Adrastus

“ And to his side came Menelaus, son of Atreus, bearing his far-shadowing spear. Then Adrastus clasped him by the knees and besought him: "Take me alive, thou son of Atreus, and accept a worthy ransom; treasures full many lie stored in the palace of my wealthy father, bronze and gold and iron wrought with toil; thereof would my father grant thee ransom past counting, should he hear that I am alive at the ships of the Achaeans." ”

“ ADRASTUS. [to Crythes and the soldiers.]
Why do ye tarry here?
Begone!—still do ye hover round my couch?
If the commandment of a dying king
Is feeble, as a man who has embraced
His child for the first time since infancy,
And presently must part with him for ever,
I do adjure ye leave us!
[Exeunt all but Ion and Adrastus.]
ION.
O my father!
How is it with thee now?
ADRASTUS.
Well ”

“ To the hero Admetus, Adrastus gives a mantle dyed with Tyrian purple, and embroidered with Leander's death. There flows the Hellespont; the youth is vainly struggling with the swollen waves; and there stands Hero on her tower; and the lamp already flickers in the blast that will destroy both light and lives at once. It still remained for a grammarian of the fifth century, Musæus, of whom nothing but the name is known, to give the final form to this poem of love and death. The spring-tide of the epic and the idyl was over. ”

“ Creon and attendants come up to him.
Cre. I have o'er-heard thy black design, Adrastus,
And therefore, as a traitor to this state,
Death ought to be thy lot: Let it suffice
That Thebes surveys thee as a prince; abuse not
Her proffered mercy, but retire betimes,
Lest she repent, and hasten on thy doom.
Adr. Think not, most abject, most abhorred of men,
Adrastus will vouchsafe to answer thee;—
Thebans to you I justify my love:
I have addrest my prayer to this fair princess ”

“ The busy Adrastus, whose professional engagements might seem more than enough for the nervous energy of one man, and who yet finds time to print essays on the chief current subjects, from the tri-lingual inscriptions, or the Idea of the Infinite among the prehistoric Lapps, to the Colorado beetle and the grape disease in the south of France, is generally praised if not admired for the breadth of his mental range and his gigantic powers of work. ”

“ Unbless’d Adrastus next at mercy lies Beneath the Spartan spear, a living prize. Scared with the din and tumult of the fight, His headlong steeds, precipitate in flight, Rush’d on a tamarisk’s strong trunk, and broke The shatter’d chariot from the crooked yoke; Wide o’er the field, resistless as the wind, For Troy they fly, and leave their lord behind. Prone on his face he sinks beside the wheel: Atrides o’er him shakes his vengeful steel ”

“ Callisthenes says that Adrasteia had its name from King Adrastus, who first built the temple of Nemesis. The city Adrasteia is situated between Priapus and Parium, with a plain of the same name below it, in which there was an oracle of the Actæan Apollo and Artemis near the sea-shore.1359 On the demolition of the temple, all the furniture and the stone-work were transported to Parium, where an altar, the workmanship of Hermocreon, remarkable for its size and beauty, was erected, but the oracle, as well as that at Zeleia, was abolished. No temple either of Adrasteia or Nemesis exists. ”

“ Adras ́tus, son of Talaus and Lysimache, was king of Argos. Polynices, being banished from Thebes by his brother Eteocles, fled to Argos, where he married Argia, daughter of Adrastus. The king assisted his son-in-law, and marched against Thebes with an army. He was defeated with great slaughter, and fled to Athens, where Theseus gave him assistance, and was victorious. Adrastus died from grief, occasioned by the death of his son Ægialeus.
Adria ́nus. A famous emperor of Rome. He is represented as an active, learned, warlike, and austere general. ”

“ He begged the king to kill him at once, over the body of his son, and thus put an end to the unutterable agony that he endured. This second calamity was more, he said, than he could bear. He had killed before his own brother, and now he had murdered the son of his greatest benefactor and friend.
Burial of Atys.
Adrastus kills himself.
Crœsus, though overwhelmed with anguish, was disarmed of all resentment at witnessing Adrastus's suffering. He endeavored to soothe and quiet the agitation which the unhappy man endured, but it was in vain. Adrastus could not be calmed. ”

