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

Magnetes — The forty ships of Pelion — swept onto the false-lit rocks of Kaphereus, and never home.

The Magnetes of Mount Pelion and the river Peneios sent forty black ships to Troy under fleet Prothoos son of Tenthredon. On the return, lured by Nauplius's false beacon, Prothoos drowned on the Kapherean rocks and his people, scattered, drifted to Crete.

Leader at Troy: Prothoos.

Ruler in the Odyssey's present: Prothoos.

Role in the Trojan War: Achaean. Forty black ships from the land about Peneios and Pelion under fleet Prothoos son of Tenthredon — the last of the Thessalian contingents named in the Catalogue, serving the ten years under Agamemnon's command.

The homecoming: Drowned on the Kapherean rocks by Nauplius's false beacon; his people scattered to Crete.

Beneath Mount Pelion of the trembling leafage, where the river Peneios pours seaward through the vale of Tempe, lay the land of the Magnetes — the last of the Thessalian peoples named in the great Catalogue of the ships. It was a wild coast of forested crags, the mountain from whose peak was cut the ash-spear of Achilles, the haunt of Cheiron and the shaggy Centaur-folk of old. From this country fleet Prothoos, son of Tenthredon, gathered his warriors to the muster of Agamemnon. To the war against Troy the Magnetes brought forty black ships — a middling contingent, but a full and willing share of the Achaean host. In the roll-call of Boeotia's leaders and Nestor's Pylos and the hundred keels of Mycenae, Prothoos and his highlanders stand at the very close of the northern kingdoms, dwelling 'about Peneios and Pelion.' They fought the ten long years under the sceptre of the king of men. Homer gives the Magnetes no single blazing aristeia, no named duel to set beside Diomedes or Aias; theirs was the harder, nameless labour of the ranks — forty ships' worth of spearmen who held the line before the wall of Ilios until the horse was drawn within the gates and the citadel burned. But it was on the road home, not before Troy, that the doom of the Magnetes was written. As the victorious fleets scattered from the ruined city, Nauplius of Euboea nursed a father's hatred: his son Palamedes had been stoned to death at Troy through the cunning of Odysseus, with Agamemnon's connivance, and the overlord's host had denied him satisfaction. So Nauplius took his revenge upon them all. On the storm-lashed headland of Kaphereus in Euboea he kindled a false beacon, and the homing ships, believing it a harbour-light, stood in for the shore and were broken upon the Kapherean rocks. Many perished there. Among them fell Prothoos: his forty ships were shattered, and the leader of the Magnetes drowned in the wreck. Thus the crime committed under Agamemnon's command at Troy circled back to devour the very men who had followed his standard. At the dramatic present, ten years into the returns, the land about Pelion is a realm without its lord. Prothoos lies dead beneath the Euboean surf, and no son of Tenthredon is remembered to take up his seat. The remnant of his people who survived the wreck did not come home at all: driven from Kaphereus, the Magnetes with Prothoos drifted to Crete and settled there, far from the Peneios, a scattered folk grafted onto Idomeneus's storm-torn island. The kingdom of the Magnetes, unlike gold-rich Mycenae, has no avenging Orestes — only an empty coast and a colony of exiles on a foreign shore. The threads of that ruin bind the Magnetes to half the Achaean world. Their overlord was MYC — Agamemnon of Mycenae, whose complicity in Palamedes' death lit the fuse of Nauplius's revenge. They were wrecked at Kaphereus alongside Meges and his men of DOU (Doulichion), cast on the same rocks the same black night. The survivors' new home was CRE, the Crete of Idomeneus — himself another of Nauplius's intended victims, betrayed at home by Leukos while the beacon burned. And on Pelion their neighbours in the Catalogue were the Magnesian coast-dwellers of MEL (Meliboea, Philoktetes' land) and, up the Peneios vale, the Lapiths of LAP under Polypoites — that same mountain from which Peirithoos once drove the Centaurs. In the ranks of the Danaans the Magnetes were one contingent among many; in the tale of the nostoi they became a byword for the homecoming that ended not in a hall but on a reef.

“And the Magnetes were led of Prothoos son of Tenthredon, even they that dwelt about Peneios and Pelion with trembling leafage.” — Iliad 2.756-758