2. In the Νεκυΐα of the Eleventh Odyssey we are introduced to Tyro, the daughter of Salmoneus, and the wife of Cretheus[748]. She is decorated with the epithet εὐπατέρεια, never given elsewhere by Homer except to Helen, and apparently an equivalent with him for Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα.
It is by no means unlikely, I would venture to suggest, that a similar force may lie in the epithet Salmoneus, who is here called ἀμύμων. That epithet is indeed sometimes applied on the ground of personal character. But Homer also gives it to the villain Ægisthus, which appears quite inexplicable except on the ground of the divine descent of the Pelopids[749]. The later tradition has loaded Salmoneus with the crime of audacious profanity: and it has also, beginning with Hesiod[750], made him a son of Æolus. The word ἀμύμων, combined with the εὐπατέρεια of Tyro, leaves little room for doubt that perhaps both, and certainly the latter of these representations are agreeable to the sense of Homer. If so, then Tyro was a granddaughter of Æolus; and we can at once fix his date from Homer, as follows:
1. Æolus.
2. Salmoneus, Od. xi. 235-7.
3. Tyro = Cretheus, ibid.
4. Pheres, Od. xi. 259.
5. Admetus, Il. ii. 711-15, 763.
6. Eumelus, ibid. and Od. iv. 798.
From which last cited passage I set down Eumelus as the contemporary of his brother-in-law Ulysses, and half a generation senior to the standard age of the war.
We have also the collateral line of Sisyphus from Æolus as follows: 1. Sisyphus; 2. Glaucus (1); 3. Bellerophon; 4. Hippolochus; 5. Glaucus (2), contemporary with the war[751]. According to this table Sisyphus might be either the son or the grandson of Æolus.
And again, Cretheus, who like Sisyphus is Αἰολίδης, may have been either the uncle or the cousin of his wife Tyro. The Fragment of Hesiod would make both him and Sisyphus sons of Æolus, and therefore uncles to Tyro.
These genealogies are in perfect keeping with what Homer tells us of the Neleid line. Tyro, he says, fell in love with Enipeus. In the likeness of that river, Neptune had access to her, and she bore to him two sons, Pelias and Neleus. Neleus is the father of Nestor: and Nestor stands one generation senior to Eumelus; for he was in his third tri-decadal period[752], if the expression may be allowed, during the action of the Iliad. Thus we have (as before), 3. Tyro; 4. Neleus; 5. Nestor; 6. Nestor. The maternal genealogy of Eumelus brings us exactly to the same point: for Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, was married to his father Admetus[753].
Thus the Æolid genealogies are laid down by Homer with great clearness, except as to the first interval, and with a singular self-consistency. Perseus[754], as we have seen, belongs to the fifth generation before the war. This is nearly the same with Sisyphus, and with Cretheus: and we are thus enabled to determine with tolerable certainty the epoch of the first Hellenic infusion into Greece. It precedes the arrival of Portheus in Ætolia by one generation, and that of Pelops by two.
Of Sisyphus we know from Homer, that he lived at an Ephyre on or near the Isthmus of Corinth. It is not so clear whether Cretheus ever came into the Peloponnesus. There is an Enipeus of Elis: but there is also one[755] of Thessaly, which was doubtless its original. The name, however, of the Thessalian stream appears to have been written Eniseus. Nitzsch[756] determines, on insufficient grounds as far as I can judge, that the passage of Od. xi. cannot mean the Enipeus of Pisatis. I can find no conclusive evidence either way: but Sisyphus was certainly in Southern Greece at or before this time, so that we need not wonder if Cretheus, another Æolid, was there also. His reputed son Neleus founded, without doubt, the kingdom of Pylos. Post-Homeric tradition places even Salmoneus, the father of Tyro, in Elis.