“ Kleisthenês not only forbade the rhapsodes to come to Sikyôn, but farther resolved to expel Adrastus himself from the country,—such is the literal Greek expression, [44] the hero himself being believed to be actually present and domiciled among the people. He first applied to the Delphian oracle for permission to carry this banishment into direct effect, but the Pythian priestess returned an answer of indignant refusal,—“Adrastus is king of the Sikyonians, but thou art a ruffian.” Thus baffled, he put in practice a stratagem calculated to induce Adrastus to depart of his own accord. ”

“ Thy soul's a woman;—speak, Adrastus,
And boldly, as thou met'st my arms in fight:—
Dar'st thou not speak? why then 'tis bad indeed.—
Tiresias, thee I summon by thy priesthood,
Tell me what news from hell; where Laius points,
And whose the guilty head!
Tir. Let me not answer.
Œdip. Be dumb then, and betray thy native soil
To farther plagues.
Tir. I dare not name him to thee.
Œdip. Dar'st thou converse with hell, and canst thou fear
An human name?
Tir. Urge me no more to tell a thing, which, known,
Would make thee more unhappy: 'Twill be found,
Though I am silent. ”

“ After his death Adrastus became an object of worship in Argos and the cities which owned its suzerainty. We have an illustration of the close connection which then subsisted between religion and politics in the fact that when Cleisthenes, the “Tyrant” of Sicyon, wished to assert his independence of Argos, he applied to Thebes for an image of Melanippus, the ancient and powerful foe of Adrastus, so that, being introduced into the citadel of Sicyon, he might put the other hero-god to flight. ”

“ The hero Adrastus, whose chapel Herodotus himself saw in the Sikyonian agora, was common both to Argos and to Sikyôn, and was the object of special reverence at both: he figures in the legend as king of Argos, and as the grandson and heir of Polybus, king of Sikyôn. He was the unhappy leader of the two sieges of Thebes, so famous in the ancient epic,—and the Sikyonians listened with delight both to the exploits of the Argeians against Thebes, as celebrated in the recitations of the epical rhapsodes, and to the mournful tale of Adrastus and his family misfortunes, as sung in the tragic chorus. ”

“ And they that held Adrasteia and the land of Apaesus, and that held Pityeia and the steep mount of Tereia, these were led by Adrastus and Araphius, with corslet of linen, sons twain of Merops of Percote, that was above all men skilled in prophesying, and would not suffer his sons to go into war, the bane of men. ”

“ Most of the soldiers had also been slain: so Adrastus made up his mind to go home, and wait until the sons of these fallen heroes were old enough to fight, before he went on with the war. As they thought it their duty to avenge all injuries, and especially the death of a relative, Adrastus had no trouble in getting these youths to march against Thebes. So they began a second siege, which was known as the War of the E-pig ́o-ni, or descendants, because the young warriors took up their fathers' quarrel. ”

“ But there is a temple of Adrasteia near Cyzicus. Antimachus, however, says,
“There is a great goddess Nemesis, who has received all these things from the immortals. Adrastus first raised an altar to her honour on the banks of the river Æsepus, where she is worshipped under the name of Adrasteia.”
14. The city of Parium lies upon the sea, with a harbour larger than that of Priapus, and has been augmented from the latter city; for the Pariani paid court to the Attalic kings, to whom Priapene was subject, and, by their permission, appropriated to themselves a large part of that territory. ”

“ But Adrastus was not to be thus prevented. Deeming himself the most unfortunate of men, he slew himself on the tomb of the hapless youth. And for two years Crœsus abandoned himself to grief.
And now we must go on to tell how Crœsus met with a greater misfortune still, and brought the Persians to the gates of Greece. Cyrus, son of Cambyses, king of Persia, had conquered the neighboring kingdom of Media, and, inspired by ambition, had set out on a career of wide-spread conquest and dominion. He had grown steadily more powerful, and now threatened the great kingdom which Crœsus had gained. ”

“ When they had come to Mount Olympus they hunted for the beast, and having found him they made a ring and threw their spears at him: then the guest called Adrastus, the man who had been cleansed of the deed of blood, missed the boar with his spear and hit the son of Croesus. So Atys was smitten by the spear and fulfilled the utterance of the dream. One ran to bring Croesus word of what had been done, and came to Sardis, where he told the king of the fight and the manner of his son’s end. ”

