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

Taphians — Taphos of the sea-robbers — the oar-loving isle that never sailed for Troy, yet fell once already to Mycenae's spear.

The western sea-raiders' isle, neutral in the great war and untouched by the nostoi. At the dramatic present it reigns unbroken under Mentes son of Anchialus — the guise Athena borrows to rouse Telemachos — though an elder Taphian dynasty was destroyed a generation before Troy by Amphitryon of the Mycenaean house.

Leader at Troy: Mentes.

Ruler in the Odyssey's present: Mentes.

Role in the Trojan War: Neutral. The Taphians led no ships to Ilios and struck no blow in the ten years' war — a piratical people of the western isles who kept to the oar, the copper-trade, and the slave-raid while the great kingdoms bled at Troy.

The homecoming: No return to await — the isle that never went to war, reigning still while the heroes' fleets are lost at sea.

Out beyond the mouth of the Achelous, among the low wave-washed isles of the western sea near rugged Ithaca, lies Taphos of the Taphians — the Teleboans, 'lovers of the oar.' While the kings of Hellas mustered their hundreds of ships for Ilios, this isle sent none. In all the long Catalogue of the host that broke upon Troy the Taphians have no place; they took neither the Achaean nor the Trojan side, but kept their own dark trade upon the wine-dark sea. Their name is spoken across the returns not for any aristeia at the wall of Troy, but for piracy: it was Taphian sea-robbers who snatched the Sidonian nurse from the fields and sold her into bondage (Odyssey 15.427), Taphians from whom the swineherd Eumaios bought his thrall Mesaulios (Odyssey 14.449-452), and with Taphian raiders that Eupeithes — father of the suitor Antinoos — once harried the Thesprotians, who were at peace with Ithaca (Odyssey 16.424-430). This is a realm whose war was never Troy's. Yet Taphos had its own war, and its own fall, a generation before Agamemnon ever mustered at Aulis. The line sprang from Taphios, who colonized the isle and named its folk Teleboans; his son was Pterelaos, whom Poseidon made proof against death by planting a single golden hair in his head. When Pterelaos' sons crossed to the Argolid and claimed the kingdom of their forefather Mestor, driving off the cattle of Electryon of Mycenae, the two broods of cousins slew one another in the cattle-feud, and the elder Taphian war was joined. Here the isle's story is bound fast to gold-rich MYCENAE (MYC): it was Amphitryon of the Perseid house, betrothed to Electryon's daughter Alkmene, who carried the war to Taphos to avenge that slaughter. The impregnable isle held so long as Pterelaos lived — until his daughter Komaitho, love-struck for the besieger, plucked out the deathless golden hair. Pterelaos died, the Teleboan isles were subjugated, and Amphitryon slew the traitress in turn (Apollodorus 2.4.5-7). The house that reigns now is the survivor-line grown up from that ruin. In that elder campaign Amphitryon drew allies from across the mainland, among them Kephalos out of ATHENS (ATH) with the tireless Teumessian hound — so even Taphos' private war reached into the great houses of Greece. At the dramatic present, year ten of the nostoi, Taphos reigns quiet and whole while the returning heroes drown or wander. Its lord is Mentes son of wise Anchialos, a guest-friend of Odysseus' house 'from of old' — bound to old Laertes by the ancient tie of xenia. And it is precisely this friendly, unwarlike, sea-going king whose shape grey-eyed Athene borrows when she comes down from Olympos to the threshold of Odysseus' hall to kindle Telemachos to action (Odyssey 1.105). Disguised as Mentes, she says she is bound with ship and crew to Temesa in quest of copper, her cargo shining iron — the very trade that made the Taphians rich. Thus the isle that stayed out of the war becomes, through its king's borrowed face, the hinge on which the whole homecoming turns: the neutral realm links directly to Odysseus' own kingdom of the CEPHALLENIANS (CEP), for Mentes' hearth-friendship with Laertes is the credential by which a goddess walks unremarked into Ithaca and sets the son upon the road to seek his father.

“I avow me to be Mentes, son of wise Anchialus, and I bear rule among the Taphians, lovers of the oar.” — Odyssey 1.180-181