Cycnus believed her, and putting him and his sister in a chest he set them
adrift on the sea. The chest was washed up on the island of
Leucophrys, and Tenes landed and settled in the island, and called it Tenedos after himself. But
Cycnus afterwards learning the truth, stoned the flute-player to death and
buried his wife alive in the earth.
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.