Palinurus
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- This article is about mythological helmsman. For the genus in the family crustacea, see Palinurus (genus).
Palinurus, in Roman mythology is the helmsman of a ship of the adventurer Aeneas, whose descendants would one day found the city of Rome. As the price for the safe passage of Aeneas and his people after fleeing from Troy to Italy to escape the devastation of Troy by the Greeks during their victory in the Trojan War, Venus, the mother of Aeneas, offers to Neptune, god of the sea, the death of Palinurus. Somnus causes Palinurus to fall asleep and fall overboard. He is then stranded on the coast of Lucania, in southern Italy, where he is killed by a native tribe, the Lucani. When Aeneas meets Palinurus in the Underworld, he agrees to provide the helmsman's body a proper burial, at what is now Cape Palinuro.[1][2]
Palinurus is mentioned in Utopia by Sir Thomas More as a type of careless traveller. "'Then you're not quite right,' he replied, 'for his sailing has not been like that of Palinurus, but more that of Ulysses, or rather of Plato. This man, who is named Raphael.'"[3]
Palinurus was the pseudonym chosen by Cyril Connolly for his book The Unquiet Grave:A Word Cycle.
[edit] References
- ^ (2003) Hornblower, Simon and Antony Spawforth: The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition, New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1100. ISBN 0-19-860641-9.
- ^ Virgil Aeneid, III.202, V.858, VI.381.
- ^ More, Sir Thomas (1992). translated by Robert M. Adams: Utopia, 2nd edition, 5.
