Note 706 — Chapter XV · LEGEND OF TROY.
Reading edition
Euripid. Telephus, Frag. 26, Dindorf; Hygin. f. 101; Diktys, ii. 10. Euripidês had treated the adventure of Telephus in this lost tragedy: he gave the miraculous cure with the dust of the spear, πριστοῖσι λογχῆς θέλγεται ῥινήμασι. Diktys softens down the prodigy: “Achilles cum Machaone et Podalirio adhibeutes curam vulneri,” etc. Pliny (xxxiv. 15) gives to the rust of brass or iron a place in the list of genuine remedies.
“Longe omnino a Tiberi ad Caicum: quo in loco etiam Agamemnôn errasset, nisi ducem Telephum invenisset” (Cicero, Pro L. Flacco, c. 29). The portions of the Trojan legend treated in the lost epics and the tragedians, seem to have been just as familiar to Cicero as those noticed in the Iliad.
Strabo pays comparatively little attention to any portion of the Trojan war except what appears in Homer. He even goes so far as to give a reason why the Amazons did not come to the aid of Priam: they were at enmity with him, because Priam had aided the Phrygians against them (Iliad, iii. 188: in Strabo, τοῖς Ἰῶσιν must be a mistake for τοῖς Φρυξίν). Strabo can hardly have read, and never alludes to, Arktinus; in whose poem the brave and beautiful Penthesileia, at the head of her Amazons, forms a marked epoch and incident of the war (Strabo, xii. 552).