai.

Jebb

1295

Κρήσσης: Aëropè, daughter of Catreus, king of Crete, a descendant of Minos. According to the legend which Sophocles follows here, Catreus found Aëropè with a paramour (a slave), and sent her to Nauplius, king of Euboea, charging him to drown her. Nauplius, however, spared her life, and she afterwards married Atreus. The scholiast on 1297 says that this was the story treated by Euripides in the “Κρῆσσαι” (Nauck Trag. Frag. p. 501); with the difference, however, that Aëropè married Pleisthenes, not Atreus. The “Κρῆσσαι” was produced in 438 B.C. (Argum. Eur. Alc.）

1296

ὁ φιτύσας πατήρ can mean only the father of Aëropè, Catreus. Now, according to the schol. on Eur. Or. 812, Sophocles (in a play not named there, but which was probably the “Ἀτρεὺς ἢ Μυκηναῖαι”) somewhere described Atreus himself as drowning his false wife for a twofold crime,—adultery with Thyestes, and the theft of the golden lamb: “τὴν γυναῖκα Ἀερόπην τιμωρεῖται κατ᾽ ἄμφω...ῥίψας αὐτὴν εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν, ὡς φησὶ Σοφοκλῆς”. Hence it has been proposed to change πατὴρ into σ᾽ Ἀτρεὺς (Hermann), or σ᾽ ἀνὴρ (Wolff). A simpler correction would be, “ὁ σ᾽ ἐκφύσας πατήρ”. But it cannot be assumed that Sophocles must have followed here the same version which he used elsewhere. In his “Ἀλήτης”, for example, he appears to have modified the version of the “Ὀρεστεία” which he adopts in his Electra (see El., Introd., p. xliii, n. 4). The story of Aëropè's detection by Catreus is effective for the purpose here, which is to represent Agamemnon as born of a mother who had sinned before his birth. Nor is that story necessarily inconsistent with the other, that she was false to Atreus, and was drowned by him.

Smith

s.v. Creteus

Κρητεύς), or CATREUS, a son of Minos by Pasiphae or Crete, and king of Crete. He is renowned in ancient story on account of his tragic death by the hand of his own son, Althemenes. (Apollod. 2.1.2, 3.1.2; Diod. 4.59; Paus. 8.53.2; ALTHEMENES.)

Tripp

s.v. Catreus, p. 152

Catreus. A son of Pasiphaë. Catreus ruled some part of Crete—no doubt the city named after him. He had a son Althamenes, and three daughters, Aërope, Clymene, and Apemosyne. An oracle warned him that one of his children would kill him. ...

Webster [in folder]

p. 37

The scholiast on the reference to Aerope in ‘’Ajax’’ 1297 says ‘the story is in Euripides’ ‘’Cretan’’ [cont.]

p. 38

’’Women’’ that when Aerope had been seduced by a servant, her father (Katreus of Crete) handed her over to Nauplios with instructions to drown her, but he failed to do so and engaged her to Pleisthenes’. ... the scholiast on Frogs 849 gives various explanations of 'composer of Cretan monodies, dramatizer of unholy marriages'; according to Apollonius 'this could refer to Aerope in the Cretan Women whom Euripides introduced prostituting herself'.

...