Epitome

But not knowing the course to steer for Troy, they put in to Mysia and ravaged it, supposing it to be Troy.[*](With the following account of the landing of the Greeks in Mysia and their encounter with Telephus, compare Proclus, in Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. G. Kinkel, pp. 18ff.; Scholiast on Hom. Il. i.59. The accounts of both these writers agree, to some extent verbally, with that of Apollodorus and are probably drawn from the same source, which may have been the epic Cypria summarized by Proclus. The Scholiast tells us that it was Dionysus who caused Telephus to trip over a vine-branch, because Telephus had robbed the god of the honours that were his due. The incident is alluded to by Pind. I. 8.48(106)ff. The war in Mysia is narrated in more detail by Philostratus, Her. iii.28-36 and Dictys Cretensis ii.1-7. Philostratus, Her. 35 says that the wounded were washed in the waters of the hot Ionian springs, which the people of Smyrna called the springs of Agamemnon.) Now Telephus son of Hercules, was king of the Mysians, and seeing the country pillaged, he armed the Mysians, chased the Greeks in a crowd to the ships, and killed many, among them Thersander, son of Polynices, who had made a stand. But when Achilles rushed at him, Telephus did not abide the onset and was pursued, and in the pursuit he was entangled in a vine-branch and wounded with a spear in the thigh.

Departing from Mysia, the Greeks put to sea, and a violent storm coming on, they were separated from each other and landed in their own countries.[*](Compare Proclus in Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. G. Kinkel, p. 19, according to whom Achilles, on this return voyage, landed in Scyros and married his youthful love Deidamia, daughter of Lycomedes. See above, Apollod. 3.13.8.) So the Greeks returned at that time, and it is said that the war lasted twenty years.[*](Compare Hom. Il. 24.765ff., where Helen at Troy says that it was now the twentieth year since she had quitted her native land. The words have puzzled the Scholiasts and commentators, but are explained by the present passage of Apollodorus.) For it was in the second year after the rape of Helen that the Greeks,

Having again assembled at Aulis after the aforesaid interval of eight years, they were in great perplexity about the voyage, because they had no leader who could show them the way to Troy.

But Telephus, because his wound was unhealed, and Apollo had told him that he would be cured when the one who wounded him should turn physician, came from Mysia to Argos, clad in rags, and begged the help of Achilles, promising to show the course to steer for Troy. So Achilles healed him by scraping off the rust of his Pelian spear. Accordingly, on being healed, Telephus showed the course to steer,[*](This account of how Telephus steered the Greek fleet to Troy after being healed of his grievous wound by Achilles, is probably derived from the epic Cypria; since it agrees on these points with the brief summary of Proclus. See Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. G. Kinkel, p. 19. Compare Scholiast on Hom. Il. i.59; Dictys Cretensis ii.10. As to the cure of Telephus's wound by means of the rust of the spear, see also Hyginus, Fab. 101; Prop. ii.1.63ff.; Ovid, Ex Ponto ii.2.6. Pliny describes a painting in which Achilles was represented scraping the rust from the blade of his spear with a sword into the wound of Telephus (Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxv.42, xxxiv.152). The spear was the famous one which Chiron had bestowed on Peleus, the father of Achilles; the shaft was cut from an ash-tree on Mount Pelion, and none of the Greeks at Troy, except Achilles, could wield it. See Hom. Il. 16.140-144; Hom. Il. 19.387-391; Hom. Il. 22.133ff. The healing of Telephus's wound by Achilles is also reported, though without mention of the spear, by Dictys Cretensis ii.10, a Scholiast on Hom. Il. i.59 and a Scholiast on Aristoph. Cl. 919. The subject was treated by Sophocles in a play called The Assembly of the Achaeans, and by Euripides in a play called Telephus. See The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. A. C. Pearson, i.94ff.; Griechische Dichterfragmente. ii. Lyrische und dramatische Fragmente, ed. W. Schubart und U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Berlin, 1907), pp. 64ff.; TGF (Nauck 2nd ed.), pp. 161ff., 579ff. Aristophanes ridiculed the rags and tatters in which Telephus appeared on the stage in Euripides's play (Aristoph. Acharn. 430ff.). Apollodorus may have had the passage of Euripides or the parody of Aristophanes in mind when he describes Telephus as clad in rags. The cure of a wound by an application to it of rust from the weapon which inflicted the hurt is not to be explained, as Pliny supposed, by any medicinal property inherent in rust as such, else the rust from any weapon would serve the purpose. It is clearly a folklore remedy based on the principle of sympathetic magic. Similarly Iphiclus was cured of impotence by the rust of the same knife which had caused the infirmity. See Apollod. 1.9.12. The proverbial remedy for the bite of a dog “the hair of the dog that bit you,” is strictly analogous in principle; for it is not the hair of any dog that will work the cure, but only the hair of the particular dog that inflicted the bite. Thus we read of a beggar who was bitten by a dog, at the vicarage of Heversham, in Westmoreland, and went back to the house to ask for some of the animal's hair to put on the wound. See W. Henderson, Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England (London, 1879), p. 160, note 1. A precisely similar remedy for similar hurts appears to be popular in China; for we hear of a missionary who travelled about the province of Canton accompanied by a powerful dog, which bit children in the villages through which his master passed; and when a child was bitten, its mother used to run after the missionary and beg for a hair from the dog's tail to lay on the child's wound as a remedy. See N. B. Dennys, The Folklore of China (London and Hongkong, 1876), p. 52. For more examples of supposed cures based on the principle of sympathy between the animal who bites and the person who is bitten, see W. Henderson, l.c.; W. G. Black, Folk-Medicine (London, 1883), pp. 50ff.; W. Gregor, Notes on the Folklore of the North-East of Scotland (London, 1881), p. 127.) and