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| Calchas Thestorides Κάλχας Θεστορίδης | |
|---|---|
| Trojan War character | |
 Calchas presides at the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, the daughter of Agamemnon, as the divine price of the winds required to carry the fleet to Troy, in a peristyle fresco from Pompeii. | |
| First appearance |
|
| Created by | Homer and his school |
| Based on | Character from a traditional story of the Trojan War |
| Adapted by | Greek oral poets presenting the story in poetry contests at festivals |
| In-universe information | |
| Title | Guide |
| Occupation | Seer, Greek Mantis, in the sense of one who knows the divine will.[1] |
| Affiliation | Achaean army |
| Origin | Argos in the Peloponnesus |
| Nationality | Achaean |
Calchas (/ˈkælkəs/; Ancient Greek: Κάλχας, Kalkhas) is an Argive mantis, or "seer," dated to the Age of Legend, which is an aspect of Greek mythology. Calchas appears in the opening scenes of the Iliad, which is believed to have been based on a war conducted by the Achaeans against the powerful city of Troy in the Late Bronze Age.
Calchas, a seer in the service of the army before Troy, is portrayed as a skilled augur, Greek ionópolos ('bird-savant'):[2] "as an augur, Calchas had no rival in the camp."[3]
He received knowledge of the past, present, and future from the god, Apollo. He had other mantic skills as well: interpreting the entrails of the enemy during the tide of battle.[4] His mantosune, as it is called in the Iliad, is the hereditary occupation of his family, which accounts for the most credible etymology of his name: “the dark one” in the sense of “ponderer,” based on the resemblance of pondering to melancholy, or being “blue.”[5] Calchas has a long literary history after Homer. His appearance in the Iliad is no sort of “first” except for the chronological sequence of literature. In the legendary time of the Iliad, seers and divination are already long-standing.
- ^ Same root as English "mind:" "Appendix I: Indo-European Roots". *men-1. The American Heritage Dictionary (Fourth ed.). Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2009.
- ^ The English word augur, based on a Roman official of that name, is used to mean a person of any culture engaged in ornithomancy. There were no Romans at Troy, as Rome had not yet been founded.
- ^ Homer, Iliad I, lines 68-72 (E.V. Rieu translation).
- ^ Quintus of Smyrna, Posthomerica IX (Alan James translation). The art is based on the Roman word for it. They inherited it from the Etruscans, but in English it means of any culture. There were no Romans or Etruscans at Troy.
- ^ Henry George Liddell; Robert Scott. "κάλχας (Calchas)". A Greek-English Lexicon. Perseus Digital Library. Liddell and Scott, following the tradition of J.B. Hoffman, relate the name to κάλχη (kalkhe), the purple murex, exactly in the sense of the English mood word "blue". As there is no clear path to an Indo-European root, some suggest a loan word. Hoffman and some others also relate it to Old English gealg or gealh, from an East Germanic *galgaz, "grim", but there is no Indo-European root for that, either. In the most speculative suggestion, the darkness is not blueness but is the color of corroded bronze (kalkhos). Excluded is Old English gealga, "melancholy" from “gallows", with an Indo-European root "branch".
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