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Idaea (wife of Phineus)

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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.

² Here Apollodorus departs from the usual tradition, followed by himself elsewhere （Apollod. 1.9.21）, which affirmed that the Argonauts, instead of punishing Phineus, rendered him a great service by delivering him from the Harpies.

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.

Hyginus

Fabulae

19 Phineus

Phineus, the Thracian son of Agenor, had two sons by Cleopatra. They were blinded by their father as a result of their stepmother's accusations.

Palatine Anthology

3.4 (Paton, pp. 152, 153)

4 The fourth has Polymedes and Clytius, the sons of Phineus of Thrace, who murdered their father’s Phrygian wife, because he had taken her in place of their mother Cleopatra.¹

Clytius and Polymedes, renowned for intelligence, are killing their Phrygian stepmother for their own mother’s sake. Cleopatra is delighted with this; she had earlier seen Phineus’ wife righteously defeated.

Sophocles

Antigone

966–976

Chorus

[966] And by the waters of the Dark Rocks, the waters of the twofold sea, are the shores of Bosporus and the Thracian city Salmydessus, [970] where Ares, neighbor of that city, saw the accursed, blinding wound inflicted on the two sons of Phineus by his savage wife. It was a wound that brought darkness to the hollows, making them crave vengeance [975] for the eyes she crushed with her bloody hands and with her shuttle for a dagger.

977–987

Chorus

[977] Wasting away in their misery, they bewailed their miserable suffering [980] and their birth from their mother stripped of her marriage. But she traced her descent from the ancient line of the Erechtheids, and in far-distant caves she was raised amidst her father's gusts. She was the child of Boreas, [985] running swift as horses over the steep hills, a daughter of gods. Yet she, too, was assailed by the long-lived Fates, my child.

Phineus A and B

fr. 645 [= Schol. Soph. Ant. 981]

fr. 704 [= Schol. Apoll. Rhod. 2.178]

Modern

Gantz

p. 351

[Sophocles] wrote two Phineus plays, one ... the other offering a previously unpreserved tale in which Phineus has married Kleopatra, a daughter of Boreas, and has two children (there is some textural corruption in the names, which in any case vary). These he blinds, persuaded by the slander of their stepmother Idaia (fr. 704 R). A choral allusion in Antigone, however has the stepmother herself commit the deed, blinding the sons with a shuttle (Ant 966-87), while the scholia to the same passage (at Ant 981) note Eidothea, sister of Kadmos, "whom Sophokles mentions in his Tympanistai" as an alternate possibility for the second wife, together with Idaia, daughter of Dardanos. Other fragments attributed to this lost work of Sophocles may mean that the that the entire play (satyric?) dealt with Phineus, and the scholiast's subsequent words, where the stepmother blinds the children and imprisons them in a tomb, might then well come from it (frr 637-38 R, together with fr 645 [the scholion]).

p. 352

The above mentioned scholia to the Antigone suggests that, in one version of the story the stepmother accused her children of rape to make Phineus blind them (so too Apollodoros), while in another Phineus put aside his first Kleopatra to marry Idaia and Kleopatra in anger then blinded her own children. As for the entombment of the children, ... The Odyssey scholia offer the account noted above drawn from Asklepiadas: here Phineus with children from Kleopatra marries Eurytia, and hands them over to their stepmother to be killed after hearing slander against them (Σ Od 12.69 = 12F31; we are surely to understand that she made the accusation).

Grimal

s.v. Idaea p. 227

Idaea (Ἰδαια) This is a name which means 'she who comes from Ida' or 'she who lives on Ida'. Several heroines have the name, including:

...

2. One of the daughters of Dardanus and so a great-granddaughter of the preceding Idaea. She married Phineus, the king of Thrace, as his second wife. She was responsible for the misfortunes that fell on PHINEUS by her slandering of the children of his first wife, Cleopatra, the daughter of Boreas (see BOREADES).

p. 490

Idaea ... (2) Schol. on Apoll. Rhod. Arg. 2.178; Sophocles, Phineus (lost tragedy, Jebb- Pearson II, p. 311ff.); Ant. 980; Diod Sic. 4.43; Ovid. Rem. Am. 454.

