Lemnos — Island of Hephaestus

Hephaestus's fall and the island's fire cult

The oldest account of Hephaestus landing on Lemnos comes from the Iliad. Hephaestus himself tells Hera that Zeus once seized him by the foot and threw him from the threshold of heaven. He fell for a whole day and came down on Lemnos at sunset with little life left in him, and the Sintian men cared for him. Homer gives a second fall elsewhere in the poem. There Hera throws her lame newborn out of shame, and the sea goddesses Thetis and Eurynome rescue him. That version has nothing to do with Lemnos. Later writers often merged the two stories, which is why sources disagree about who threw him.

In historical times the island had two main cities. One was Hephaestia, named for the god. The other was Myrina on the west coast. Lemnos was also a centre of the mysteries of the Kabeiroi, gods who in local tradition were sons or grandsons of Hephaestus by the nymph Kabeiro. The remains of their sanctuary, the Kabeirion at Chloi on the north-east coast, can still be visited. Philostratus describes a Lemnian purification ritual in which every fire on the island was put out for nine days, until a ship brought new fire from Delos. Scholars have often connected this rite with the story of the Lemnian women. The island also produced "Lemnian earth," a medicinal clay dug once a year and stamped with a seal. The physician Galen made a trip to Lemnos in the second century AD to see it collected.

Hypsipyle and her family

The massacre story makes more sense once you know who Thoas was. In most accounts he was a son of Dionysus and Ariadne. That is why Hypsipyle hid him in a chest, or in some versions disguised him as an image of the god, and set him adrift. Apollonius of Rhodes says the chest washed up on the island of Oenoe, later called Sicinos.

Hypsipyle's story continued after the Argonauts left. When the women found out she had spared her father, she was driven out or sold into slavery and ended up as nurse to the infant Opheltes, son of the king of Nemea. While she was guiding the Seven Against Thebes to a spring, she set the child down and a serpent killed him. The Nemean Games were said to have been founded in his memory. Euripides dramatised this in his Hypsipyle, which survives in substantial papyrus fragments. In that play her twin sons by Jason, Euneus and Thoas, find and rescue their mother. Euneus later became king of Lemnos. In the Iliad he sends ships of wine to the Greek camp at Troy, and he buys the Trojan prince Lycaon from Achilles as a slave.

The Lemnian women were a byword. Aeschylus's chorus in the Libation Bearers calls the Lemnian crime the most terrible of all evils. Herodotus says that "Lemnian deeds" became a Greek phrase for atrocities. He links it to a second, quasi-historical massacre, in which the Pelasgian settlers of Lemnos killed the Athenian women they had captured and the children those women had borne them.

Philoctetes: where, and how long

Sources differ on where Philoctetes was bitten. Sophocles places it at the shrine of the goddess Chryse on a small island near Lemnos. Apollodorus places it on Tenedos during a sacrifice. Other writers put it on Lemnos itself. All the main versions agree that the Greeks marooned him on Lemnos because his cries and the smell of the wound made sacrifice impossible. Sophocles' Philoctetes (409 BC) makes the island deserted to stress his isolation, even though Lemnos was inhabited in Homer and in the Argonaut story. In his version Odysseus brings along Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, to trick Philoctetes out of the bow. The young man's conscience gets in the way, and the deadlock ends only when the deified Heracles appears and orders Philoctetes to go to Troy. Aeschylus and Euripides each wrote a Philoctetes too. Both plays are lost, but the orator Dio Chrysostom compared all three. In Euripides' version Diomedes, not Neoptolemus, went with Odysseus.

Lemnos had a real history alongside the myths. Poliochni on the east coast is one of the earliest town-like settlements in the Aegean, dating to the fourth and third millennia BC. A sixth-century BC grave stele found near Kaminia carries an inscription in a non-Greek language closely related to Etruscan. The Athenian general Miltiades took the island for Athens around 500 BC.

Ancient sources

• Homer, Iliad 1.590–594 — Hephaestus recalls being thrown from heaven by Zeus and landing on Lemnos, where the Sintians cared for him.
• Homer, Iliad 7.467–469 and 21.40–41 — Euneus, son of Jason and Hypsipyle, sends wine to the Greeks and buys Lycaon from Achilles.
• Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 1.609–909 — the fullest account of the massacre, Thoas's escape, and the Argonauts' stay with Hypsipyle.
• Sophocles, Philoctetes — Philoctetes marooned on Lemnos, and Odysseus and Neoptolemus's mission to fetch the bow.
• Herodotus, Histories 6.138 — the Pelasgian massacre on Lemnos and the proverb "Lemnian deeds."
• Apollodorus, Library 1.9.17 and 3.6.4 — summarises the Lemnian women, the Argonauts' visit and Hypsipyle's later service at Nemea.

Frequently asked questions

Why did the Lemnian women kill their husbands?

Aphrodite, angry that they neglected her worship, cursed them with a foul smell. Their husbands then took Thracian captive women as concubines, and the wives killed all the men in revenge.

How many children did Jason have with Hypsipyle?

Usually two sons, Euneus and Thoas (in some versions called Nebrophonus or Deipylus). Homer knows only Euneus, who later ruled Lemnos.

How long was Philoctetes left on Lemnos?

Nearly ten years, which is most of the Trojan War. He was fetched only after a prophecy, usually credited to the captured Trojan seer Helenus, revealed that Troy could not fall without the bow of Heracles.

Is Lemnos a volcano?

Lemnos is volcanic in origin, but it has no active volcano. "Mosychlos" may refer to ancient burning gas vents or to a myth with no geological basis. Its location has never been identified with certainty.