Cinyras and the Clay Ships

Catalogue ID: 04-trojan-cycle/264-cinyras-clay-ships-cyprus

Cycle: Trojan — Cypria / Cypriot king’s false contribution

Version line: Epic Cycle / handbook — Cinyras promises ships to Agamemnon; sends clay models

Sources: Apollodorus, *Epitome* 3.9; scholia and Cypria summaries (Cinyras of Cyprus); Homer, *Iliad* 11.19–28 (Cinyras gives Agamemnon a ornate corslet—hospitality gift, not the clay-ships tale)

Source file: /workspace/greek-myth-catalogue/04-trojan-cycle/264-cinyras-clay-ships-cyprus.md

Characters

Cinyras — king of Cyprus; pledges ships; sends clay substitutes
Greeks — mustering expedition
Thyestes — requester of Cypriot ships; receiver of the corslet in Homer

Places

Cyprus — Cinyras’s realm
Mount Helicon — context of the request (expedition frame)

Themes

Narrative

When the Greeks mustered for Troy, Agamemnon sought ships from Cinyras, king of Cyprus. Cinyras promised fifty; instead he sent one real ship and forty-nine models of clay (or a fleet of earthenware ships), keeping his word in mockery. The fraud marks Cypriot cunning at the expedition’s edge—parallel to other delayed or deceptive contingents in cyclic lore. Homer knows Cinyras only as the giver of Agamemnon’s elaborate breastplate, a guest-gift when news of the war reached Cyprus—no clay ships there. Catalogue the Apollodorean/cyclic deception apart from the Homeric corslet and apart from Cinyras’s incestuous Adonis lineage.