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

Maeonians — The horse-lords of Tmolos — sons of the Gygaian lake, who marched for Troy and vanished home unsung.

The Maionians of Lydia, a Trojan-ally chariot-aristocracy under Mount Tmolos, were led to Ilios by Mesthles and Antiphos, the water-born sons of Talaimenes and the Gygaian lake. Their leaders are nowhere recorded as slain — a silent nostos presumed to end back beneath Tmolos.

Leader at Troy: Mesthles.

Ruler in the Odyssey's present: Mesthles.

Role in the Trojan War: Trojan allies: a horse-proud chariot contingent from under Mount Tmolos, led by the brothers Mesthles and Antiphos. Mesthles stood in the front rank of the fight over Patroclus' body when Ares-filled Hector rallied the allies by name.

The homecoming: Never slain in any surviving line — presumed home to the Gygaian lake.

Beneath snowy Tmolos, where the rivers Hyllos and eddying Hermos run down to the reed-fringed Gygaian lake, lay the rich country of the Maionians — the land the singers would later call Lydia. It sent no king of its own blood to a throne, but two brothers to a war: Mesthles and Antiphos, the two sons of Talaimenes, whose mother, the poem says, was the Gygaian mere itself. Water-born captains of a horse-proud people, they marched to Ilios among the countless tribes of allies that Hector gathered from their cities to guard the Trojans' wives and infant children.\n\nThese were no minor spear-fodder. In Dolon's night-catalogue of the allied camp, the Maionians stand named as "lords of chariots," ranged with the Phrygians (PHR) toward the plain — a wealthy chariot-aristocracy whose craft the whole army knew. When Homer would picture the blood springing on Menelaos' wounded thigh, he reached for their workshops: "As when some woman of Maionia or Karia staineth ivory with purple, to make a cheek-piece for horses" — the Maionian and Carian (CAR) dye-women stand in the same breath, neighbours in art as in the line of battle, for Nastes led his uncouth-tongued Carians into the field directly after them.\n\nTheir war-alignment is Troy's (TRO), root and branch. Mesthles is remembered in the hardest hour of all: over the corpse of Patroclus, when Hector had donned the divine armour of Peleus' son and Ares the dread war-god entered into him, the maddened Hector "sped among the noble allies with a mighty cry" and called each by name to hold the line — Mesthles first among them, with Glaukos and Medon and Asteropaios and the rest. The Maionian captain stood in the front rank of that terrible tug-of-war for the dead.\n\nTheir country paid in princes even where their leaders did not. When Achilles (MYR) came raging back to battle after Patroclus, the very first man he took was Iphition, Otrynteus' valiant son, "born of a Naiad nymph to Otrynteus waster of cities, beneath snowy Tmolos, in Hyde's rich domain." Achilles split his head with the hurled spear and exulted over him: "here is thy death, thy birth was on the Gygaian lake." So the same water that mothered Mesthles and Antiphos is named as the cradle of the first blood Achilles spills in his vengeance — the Maionian homeland threaded into the Iliad's darkest aristeia.\n\nAnd the return? Here the record simply falls silent, and that silence is itself the nostos. The Iliad sings the deaths of so many allied captains — Sarpedon, Asteropaios, Pyraichmes, Hippothoos — but Mesthles and Antiphos are never cut down in any surviving line. No barrow is raised for them, no boast spoken over them. In a war-and-return atlas theirs is the quietest fate of all: presumed to have led the remnant of the horse-lords home, back under Tmolos to the treasure-chambers where the purple cheek-pieces are laid up for a king's boast, and to the still Gygaian water that bore them. At the tenth year of the returns no song contradicts it — the sons of the lake went back to the lake.

“And the Maionians were commanded of Mesthles and Antiphos, Talaimenes' two sons, whose mother was the Gygaian mere.” — Iliad 2.864-865