Science: Philoctetes Was Here

Some 3,100 years ago, the Aegean island of Chryse (pronounced Cry-see) soared rocketlike into brief prominence in the Mediterranean world. According to Homer's Iliad, what made the mighty Achilles sulk in his tent before Troy was the aftermath of a quarrel over the daughter of Chryses, high priest of the tiny island's temple of Apollo. Another famed Greek warrior, the archer Philoctetes, never got beyond Chryse; stopping off there on his way to Troy, Philoctetes was fatally bitten by a viper loosed on him, according to legend, by a local nymph whose advances he had spurned. But after that, mythology's Baedeker...

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