Locrians (Ὀποῦς) — a Homeric kingdom of the Odyssey, c. 1200 BC

Locrians — Swift Aias of the linen corslet — the spear that outreached all Greece, and the boast the sea would not forgive.

Opuntian Locris, forty ships under Aias son of Oileus — the deadliest spearman of the Achaeans after Achilles, and inseparable battle-mate of the greater Aias. His sacrilege against Kassandra doomed the fleet, and he drowned on the homeward sea, killed by his own boast.

Leader at Troy: Aias.

Ruler in the Odyssey's present: Aias.

Role in the Trojan War: Achaean contingent: forty ships from Opuntian Locris under swift Aias son of Oileus, deadliest of Greek spearmen after Achilles, who fought ever beside his namesake the Telamonian Aias. He crowned the victory with sacrilege, dragging Kassandra from Athene's altar — the impiety that turned the goddess against the whole returning host.

The homecoming: Escaped the sea, then boasted against the gods — and drowned on the cloven Gyraean rock.

Opous and the towns of the Opuntian Locrians lay in central Greece, over against holy Euboia across the narrow water, about the streams of the Boagrios river. It was a small realm of a small king — but that king was Aias the son of Oileus, called Aias the Less, and no spear in the whole Achaean host, save Achilles', reached farther or killed surer than his.\n\nWhen the ships gathered for Troy the Locrians sent forty black hulls. Their captain wore no bronze cuirass but a corslet of linen, and Homer marks him plainly in the Catalogue: 'not so great as was the Telamonian Aias but far less,' yet 'with the spear he far outdid all the Hellenes and Achaians.' Swift-footed and swift-handed, he was the running skirmisher of the war, and through ten years of fighting he was almost never seen apart from his greater namesake — the two Aiantes, the Telamonian bulwark and the Oilean blade, standing shoulder to shoulder in the press so that men spoke of them as one. That is the first cross-link of this house: to SAL, Salamis, whose lord Telamonian Aias was his inseparable battle-mate on the wall and by the ships.\n\nYet a shadow lay on him even in his glory, and it wore the face of Athene. At the funeral games for Patroklos he led the footrace to the very last stride — and there the goddess 'marred his race,' and he slipped in the filth of the slaughtered oxen and fell, mouth and nostrils fouled, while Odysseus took the prize. He rose spitting and swearing that the goddess had done it, and the Argives laughed. It was a small omen of a great doom.\n\nFor when Troy fell, Aias earned that doom outright. In the sack he ran down Kassandra, King Priam's prophet-daughter, where she clung to the wooden image of Athene in the goddess's own temple, and violated her at the altar — the sacrilege that turned the grey-eyed goddess against the whole returning fleet. This binds his story to TRO, the Trojans, whose royal seeress he defiled, and it is why the nostoi went so ill for so many.\n\nHis own return is the frame of everything. Athene begged a tempest of Zeus and hurled it on the Achaeans off the rocks; Poseidon first carried Aias safe to the Gyrae rocks and delivered him from the sea — and he would have escaped his death, hated of Athene though he was, had he not let a proud word fall. He shouted that in the gods' own despite he had escaped the gulf of the sea. Poseidon heard the boast, caught up his trident, smote the Gyraean rock and clove it; the sundered piece bore Aias down into the heaving deep, and there he perished when he had drunk of the salt sea water. So the deadliest spearman of Greece went down alone, killed less by the storm than by his own tongue.\n\nThe tale reaches the living world through the returns of others, and these are the last cross-links. It is the sea-god Proteus who tells it — to Menelaos of LAC, Lacedaemon, wandering home from Egypt — as one of the two great captains lost on the homeward deep; and Proteus names Aias' drowning in the same breath as the murder of Agamemnon of MYC, Mycenae, so that the Locrian's watery grave and the overlord's bloody welcome-feast are set side by side as the twin disasters of the nostos. And the very country his people faced across the strait, Euboia of the ABA, the Abantes, became the graveyard of still more Greeks, wrecked by Nauplios' false beacon on the Capherean rocks — the same storm-driven ruin that swallowed their own king.\n\nAt the dramatic present, ten years on, Opous has no returning lord to crown. Aias lies drowned; the Locrians who struggled home brought back no king, only the memory of the swiftest spear at Troy and the boast the sea would not forgive.

“And so would he have fled his doom, albeit hated by Athene, had he not let a proud word fall in the fatal darkening of his heart.” — Odyssey 4.502-503