© 1998 Bernard SUZANNE | Last updated January 16, 1999 |
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This page is part of the "tools" section of a site, Plato and his dialogues, dedicated to developing a new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The "tools" section provides historical and geographical context (chronology, maps, entries on characters and locations) for Socrates, Plato and their time. By clicking on the minimap at the beginning of the entry, you can go to a full size map in which the city or location appears. For more information on the structure of entries and links available from them, read the notice at the beginning of the index of persons and locations.
Greek city of Boeotia, west of Thebes
(area 2).
In mythology, Coronea was the kingdom of Athamas, a son of Æolus
and grandson of Hellen. He was married three times and was involved in a lot
of troubles with his successive wives, which inspired
several tragedies in classical times (none of them still extant) including,
by Æschylus, an Athamas ;
a play by the same name by Sophocles ;
and, by Euripides, a Phryxus and
an Ino .
From his first wife Nephele (a Greek word meaning "cloud"), Athamas had a son
named Phrixus and a daughter named Helle. But he later abandonned Nephele
to marry Ino, one of the daughters of Cadmus,
the founder of nearby Thebes. This explains why Athamas
was for a while in charge of raising young Dionysus,
the son of Zeus and Ino's sister Semele, after his mother had died. With Ino,
Athamas had two sons, Learchus and Melicertes, yet Ino was jealous of the children
he had had with Nephele and decided to get rid of them. She managed to induce
a famine in the country and to make her husband believe that the oracle of Delphi
required the sacrifice of Phrixus to end it. But while Phrixus was led to the
altar, Nephele gave him a ram with a golden fleece offered her by Hermes, on
which Phrixus and his sister Helle could fly away. They flew to Colchis,
at the extreme east of the Black Sea, but, along the way, Helle fell in the
sea, in a place that was named "Hellespont" in her honor (the strait , today
called Dardanelles, between the Ægean Sea and Propontis, today's Sea of
Marmara, on the way toward the Black Sea). Phrixus and the ram made it to the
court of Æetes, king of Phasis, where Phrixus
offered the ram to Zeus in thanksgiving and gave his golden fleece to king Æetes
(this is the Golden Fleece the Argonauts came to conquer under the leadership
of Jason).
When Athamas learned what Ino had done, he ordered that she be sacrificed in
place of Phrixus. But then, Dionysus saved her by surrounding her in a cloud
and struck Athamas with madness (or maybe it was Hera, in reprisal against Athamas
who had accepted to take care of Dionysus), so that he killed his own son Learchus.
When she heard that, Ino took her other son Melicertes and jumped with him in
the sea (in some traditions, she is said to have killed him first and jumped
in the sea with his dead body). After that, Athamas was exiled from Boeotia
and seeked refuge in Thessalia, where he founded
another city named Alos and married for the third time.
It is in Coronea that a battle took place in 447
between the Athenians supporting democratic regimes in Boeotia and Boeotian
oligarchs led by Thebes. Athens
was defeated (Thucydides,
I, 113) and Thebes was thus able to reconstruct
the Boeotian Confederacy under its leadership.
It is in that battle that Clinias, Alcibiades'
father, was killed (see Plato's Alcibiades,
112c).