Epitome

On receipt of this oracle, Agamemnon sent Ulysses and Talthybius to Clytaemnestra and asked for Iphigenia, alleging a promise of his to give her to Achilles to wife in reward for his military service. So Clytaemnestra sent her, and Agamemnon set her beside the altar, and was about to slaughter her, when Artemis carried her off to the Taurians

After putting to sea from Aulis they touched at Tenedos. It was ruled by Tenes, son of Cycnus and Proclia, but according to some, he was a son of Apollo. He dwelt there because he had been banished by his father.[*](The following story of Tenes, his stepmother's calumny, his banishment, and his elevation to the throne of Tenedos, is similarly told by Paus. 10.14.2-4; Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lycophron 232; Scholiast on Hom. Il. 1.38; Eustathius on Hom. Il. i.38, p. 33. Eustathius and the Scholiast on Homer call Tenes's sister Leucothea, and give Polyboea as an alternative name of their stepmother. According to Pausanias, the first wife of Cycnus was a daughter of Clytius, not of Laomedon. As to the names, Tzetzes agrees with Apollodorus, whom he probably copied. A rationalized version of the story is told by Diod. 5.83. According to him, Tenes was worshipped after his death as a god by the people of Tenedos, who made a precinct for him and offered sacrifices to him down to late times. No flute-player was allowed to enter the precinct, because a flute-player had borne false witness against Tenes; and the name of Achilles might not be mentioned within it, because Achilles had killed Tenes. Compare Plut. Quaest. Graec. 28.)

For Cycnus had a son Tenes and a daughter Hemithea by Proclia, daughter of Laomedon, but he afterwards married Philonome, daughter of Tragasus; and she fell in love with Tenes, and, failing to seduce him, falsely accused him to Cycnus of attempting to debauch her, and in witness of it she produced a flute-player, by name Eumolpus.

Cycnus believed her, and putting him and his sister in a chest he set them adrift on the sea. The chest was washed

So when the Greeks were standing in for Tenedos, Tenes saw them and tried to keep them off by throwing stones, but was killed by Achilles with a sword-cut in the breast, though Thetis had forewarned Achilles not to kill Tenes, because he himself would die by the hand of Apollo if he slew Tenes.[*](Compare Plut. Quaest. Graec. 28. Plutarch mentions the warning given by Thetis to Achilles not to kill Tenes, and says that the goddess specially charged one of Achilles's servants to remind her son of the warning. But in scouring the island Achilles fell in with the beautiful sister of Tenes and made love to her; Tenes defended his sister against her seducer, and in the brawl was slain by Achilles. When the slayer discovered whom he had slain, he killed the servant who ought to have warned him in time, and he buried Tenes on the spot where the sanctuary was afterwards dedicated to his worship. This version of the story clearly differs from the one followed by Apollodorus.)

and as they were offering a sacrifice to Apollo, a water-snake approached from the altar and bit Philoctetes; and as the sore did not heal and grew noisome, the army could not endure the stench, and Ulysses, by the orders of Agamemnon, put him ashore on the island of Lemnos, with the bow of Hercules which he had in his possession; and there, by shooting birds with the bow, he subsisted in the wilderness.[*](This story of the exposure and desertion of Philoctetes in Lemnos appears to have been told in the epic Cypria, as we may judge by the brief summary of Proclus. See Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. G. Kinkel, p. 19. According to Proclus, the Greeks were feasting in Tenedos when Philoctetes was bitten by a water-snake. This is not necessarily inconsistent with the statement of Apollodorus that the accident happened while the Greeks were sacrificing to Apollo, for the feast mentioned by Proclus may have been sacrificial. According to another version of the story, which Sophocles followed in his Philoctetes, the accident to Philoctetes happened, not in Tenedos, but in the small island of Chryse, where a goddess of that name was worshipped, and the serpent which bit Philoctetes was the guardian of her shrine. See Soph. Phil. 263-270; Soph. Phil. 1326-1328. Later writers identified Chryse with Athena, and said that Philoctetes was stung while he was cleansing her altar or clearing it of the soil under which it was buried, as Tzetzes has it. See Scholiast on Hom. Il. ii.722; Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lycophron 911; Eustathius on Hom. Il. ii.724, p. 330. But this identification is not supported by Sophocles nor by the evidence of a vase painting, which represents the shrine of Chryse with her name attached to her image. See Jebb's Soph. Ph., p. xxxviii, section 21.; Baumeister, Denkmäler des klassischen Altertums, iii.1326, fig. 1325. The island of Chryse is no doubt the “desert island near Lemnos” in which down to the first century B.C. were to be seen “an altar of Philoctetes, a bronze serpent, a bow, and a breastplate bound with fillets, the memorial of his sufferings” (Appian, Mithridat. 77). The island had sunk in the sea before the time of Pausanias in the second century of our era (Paus. 8.33.4). According to a different account, the unfortunate encounter of Philoctetes with the snake took place in Lemnos itself, the island where he was abandoned by his comrades. See Scholiast on Hom. Il. ii.724, p. 330 and Eustathius on Hom. Il. ii.724, p. 330; Scholiast on Soph. Ph. 270; Hyginus, Fab. 102. Philoctetes was commonly supposed to have received the bow and arrows of Hercules from that hero as a reward for his service in kindling the pyre on Mount Oeta. See Soph. Phil. 801-803; Diod. 4.38.4; Scholiast on Hom. Il. ii.724; Hyginus, Fab. 102; Ov. Met. 9.229-234. According to one account, which Servius has preserved, it was from these arrows, envenomed with the poison of the hydra, and not from a serpent, that Philoctetes received his grievous hurt. It is said that Hercules on the pyre solemnly charged his friend never to reveal the spot where his ashes should repose. Philoctetes promised with an oath to observe the wish of his dying friend, but afterwards he betrayed the secret by stamping with his foot on the grave. Hence on his way to the war one of the poisoned arrows fell upon and wounded the traitor foot. See Serv. Verg. A. 3.402; Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. Bode, i. pp. 21, 132 (First Vatican Mythographer 59; Second Vatican Mythographer 165). Homer speaks of Philoctetes marooned by the Greeks in Lemnos and suffering agonies from the bite of the deadly water-snake (Hom. Il. 2.721-725), but he does not say how or where the sufferer was bitten. Sophocles represents Lemnos as a desert island (Soph. Phil. 1ff.). The fate of the forlorn hero, the ancient Robinson Crusoe, dwelling for ten years in utter solitude on his lonely isle, was a favourite theme of tragedy. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all composed plays on the subject under the title of Philoctetes. See Dio Chrysostom lii; Jebb's Introduction to Soph. Ph., pp. xiiiff.; TGF (Nauck 2nd ed.), pp. 79ff., 613ff. )

Putting to sea from Tenedos they made sail for Troy, and sent Ulysses and Menelaus to demand the restoration of Helen and the property. But the Trojans, having summoned an assembly, not only refused to restore Helen, but threatened to kill the envoys.