Anthippe and Cichyrus
In Greek mythology, Anthippe and Cichyrus (Ancient Greek: Ἀνθίππη καί Κίχυρος, romanized: Anthíppē kaí Kíkhuros) are two youths from the ancient Greek kingdom of Chaonia in Epirus, northwestern Greece. Their brief and tragic tale in which Cichyrus accidentally kills Anthippe during hunting and then dies himself is known through the works of Parthenius of Nicaea, a Greek grammarian.
Mythology
[edit]In the region of Chaonia, a youth of noble birth fell in love with and courted the shy Anthippe, who returned his affections. Soon the too engaged in a secret love affair kept hidden from their parents. During a public Chaonian festival they retreated and hid in a bush while everyone else was celebrating. As it happened, the king's son Cichyrus was hunting a leopard nearby, and the animal hid in the same thicket as them.[1]
Cichyrus hurled his spear against it, but was horrified to discover the other boy trying to staunch a dying Anthippe’s mortal wound to no avail. In great shock he drove away in a frenzy until he eventually fell off his horse down in a stony and craggy ravine where he died. The Chaonians honoured their king by erecting a wall right where his body was found, and called the new city Cichyrus after him.[2] Nothing is known about what became of Anthippe's unnamed lover.[3]
Cultural background
[edit]The story of Anthippe and Cichyrus follows a pattern common in short love stories of the Hellenistic era in which a woman dies, and the man who was in love with her dies or kills himself in grief, usually due to causing her death in the first place. Anthippe and Cichyrus are an outlier example where the woman and the man are not a couple and the man does not intentionally die. Other examples of the genre include Pamphilus and Eurydice (the earliest identified example), and Cyanippus and Leucone. Those stories were undoubtedly the sources Roman author Ovid used for his rendition of the Pyramus and Thisbe myth in the Metamorphoses, a story that would eventually inspire William Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet.[3]
See also
[edit]
- Procris, killed by her husband during hunting
References
[edit]- ^ Ellis 1896, pp. 178–9.
- ^ Parthenius of Nicaea, Sorrows of Love 32: Anthippe
- ^ a b Bigliazzi & Calvi 2016, pp. 49–50.
Bibliography
[edit]- Bigliazzi, Silvia; Calvi, Lisanna (2016). Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and Civic Life: The Boundaries of Civic Space. UK: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-83998-4.
- Ellis, Robinson (1896). "A Theory of the Culex". The Classical Review. 10 (4). JSTOR 691239. Retrieved 2 August 2025.
- Parthenius of Nicaea, Love Romances, translated by Sir Stephen Gaselee (1882–1943), Loeb Classical Library, 1916. Online version at topos text.