Hard

p. 386

According to another group of stories, Phineus' troubles arose because he or his second wife mistreated the sons whom he fathered by his first marriage. Sophocles wrote at least two plays on this matter, but our information on them is very incomplete. In a full narrative recorded by the Hellenistic mythographer Asclepiades, Phineus first married Kleopatra, a daughter of Boreas, and then a certain Eurytie, who laid false accusartions (doubtless of seduction) against the sons of his previous wife. So he handed them over to her to be killed, much [cont.]

p. 387

to the anger of Zeus, who offered him a choice between blindness and death. ... There are various other accounts in which Phineus' second wife, who is also named as Idaia or Eidothea, accused her stepsons of trying to rape or seduce her, and so prompted Phineus to blind them, or to hand them over to her to be blinded and imprisoned or put to death.

Jebb, Headlam, and Pearson

p. 311

The story of Phineus and his sons, so far as it is given by Sophocles himself in the Antigone (966-987), is ... Phineus married again; and the [cont.]

p. 312

cruel stepmother¹ dealt a blinding blow to Cleopatra's two sons, using her shuttle as a dagger to strike them in the eyes. ...

Sophocles does not give a reason of the stepmother'e cruelty, but this is supplied by other authorities. It is a story of a well-known type. The stepmother, whose name is variously recorded, chargined, we may suppose, at repulse by one of them, accussed her stepsons to their father of attempting to violate her. Phineus believed her accusation, and blinded them ...

Asclepiades³, who gives to the stepmother the name Eurytia, ...

¹ Her name is not given. Sophocles called her Idothea in the Tympanistae (fr. 645), but Idaea in a play which is not named (fr. 704). Cf. Ov. Rem. Am. 454.

³ Schol. Hom μ 69 (FHG III 302). ...

p. 315

704

... The names of the sons are elsewhere given as Plexippus and Pandion (Apollod. 3.200, schol. Soph. Ant. 981), Terymbas and Aspondus (schol. Soph. Ant. 981), Crambus and Parthenius (schol. Apoll. Rhod. 2.140), Bithynus and Mariandynus (Etym. gen. cf. FHG 111 594), and Polidector and Polidophus (schol. Ov. Ib. 271). Welker and Bergk substituted Oreithyius for Oarbus here.

Tripp

s.v. Idaea (1), p. 315

The second wife of PHINEUS (1). Idaea bore two sons, Thynius and Mariandynus. Her lying accusations against her stepsons led her husband to imprison and torture them. They were rescued by the Argonauts. Idaea was sent home to her father, the Scythian king Dardanus, who condemned her to death.

Smith

s.v. Phineus 3

3. A son of Agenor, and king of Salmydessus in Thrace (Apollon. 2.178, 237; Schol. ad eund. 2.177). Some traditions called himl a son of Phoenix and Cassiepeia, and a grandson of Agenor (Schol. ad Alpollon. Rhod. 2.178), while others again call him a son of Poseidon (Apollod. 1.9.21). Some accounts, moreover, make him a king in Paphlagonia or in Arcadia. (Schol. ad Apollon. Rhod. l.c.; Serv. ad Aen. 3.209.) He was first married to Cleopatra, the daughter of Boreas and Oreithyia, by whom he had two children, Oryithus (Oarthus) and Crambis (some call them Parthenius and Crambis, Schol. ad Apollon. Rhod. 2.140; Plexippus and Pandion, Apollod. 3.15.3; Gerymbas and Aspondus, Schol. ad Soph. Antiq. 977; or Polydectus and Polydorus, Ov. Ib. 273). Afterwards [Phineus] was married to Idaea (some call her Dia, Eurytia, or Eidothea, Schol, ad Apollon. Rhod. l.c.; Schol. al Hoia. Od. 12.70; Schol. ad Soph. Antig. 980), by whom he again had two sons, Thynus and Mariandynns. (Schol. ad Apollon. Rhod. 2.140, 178; Apollod. 3.15.3.)