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Dardanus (Scythian king)

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Ancient

Apollodorus

3.15.3

Cleopatra was married to Phineus, who had by her two sons, Plexippus and Pandion. When he had these sons by Cleopatra, he married Idaea, daughter of Dardanus. She falsely accused her stepsons to Phineus of corrupting her virtue, and Phineus, believing her, blinded them both.¹ But when the Argonauts sailed past with Boreas, they punished him.2

¹ See above, Apollod. 1.9.21. The story of Phineus and his sons is related by the Scholiast on Sophocles (Antigone, 981), referring to the present passage of Apollodorus as his authority. The tale was told by the ancients with many variations, some of which are noticed by the Scholiast on Sophocles (Antigone, 981). According to Soph. Ant. 969ff., it was not their father Phineus, but their cruel stepmother, who blinded the two young men, using her shuttle as a dagger. The names both of the stepmother and of her stepsons are variously given by our authorities. See further Diod. 4.43ff.; Scholiast on Hom. Od. xii.69 (who refers to Asclepiades as his authority); Scholiast on Ap. Rhod., Argon. ii.178; Hyginus, Fab. 19; Serv. Verg. A. 3.209; Scholiast on Ovid, Ibis 265, 271; Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. Bode, i. pp. 9, 124 (First Vatican Mythographer 27; Second Vatican Mythographer 124). According to Phylarchus, Aesculapius restored the sight of the blinded youths for the sake of their mother Cleopatra, but was himself killed by Zeus with a thunderbolt for so doing. See Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos i.262, p. 658, ed. Bekker; compare Scholiast on Pind. P. 3.54(96); Scholiast on Eur. Alc. 1. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles composed tragedies entitled Phineus. See TGF (Nauck 2nd ed.), pp. 83, 284ff.; The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. A. C. Pearson, vol. ii. pp. 311ff.

Diodorus Siculus

4.43.3–4

At that time, however, the tale continues, when the storm had abated, the chieftains landed in Thrace on the country which was ruled by Phineus. Here they came upon two youths who by way of punishment had been shut within a burial vault where they were being subjected to continual blows of the whip; these were sons of Phineus and Cleopatra, who men said was born of Oreithyïa, the daughter of Erechtheus, and Boreas, and had unjustly been subjected to such a punishment because of the unscrupulousness and lying accusations of their mother-in‑law. [4] For Phineus had married Idaea, the daughter of Dardanus the king of the Scythians, and yielding to her every desire out of his love for her he had believed her charge that his sons by an earlier marriage had insolently offered violence to their mother-in‑law out of a desire to please their mother.

4.44.3–4

And when Phineus hastened to join battle with them and the Thracian multitude ran together, Heracles, they say, who performed the mightiest deeds of them all, slew Phineus himself and no small number of the rest, and finally capturing the royal palace led Cleopatra forth from out the prison, and restored to the sons of Phineus their ancestral rule. But when the sons wished to put their stepmother to death under torture, Heracles persuaded them to renounce such a vengeance, and so the sons, sending her to her father in Scythia, urged that she be punished for her wicked treatment of them. [4] And this was done; the Scythian condemned his daughter to death, and the sons of Cleopatra gained in this way among the Thracians a reputation for equitable dealing.

Modern

Hazel

p. 164

Dardanus

1. Son of Zeus ...

2. A Scythian king, the father of Idaea, whom he slew for her cruelty to her children.

Lupher

p. 20 n. 42

⁴² Translator's note: Gentili seems to confuse the Trojan ancestor Dardanus with the Scythian king Dardanus who killed his own daughter.

p. 21

This was a wicked state of wicked men, in which the first crime was murder of kin, perpetrated by the founder, descendant of course of the kin-murderer Dardanus.⁴²

Parada

s.v. Dardanus

Smith

s.v. Dardanus

（*Da/rdanos), a son of Zeus and Electra, the daughter of Atlas. ... When Chryse died, Dardanus married Bateia, the daughter of Teucrus, or Arisbe of Crete, by whom he became the father of Erichthonius and Idaea. (Hom. Il. 20.215, &c.; Apollod. 3.12.1, &c., 15.3; Dionys. A. R. 1.61, &c.; Lycophr. 1302; Eustath. ad Il. p. 1204; Conon. Narr. 21; Strab. vii. p.331; Paus. 7.4.3, 19.3; Diod. 4.49; Serv. ad Aen. 1.32.)

... There are four other mythical personages of the name of Dardanus. (Hom. Il. 20.459; Eustath. ad Il. pp. 380, 1697; Paus. 8.24.2.)

Tripp

p. 190

Dardanus (1). The son of Zeus ...

Dardanus (2). A king of the Scythians. Dardanus was the father of Idaea, second wife of Phineus, king of Salmydessus. He condemed her to death for her crimes against her stepsons.