The Son of the Wine God

The Greeks of Chios were not sure who had been on their island before them, and their uncertainty is preserved, fossilised, in the stories they told.

The fullest version comes from Ion of Chios, and he is worth knowing about for his own sake. Ion was a fifth-century BC writer of real distinction and unusual range: a tragedian who competed at Athens and won, an elegist, a philosopher of sorts, and — most valuably — a memoirist. His book called Epidemiai, "Visits," recorded his personal encounters with the great men of his day, and the fragments that survive are among the very few genuinely intimate glimpses we have of fifth-century Athens. In one, Ion describes dining with Sophocles on Chios and watching the great tragedian, then serving as a general, flirt cheerfully and successfully with the wine-pourer, extracting a kiss by means of an argument about how properly to blow the ash off a coal. It is a small, perfect, entirely unheroic scene, and it comes to us because a Chian wrote things down.

Ion also wrote a Foundation of Chios, and though it is lost, later writers quoting it preserve its outline. The first man to hold the island, in this account, was Oenopion, son of Dionysus and Ariadne, who came out of Crete with his sons and brought the vine.

The name means, transparently, "wine-face." He is said to have been the first man to make dark red wine. And the reason he exists is not hard to work out: Chian wine was the most prestigious in the Greek world, and a city with the best wine required a founder who had received the vine from the god of wine personally, at first hand, before anybody else got any. Foundation myths are, among other things, advertising.

The same Oenopion appears in a darker story that also attached itself to the island. Orion, the giant hunter, came to Chios and there either courted or assaulted Oenopion's daughter Merope. Oenopion's revenge was to get him drunk and blind him. Orion, sightless, groped his way east across the sea, guided by the sound of a smith's hammer, until he came to the place where the sun rises, and the rays of the rising sun restored his sight. He is in the sky now, and so, according to the Greeks, is his story.

Alongside or before Oenopion, the sources scatter Pelasgians from Thessaly, Leleges, Carians from the Anatolian mainland, and Abantes from Euboea. This is the standard Greek vocabulary for peoples who were there first and were not quite Greek, and it should not be read as history; but Carian presence is entirely plausible given that Caria was visible from the beach. Then, in the long process conventionally called the Ionian migration and traditionally dated to the eleventh or tenth century BC, Greek-speaking settlers established themselves on the island and along the facing Anatolian coast. Chios became one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League, whose common sanctuary was the Panionion on the slopes of Mount Mycale, and where the twelve met to sacrifice, to compete, and to fail to agree on any common policy whatsoever for the next four hundred years.

Herodotus, who was an Ionian himself and had a sharp ear, notes a peculiarity. Chian, he says, was not quite like the Ionic spoken elsewhere; he groups Chios with Erythrae, its immediate neighbour across the strait, as sharing one of four distinct varieties of the dialect. Chios was Ionian, but Ionian in its own way, and its own way faced east.

As for the name of the island itself, the ancients offered three explanations and modern scholars prefer a fourth. It might come from a nymph called Chione, daughter of a local river or of Poseidon. It might come from chion, snow, for the snow that caps Pelinaion in February. It might come from an obscure word for mastic. Or — and this is the likeliest — "Chios" is simply a pre-Greek name of Anatolian origin whose meaning was lost before anyone thought to write it down, and the Greeks, arriving and finding an unintelligible word already attached to the place, invented a nymph to explain it. That is what Greeks did with unintelligible words, and it is why the map of the Aegean is so densely populated with the daughters of rivers.