ABSTRACT
After remaining in Pylos for a while, Melampous won kingdoms in the Argolid for his brother and himself by delivering the daughters of Proitos, king of Tiryns, from an attack of madness, or by delivering the women of Argos from a general outbreak of madness (or, in a combined version, by curing the princesses and the other women too). There can be few episodes in Greek myth in which the tradition is more complex and inconsistent. To start with Pherecydes’ version, which was probably quite ancient, Hera afflicted the daughters of Proitos with madness because they had mocked the poverty of her Argive temple, saying that their father’s palace was more splendid by far. After their madness had endured for ten years, Proitos sought the help of Melampous, promising him a share of the kingdom and one of the maidens as a wife if he could effect a cure; and the seer achieved it by appeasing Hera with supplications and sacrifices.168 Although there is no mention of Bias in the surviving summary, it is likely enough that Melampous shared his prize with him as in the standard tradition. The lyric poet Bacchylides (died mid-fifth century BC) offers a similar account of the origin of the girls’ madness, but says that Proitos contrived a cure through his own initiative by vowing a sacrifice of fifty red-haired cattle to Artemis, who then interceded with Hera to secure the removal of the madness.169 In yet another account from the earlier tradition, in this case from the Hesiodic Catalogue, Dionysos inflicted the madness on the princesses to punish them for rejecting his rites, and Melampous worked the cure, winning a share of the land for his brother too. Although the details have been lost, the girls behaved in a wanton manner during their madness (perhaps by wandering around wholly or partially unclothed as in some vase-paintings), and their bodies were covered with scabs, and their hair dropped out.170
