The Telchines

The sea-born craftsmen who receive Poseidon

Rhea entrusts the infant Poseidon to the Telchines and to Capheira on Rhodes. Diodorus makes them children of Thalassa, the sea, and the island’s first inhabitants. They raise the sea god; when he is grown, he fathers Rhodos with their sister Halia, giving the future island its eponymous woman.

Diodorus credits the Telchines with the first divine statues and names cult images on Rhodes that still carried their title in his day. They also command cloud, rain, hail and snow and can alter their shape. Other sources refuse this simple sea-born genealogy. Bacchylides makes them children of Nemesis and Tartarus, while another account pairs Gaia and Pontus. No text reconciles the three origins.

What Strabo calls them, and why

Some call the Telchines “maligners” and sorcerers, Strabo writes, who pour water of the Styx mixed with sulphur over animals and plants to kill them. But he sets a second explanation directly against the first: the Telchines were only “maligned” by rival workmen, envious of a skill they could not match, and were the first to work iron and bronze. In this telling they fabricated the scythe Cronus carried. Strabo’s Greek carries the pun in the words themselves: the same root names both the caster of an evil eye and the one merely slandered by envious rivals. He leaves both readings standing. He also gives the Telchines a route into Rhodes, from Crete to Cyprus and then to the island.

The three-forked weapon

Callimachus gives the Telchines one further piece of work beside the sickle. In the Hymn to Delos, they forge the three-forked weapon with which “the mighty god” first strikes the mountains and breaks the islands out of the sea. The poem then makes Delos the exception, the island that owes nothing to that blow because it was never wrenched from anywhere.

The flood, and where they went

Diodorus has the Telchines see the flood coming before it arrives. They abandon Rhodes and scatter; one of them, Lycus, reaches Lycia and raises a temple to Apollo Lycius beside the river Xanthus. Those who stay behind are mostly lost when the waters do come, though a few reach the island’s high ground and survive, the sons of Zeus among their number.

The word outlives the people

Three centuries later, Callimachus opens the prologue to his Aetia by naming the Telchines again, this time as people rather than sea-daemons: “the Telchines grumble at my poetry,” he writes, “ignorant, they were never friends of the Muse,” because he had not written one continuous poem of many thousand lines on kings and heroes. Ancient scholiasts tried to identify them, with the epigrammatists Asclepiades and Posidippus among their guesses. Modern scholarship has never settled whether Callimachus meant real rivals or an invented target.

The insult depends on the older dispute over their craft. Strabo’s Telchines may be destructive sorcerers or workers accused by jealous competitors. Callimachus turns that uncertainty against people who judge his workmanship: he calls the critics by the name of craftsmen whose own reputation was damaged by envy.

Rhodes loses the Telchines to Diodorus’s flood, but their name remains attached to cult titles, forged divine weapons and a quarrel about poetry. The last secure act is Callimachus’s, written on a papyrus copy: the supposed maligners are made to speak only so the poet can answer them.