“ Κλεισθένης δὲ χοροὺς μὲν τῷ Διονύσῳ ἀπέδωκε, τὴν δὲ ἄλλην θυσίην Μελανίππῳ (see Ridgeway, p. 28) : “The men of Sicyon paid honours to Adrastus, and in particular they revered him with tragic choruses because of his sufferings, herein honouring not Dionysus, but Adrastus. Cleisthenes gave the choruses to Dionysus, and the rest of the offering to Melanippus.” It may well be that Professor Ridgeway is right in asserting that ἀπέδωκε means not “restored” but “gave”—that is, these tragic choruses were originally of the funereal kind which he suggests for all primitive Greek tragedy. ”

“ Adrastus, unable to obtain permission from the Thêbans to inter the fallen chieftains, presented himself in suppliant guise, accompanied by their disconsolate mothers, to Thêseus at Eleusis. He implored the Athenian warrior to extort from the perverse Thêbans that last melancholy privilege which no decent or pious Greeks ever thought of withholding, and thus to stand forth as the champion of Grecian public morality in one of its most essential points, not less than of the rights of the subterranean gods. ”

“ He was a prince of the royal family of Phrygia, and his name was Adrastus. He had had the misfortune, by some unhappy accident, to kill his brother; his father, in consequence of it, had banished him from his native land, and he was now homeless, friendless, and destitute.
[Pg 119]
Crœsus received him kindly. "Your family have always been my friends," said he, "and I am glad of the opportunity to make some return by extending my protection to any member of it suffering misfortune. You shall reside in my palace, and all your wants shall be supplied. ”

“ The entrance of the unfortunate king, with his eyes torn from their sockets, is too disgusting for representation [3] . Of all the 122 persons of the drama, scarce one survives the fifth act. Œdipus dashes out his brains, Jocasta stabs herself, their children are strangled, Creon kills Eurydice, Adrastus kills Creon, and the insurgents kill Adrastus; when we add to this, that the conspirators are hanged, the reader will perceive, that the play, which began with a pestilence, concludes with a massacre,
And darkness is the burier of the dead. ”

“ Igne jubæ: with the last above all, whose ‘insatiate ardour’ of speed saved Adrastus from Theban pursuit, and brought him in the original mythical winner in the Nemæan games; whose sympathy, moreover, with human miseries broke down, as in their own case, the barriers of nature, and accomplished the portent of speech and tears. Their quasi-immortality is shared by Bayard, heard to neigh, it is said, every Mid-summer-night, along the leafy aisles of the Forest of Ardennes ”

“ The reflection of stars in the sea is not quite so noticeable or impressive as Statius would have us believe. But there is real beauty both in the conception and the execution of the simile. Of more indisputable excellence is the comparison in the eleventh book (443) , where Adrastus, flying from Thebes in humiliation and defeat, is likened to Pluto, when he first entered on his kingdom of the underworld, his lordship over the strengthless dead—
qualis demissus curru laevae post praemia sortis umbrarum custos mundique novissimus heres palluit, amisso veniens in Tartara caelo. ”

“ For all the wealth of detail that Statius has lavished on them, they are featureless. Adrastus is a colourless and respectable old king, strongly reminiscent of Latinus. Capaneus and Hippomedon are terrific warriors of gigantic stature and truculent speech, but they are wholly uninteresting. Argia and Jocasta are too rhetorical, Antigone too slight a figure to be really pathetic; Oedipus can do little save curse, which he does with some rhetorical vigour; but the gift of cursing hardly makes a character. Parthenopaeus, however, is a pathetic figure ”

“ Adrastus also has divine honours among the Megarians: he too they say died among them (when he was leading the army back after the capture of Thebes) , of old age and sorrow for the death of Ægialeus. And Agamemnon erected an altar to Artemis at Megara, when he went to Calchas, a native of the place, to persuade him to join the expedition to Ilium. And in the Prytaneum they say Euippus the son of Megareus was buried, and also Ischepolis the son of Alcathous. ”