Cinyras

Also Known As: Greek Kinyras, Κινύρας; king of Cyprus, priest of the Paphian goddess, father of Adonis
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Cyprian Mythology, Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He held the wealth, the metalcraft and the hereditary priesthood of Cyprus at once, and the sources treat all three as versions of the same power.
Role in Mythos: He is the founding priest-king of Aphrodite’s sanctuary at Paphos, the ancestor whose descendants still gave the oracle there in Roman times, and the father of Adonis by his own daughter.
Relation to Humans: He was a mortal king who dealt with other kings as an equal, arming Agamemnon and then evading the war with a fraud that nobody managed to punish. To ordinary Cypriots he was the man who stood between them and the goddess, and the line that answered their questions at Paphos claimed him as its founder for eight hundred years.

The corslet reached Troy before the war did. Ten bands of dark blue enamel crossed it, twelve of gold, twenty of tin, and on each side three serpents climbed toward the throat with the glitter of a rainbow set against cloud. Agamemnon buckled it on and went out to kill men in it. The king who had sent it stayed on Cyprus and never saw the field.

Homer gives that king three lines and no face. Word had come to Cyprus that the Achaeans were sailing for Troy, and Cinyras sent the armour as a guest-gift, the courtesy one great house pays another across water. It is the earliest surviving notice of him and it already holds the whole man: enormous wealth, exquisite metalwork, and a careful distance from the fighting.

The distance was deliberate. When Menelaus came in person, with Odysseus and the herald Talthybius, to argue him into the alliance, Cinyras swore he would send fifty ships. He sent one. That one was real and sailed under the son of Mygdalion. The other forty-nine he moulded out of earth and launched into the sea, where they did what clay does in salt water. The oath was technically kept. It worked.

He could afford the gesture because of what lay under his island. Cyprus is copper, and the Roman encyclopaedists credited Cinyras with opening the mines himself, along with roof tiles and the four tools that make a smithy possible: the tongs, the hammer, the crowbar and the anvil. Whether or not any of that is history, it fixes the shape of his reputation. Where other legendary kings are remembered for a war or a monster, he is remembered for green-crusted ore, for heat, and for objects made so well that a Mycenaean overlord would wear one into battle. Anacreon gave him a hundred and sixty years to enjoy it, which is the sort of number poets reach for when a man’s luck seems to have gone on too long.

The luck had a religious source. Cypriot singers, Pindar says, kept returning to Kinyras, the priest that Aphrodite cherished and golden-haired Apollo loved as a friend. At Palaepaphos the goddess was not a statue but a smooth cone of stone standing in an open precinct, and the air over it stayed thick with burning incense all year. A questioner would come up through the courtyard at first light, put a matter to the priest, and take away an answer that came out of the smoke and the silence. Titus stopped there in 69 CE on his way to besiege Jerusalem, asked about his own prospects, and was told what he wanted to hear.

The man who told him was reckoned a descendant of Cinyras, and this is where the legend leaves the poets and hits stone. Tacitus preserves the sanctuary’s own account of itself. An old tradition made a figure called Aerias the founder, though some thought that was a name of the goddess. A more recent report said Cinyras consecrated the temple, that divination was an import brought by Tamiras of Cilicia, and that the two families agreed to share the rites. The arrangement did not last. The foreign line surrendered the science it had introduced, so that the royal house would not be outshone by newcomers, and after that only the Kinyrad priest was consulted. Centuries earlier the claim was already worth carving: Nikokles, the last king of Paphos, had his Kinyrad ancestry set out in verse on the base of his own statue, and the stone came up out of the ground in 1953.

His origins are the least settled part of him. Ovid makes him a descendant of Paphos, the child born to Pygmalion and the woman who had been ivory. Apollodorus has him arrive on Cyprus with a following, found the city, and marry Metharme, Pygmalion’s daughter. Both accounts hang him on the same sculptor, and neither can agree how.

The ruin, when it came, came from inside the house. Ovid tells it at length and can hardly bring himself to. Cinyras had a daughter, Myrrha, whom every prince in the east wanted, and who wanted her father. Her nurse worked the opening: it was the annual festival of Ceres, when the matrons put on white, carried garlands of wheat, and kept nine nights clear of any touch of a man. The queen, Cenchreis, attended every rite. The king’s bed was empty, and the king was drunk. The nurse described a girl who loved him desperately, and when he asked her age said only that she was exactly as old as Myrrha. In the dark he called the girl daughter because it suited her years, and she called him father, so that no name was left out of the crime.

It was repeated over many nights. Then he brought a light. What he did with the sword he pulled from the scabbard beside the bed is the one thing in his story that needs no explaining, and he failed at it: Myrrha ran, and the dark she had used against him hid her. She wandered nine months, begged the gods for a state that was neither living nor dead, and hardened into the myrrh tree that still weeps her resin. The bark split, and Adonis was born out of it.

So the powers and the limits sit oddly close together. He commanded the copper, the oracle, the ships he chose not to send, and an office that outlived his dynasty and his island’s independence. He could not be told a true thing in the dark, and the one house he could not administer was his own. The tellings do not agree on how he died, or whether he did in any ordinary way; what they agree on is that the priesthood went on without him.

There is a modern argument worth naming, because it changes how the name reads. Greek kinyra is a lyre, a word borrowed from Semitic kinnaru, and in 1968 scholars identified Kinnaru, a divinized temple lyre, among the gods receiving offerings at Ugarit on the Syrian coast opposite Cyprus. John Curtis Franklin’s Kinyras: The Divine Lyre, published by Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in 2015, builds the case that the Cypriot priest-king is what happened when Greek speakers met a Near Eastern sacred instrument and heard a person’s name. That is scholarship of the last sixty years, not an ancient belief, and the Cypriots who sang about him would not have recognised it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Cinyras?

Cinyras was a legendary king of Cyprus and the priest of Aphrodite at her great sanctuary in Paphos. Ancient writers credit him with fabulous wealth, with opening the island’s copper mines, and with founding the hereditary priesthood that still gave oracles at Paphos in the Roman period. He is best known as the father of Adonis.

Was Cinyras the father of Adonis?

Yes, and the circumstances are the reason his story is remembered. In Ovid’s account his daughter Myrrha was driven to desire him and reached his bed by deception during a nine-night festival of Ceres when her mother Cenchreis was away at the rites. When Cinyras brought a lamp and recognised her he drew his sword, Myrrha fled, and she was changed into the myrrh tree from which Adonis was born.

What did Cinyras give Agamemnon?

He sent Agamemnon an elaborate breastplate as a guest-gift after news reached Cyprus that the Greeks were sailing for Troy. Homer describes it as banded with ten strips of dark blue enamel, twelve of gold and twenty of tin, with three serpents rising toward the neck on either side. Agamemnon is wearing it in the Iliad when he arms for his greatest day of fighting.

Did Cinyras send fifty ships to the Trojan War?

No. Apollodorus records that when Menelaus, Odysseus and Talthybius came to recruit him, Cinyras swore an oath to send fifty ships and then sent only one, under the command of the son of Mygdalion. He modelled the other forty-nine out of earth and launched them into the sea, keeping the letter of his promise and none of its substance.

Why was Cinyras important in Cyprus?

His descendants, the Kinyradai, held the priesthood and the art of divination at Paphos for centuries, and Cypriot kings advertised descent from him as a claim to legitimacy. Tacitus reports that a rival priestly family founded by Tamiras of Cilicia gave up the practice, after which only the Kinyrad priest was consulted. An inscription on a statue base of Nikokles, the last king of Paphos, sets out that ancestry in verse.