Glaukos, the infant son of king Minos of Knossos and Pasiphae, fell into a pithos filled with honey and drowned.After a long vain search his father found the body but only with the help of divine prophets or Apollo himself.Glaukos was eventually restored to life by the famous seer Polyidos.The popular myth, which provided the plot for two lost tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides 1 , was very old, although the first extant version was recorded as late as Apollodorus 2 .In his Sather Classical Lectures over half a century ago Persson explained the myth as a paradeigm of the annual death and rebirth of nature which he believed to be central to Minoan and Mycenaean cult and refiected in contemporary glyptic art 3 .His thesis may be too global for modern tastes, but his reading of the myth's central theme remains compelling to-day.The tale's basic elements of death, disappearance and renewal are undeniablé, indeed sorne versions substituted Asclepius for the seer Polyidos as a more fitting agent to restore Glaukos to life.But a curious rider to the myth confirms Polyidos' status as the boy's saviour.It is said that Minos would not release the prophet until he had taught his mantic art to Glaukos.On returning to his home in Corinth, however, or possibly Argos according to sorne, Polyidos craftily took the gift away again by spitting into the child's mouth.The seer and his trick were later additions to the myth implying the existence of linguistic oracles.They also imply incidentally that the oracles originated from an anthropomorphic god speaking in the first person through a prophetic medium, just like the procedure at Delphi in fact 5 .Polyidos means, «the man who knows much», it is a common, practically generic name for seers whose qualifications consisted in the ability to comprehend and interpret divine will.The same Polyidos, or his namesake, is the geron agathos, the goodly sage in the Iliad who tried to prevent his son 1 2 3 4 5
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