Early years When Philammon refused to take Argiope into his house as his wife, the girl left
Peloponnese and went to the country of the
Odrysians in
Thrace where she gave birth to a son, Thamyris. When the boy reached puberty, he became so accomplished in singing to the cithara that the
Scythians made him their king even though he was an interloper. According to
Diodorus the mythical singer
Linus took three pupils:
Heracles, Thamyris, and
Orpheus, which neatly settles Thamyris' legendary chronology. When
Pliny the Elder briefly sketches the origins of music, he credits Thamyris with inventing the
Dorian mode and with being the first to play the
cithara as a solo instrument with no vocal accompaniment. Thamyris is said to have been enamored of
Hyacinth (who however spurned him for the god
Apollo), and thus to have been the first man to have loved another male. According to Apollodorus in the
Library, the Muses instead punished him by gouging out his eyes. This allusion is taken up in
Euripides'
Rhesus, and in the
scholia on the
Iliad. These later sources add the details that Thamyris had demanded as his prize for winning the contest either the privilege of having sex with all the Muses or of marrying one of them; and that after his death he was further punished in
Hades. Ancient scholia emphasized that the episode was meant to illustrate that poetic inspiration was a gift of the gods, and could be taken away by them. ==Other==