The Telchines

The first people of Rhodes

The Telchines are the first people of Rhodes in the account of Diodorus, an ancient historian. He calls them children of Thalassa, the sea.

When the god Poseidon is a baby, the goddess Rhea gives him to the Telchines and to Capheira on Rhodes to raise. The Telchines bring up the young sea god. When he is grown, Poseidon has a daughter, Rhodos, with their sister Halia. The future island is later named after her.

Diodorus also says the Telchines made the first statues of the gods. In his own day, some of the statues worshipped on Rhodes still carried their name. The Telchines had power over the weather as well. They could call up cloud, rain, hail and snow, and they could change their shape.

Other parents

Not every ancient writer agrees that the sea was their parent. The poet Bacchylides makes the Telchines children of Nemesis and Tartarus. Another account names Gaia and Pontus as their parents. No ancient text brings these three origins together.

Their journey to Rhodes also has its own story. The ancient geographer Strabo traces them from Crete to Cyprus, and from there to the island. He says the island was once called Telchinis after them, because they were the first to settle it.

Smiths of the gods

Strabo calls the Telchines the first people to work iron and bronze. In his account they made the scythe that the god Cronus carried.

The poet Callimachus gives them one more piece of work beside the sickle of Cronus. In his Hymn to Delos, a poem in praise of the island, the Telchines forge a three-forked weapon. With it, “the mighty god” first strikes the mountains and breaks the islands out of the sea. In the poem, Delos is the exception. It owes nothing to that blow, because it was never torn loose from anywhere.

Sorcerers or slandered craftsmen

Strabo reports two opposite views of the Telchines. Some people, he writes, called them “maligners” and sorcerers. They poured water of the Styx, mixed with sulphur, over animals and plants to kill them.

Strabo then sets a second explanation directly against the first. In this one, the Telchines were only “maligned”. Rival workmen envied a skill they could not match and spread these stories about them.

Strabo’s Greek carries a pun here. The same root word names both a person who casts the evil eye and a person slandered by jealous rivals. Strabo leaves both readings standing.

The flood

Diodorus says the Telchines saw a flood coming before it arrived. They left Rhodes and scattered. One of them, Lycus, reached Lycia and built a temple to Apollo Lycius beside the river Xanthus.

Of those who stayed behind, most were lost when the waters came. A few reached the high ground of the island and survived, and the sons of Zeus were among them.

So Rhodes loses the Telchines to the flood in Diodorus. Their name stays attached to the titles of statues, to weapons forged for the gods, and to a quarrel about poetry.

A name for envious critics

Callimachus names the Telchines again in the prologue, or opening, of his poem the Aetia. This time they are people, not sea spirits. “The Telchines grumble at my poetry,” he writes, “ignorant, they were never friends of the Muse.” They complain because he has not written one continuous poem of many thousand lines about kings and heroes.

Ancient commentators tried to work out who these critics were. Among their guesses were Asclepiades and Posidippus, poets who wrote short poems called epigrams. Modern scholars have never settled whether Callimachus meant real rivals or invented ones.

The insult depends on the older argument about the craft of the Telchines. In Strabo they may be harmful sorcerers, or skilled workers accused by jealous rivals. Callimachus turns that doubt against the people who judge his own work. He gives his critics the name of craftsmen whose reputation was damaged by envy. In the poem, which survives on a papyrus copy, these supposed maligners speak only so that the poet can answer them.