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

Syme — Fair Syme of the three ships — the most beautiful man under Ilios, and a weakling whom beauty could not save.

The smallest of the island contingents: Nireus of Syme brought just three ships to Troy and the fairest face in the whole Achaean host after Achilles. In the tenth year the Mysian Eurypylus ran him through beneath the ribs, and Syme's little realm sent home no lord at all.

Leader at Troy: Nireus.

Ruler in the Odyssey's present: Nireus.

Role in the Trojan War: Achaean. Nireus son of Aglaia led three ships from the small Dodecanese isle of Syme — the scantiest following in the Catalogue — and was famed above all for his beauty; he fell in the tenth year, speared beneath the ribs by Eurypylus the Mysian.

The homecoming: No return — slain in the dust before Troy, the beauty that never came home.

Syme is a bare rock of an island in the deep water off the Karian coast, penned between Rhodian Rhodes and the meadows of Kos. Its king was Nireus, son of Charopos and of Aglaia — Aglaia, whose very name means Splendour — and no fairer man came up under Ilios in all the years of the war. Only Achilles the son of Peleus was reckoned lovelier; among the mortal captains who mustered at Aulis, Nireus stood next after him and above every other king of the Danaans. But beauty is not war, and the Catalogue is plain about the smallness of Syme's strength. Where Agamemnon of Mycenae (MYC) sailed with a hundred ships, Nireus led but three trim ships, and "a scanty host followed him." The bard names him three times over in as many lines — Nireus, Nireus, Nireus — as though the ringing of the name were the whole of his substance, and then sets him down without a single feat of arms. He is the paradox of the muster: the handsomest man at Troy after the greatest fighter at Troy, and himself no fighter at all — "a weakling," says Homer flatly, in the same breath as the praise. His three keels were beached among the neighbouring island squadrons, hard by the nine ships of the Koans under Pheidippos and Antiphos (KOS) and the Rhodian contingent of Tlepolemos (RHO), all of them small Dodecanese realms strung along the same sea-lane to Ilios. So the story of Syme is not one of aristeia but of a single, pitiless death, and it came late — in the tenth year, after Achilles himself was already fallen. The Mysian host had marched to Troy's aid under Eurypylus, son of Telephos and grandchild of Herakles, on whom Zeus had laid a measureless might "for a grace to glorious Herakles." Like a black hurricane he came hewing the Argives down, and Nireus, "a man in beauty like the Gods," stood in his path. Eurypylus stabbed him with the long-shafted spear beneath the ribs; down on the plain he fell, and the blood streamed out drenching his splendid arms and his thick-clustering hair. He lay, sings Quintus, like a young olive-sapling that a river in flood has torn up by the roots and stretched heavy-blossomed on the ground — and over him the Mysian jeered: "Thy beauty marvellous naught hath availed thee... Beauty is no match for strength." Yet Syme's king did not fall unwept or unavenged in the moment. Machaon — the healer-captain of Trikke (TRI), son of Asklepios — came wrathful for Nireus fallen at his side, and drove his spear through Eurypylus' shoulder; but the Mysian, doom-heavy, turned and slew Machaon too, so that leech and beauty lay together in the dust before the Argives, at last, hauled off both bodies from the Trojan hands that would have dragged them within the walls. It is a fitting knot: the loveliest of the Achaeans and one of their two physician-lords cut down by the same grandson of Herakles, the Mysian ally of Troy (MYS) — and it measures Nireus not by what he did, but by whom he was worth avenging. That is why, at the tenth year of the returns, Syme has no nostos to tell. The little island sent out three ships and a king whose only weapon was his face, and it received back neither. Where Mycenae's lord came home to the axe and Ithaca's still wanders the wine-dark sea, Nireus of the Splendour simply never came home at all — his tale sealed on the Trojan plain, the fairest of the Danaans after Peleus' son (MYR) and, like that son of Peleus, buried in the same foreign dust he had sailed so far to win.

“Nireus, moreover, led three trim ships from Syme, Nireus son of Aglaia and king Charopos, Nireus the most beauteous man that came up under Ilios of all the Danaans, after the noble son of Peleus. Howbeit he was a weakling, and a scanty host followed him.” — Iliad 2.671-675