#cassiphone

then i went to make telemachus if he was older and a king 😳

The four hypothetical wives of Telemachus: Polycaste, Circe, Nausicaa and Cassiphone.

This myth always gets a fair deal of attention when it gets posted because of how ridiculous it is, and it has devolved into a game of telephone where the basic facts are being distorted; so, as someone that has spent more time researching Circe & co. than most people, here are some corrections:

- This story is only attested in the poem Alexandra, written by the early 3rd-century BCE poet Lycophron. However, that text is framed as Cassandra uttering prophecies, so it consists of riddles and deliberately obscure statements. As a result, the 12th-century CE scholar John Tzetzes wrote scholia explaining what the author was referring to. Cassiphone appears by name only in these scholia.

- The Alexandra is not part of the Telegony, nor is it a “Telegony myth.” The Telegony is an archaic epic attributed to Eugammon of Cyrene, and neither Cassiphone nor the revenge murders feature in it. That would be like calling Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis “an Iliad myth.”

- Tzetzes makes a mistake in his scholia, he says that Cassiphone and Telemachus married each other. Scholars now understand that the wife that Lycophron was referring to was Circe, not Cassiphone. Given this, the Telemachus-Cassiphone marriage is not an idea/myth that existed in ancient Greece in any capacity.

Hornblower, Simon. LYKOPHRON : Alexandra. Greek Text, Translation, Commentary, and Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2015.

The daughter of Odysseus

Oopsie, the bride is busy 🤭

Telemachus & Pisistratus | Polycaste & Cassiphone