Pausanias, Phocis

CHAPTER XIV.

The axes which were the votive offering of Periclytus, the son of Euthymachus of Tenedos, have an old legend connected with them. Cycnus was they say the son of Poseidon, and king at Colonae, a town in the Troad near the island Leucophrys. This Cycnus had a daughter Hemithea and a son Tennes by Proclea, daughter of Clytius, and sister of that Caletor of whom Homer says in the Iliad l that he was slain by Ajax when he tried to set on fire the ship of Protesilaus, and, Proclea dying, Cycnus married for his second wife Phylonome, the daughter of Cragasus, who failing to win the love of Tennes told her husband that Tennes wanted to have illicit dealings with her against her will, and Cycnus believed this lie, and put Tennes and his sister into a chest, and sent them to sea in it. And they got safe to the island Leucophrys, since called Tenedos from Tennes. And Cycnus, who was not destined to be ignorant of his wife's deception all his life, when he learned the truth sailed after his son to implore his forgiveness, and to admit his unwitting error. And as he was anchoring at the island, and was fastening his vessel by ropes to some tree or piece of rock, Tennes in his rage cut the ropes with his axe. Hence it is passed into a proverb, when people obstinately decline a conference, that they resemble him who cut the matter short with his Tenedian axe. Tennes was afterwards slain the Greeks say by Achilles as he was defending Tenedos, and in process of time the people of Tenedos, as they were weak, joined themselves to the people of Alexandria on the mainland of the Troad.

The Greeks who fought against the King of the Persians erected at Olympia a brazen Zeus, and an Apollo at Delphi, after the actions of Artemisium and Salamis. It is said also that Themistocles, when he went to Delphi, brought of the spoils of the Medes as a present to Apollo, and when he asked if he should offer them inside the temple, the Pythian Priestess bade him at once take them away altogether. And these were the words of her oracular response : " Put not in my temple the beautiful spoils of the Persians, send them home as quickly as possible." It is wonderful that the god declined to accept the spoils of the Medes only from Themistocles. Some think the god would have rejected all the Persian spoil equally, if those who offered it had first asked (like Themistocles) if the god would accept it. Others say that, as the god knew that Themistocles would be a suppliant of the Persians, he refused on that account to accept the spoil from him, that he might not win for him by acceptance the undying hate of the Medes. This invasion of Greece by the barbarian you may find foretold in the oracles of Bacis, and earlier still in the verses of Euclus.

Near the great altar is a bronze wolf, the votive offering of the Delphians themselves. The tradition about it is that some man plundered the treasures of the god, and hid himself and the gold in that part of Parnassus where the forest trees were most thick, and that a wolf attacked him as he slept and killed him, and that this wolf used to run into the town daily and howl : and the Delphians thought this could not but be by divine direction, so they followed the wolf and discovered the sacred gold, and offered to the god a bronze wolf.