King of Lemnos Thoas was a king of
Lemnos. According to the 1st-century BC historian
Diodorus Siculus, Thoas had been a general of the wise
Cretan king
Rhadamanthus (the brother of
Minos and Ariadne's uncle) who gave to Thoas the island of
Lemnos.
The women of Lemnos The first adventure (usually) of
Jason and the
Argonauts is their visit to the island of
Lemnos, where the women have killed all the men except Thoas. There are hints of the story in the
Iliad (c. 8th century), where Lemnos is referred to as the "city of godlike Thoas", and
Euneus, Jason's son by Thoas' daughter
Hypsipyle, is mentioned. The story was probably dealt with in Aeschylus' lost tragedies
Hypsipyle and
Lemniai (late 6th century-early 5th century BC). The
lyric poet Pindar (late 6th century-early 5th century BC) mentions "the race of the Lemnian women, who killed their husbands." There was also a reference to the story in
Euripides' lost play
Hypsipyle (c. 410 BC), where Hypsipyle tells Euneus: "Alas, the flight that I fled, my son—if you only knew it—from sea-girt Lemnos, because I did not cut off my father’s grey head!". Already, for the mid-5th-century BC historian
Herodotus, the story of the women killing their husbands "who were Thoas' companions" had given rise to the proverbial phrase "Lemnian crime" used to mean any cruel deed. The earliest extant telling of the story, however, occurs in the 3rd-century BC
Argonautica by
Apollonius of Rhodes. According to this account, all the men on the island had been killed by the women, except for the "aged" Thoas, who was saved by his daughter Hypsipyle. She put Thoas into a "hollow chest" and set him adrift on the open sea. Fishermen pulled him ashore on the island of
Sicinus. The island was then called Oenoe and, a water nymph of the same name lived there. Thoas had a son Sicinus, by Oenoe, and the island later took the son's name. The 1st-century AD Latin poet
Valerius Flaccus, in his
Argonautica gives a more detailed account of Thoas' rescue and escape. During the night of the massacre, Hypsipyle woke Thoas, covered his head, and took him to Dionysus' temple, where she hid him. The next morning, Hypsipyle disguised Thoas as the temples' cult statue of Dionysus, placed him on the ritual chariot (used to parade the statue). She then took Thoas, through the streets of the city, crying aloud that the god's statue had been polluted by the night's bloody murders, and needed to be cleansed in the sea. By this subterfuge, and with the god Dionysus' help, Thoas was safely hid outside the city. But fearing discovery, Hypsipyle finds an old abandoned boat, in which Thoas put to sea, eventually reaching the land of the Taurians, where "Diana put a sword in his hand, and didst appoint him warden of thy cheerless altar". Other accounts tell similar stories, with variations. According to the 1st-century AD Latin poet
Statius, Hypsipyle hid Thoas on a ship, while according to the late 1st-century BC Latin mythographer
Hyginus, who identifies Thoas with the
Thoas who was the Taurian king, Hypsipyle put Thoas onto a ship which a storm carried to the "island Taurica". However, the 1st or 2nd-century AD Greek mythographer
Apollodorus gives a different ending to the story. He says that, while Thoas was saved at first, by Hypsipyle hiding him, sometime later, when the Lemnian women discovered that Thoas had escaped the initial slaughter, they killed Thoas, and sold Hypsipyle into slavery.
In the Iliad In the
Iliad,
Achilles offers as prize a silver mixing bowl, which had belonged to Thoas. He had received it from the
Phoenicians, and it ended up in the possession of Thoas' grandson
Euneus, who gave it to
Patroclus as ransom for
Lycaon, a son of
Priam. ==Notes==