Why ‘MANTO’?

Written by Greta Hawes

MANTO is an acronym: Modelling Ancient Narratives, Territories, Objects. More accurately, though, it is a backronym: Manto was the daughter of the Theban prophet Teiresias and a prophet herself, and so we continue the tradition of naming digital projects in Classical Studies for mythical figures (see: Pleiades, Perseus, HESTIA)

Manto is a fitting talisman. She exists on the margins of several notable mythic events but not the focus of them and is not mentioned in Homer, Hesiod, or the surviving tragedies. We can piece together her biography and her wanderings only by bringing together scattered passages in different - and often late or partial - texts. Manto was at Thebes in the generation after the attack by the Seven. A fragment from the Theban epic cycle describes how, after the city fell, she was sent to Delphi as a dedication to the god; there she meets Rhacios, a Mycenean, and together they travel to Asia Minor and settle at Colophon (Epigonoi fr. 3). As is typical in Greek myth, details tend to be fluid. In some versions she actually founds Colophon, in others the city exists already. In Diodoros she is called ‘Daphne’ and remains at Delphi, honing her prophetic skill as the original Sibyl (4.66.5-6). Pausanias has her meet Rhacios — in his version a Cretan — later when she arrives in Colophon (9.33.2). She went on to found the oracle at Claros (Epigonoi fr. 4, Theopompos fr. 346, Pomponius Mela 1.17) and the Sanctuary of Apollo Maloeis in Lesbos (Hellanicos fr. 33, scholion to Thucydides 3.3). These were not the only relics she left behind: the Thebans preserved a chair where they say she used to sit (Pausanias 9.10.3).

Manto was mother of several children. Apollodoros says that Euripides had wrote a play in which she had two children with Alcmaeon, one of the sackers of Thebes. These children were raised at Corinth; the daughter ends up with her father in Acarnia, the son became the founder of Amphilochian Argos (3.7.7). Mopsos, her son with Rhacios (or, in some accounts, Apollo), bested Calchas in prophecy after the fall of Troy and founded cities in Cilicia.

Places associated with Manto and her children. Map created using Recogito.

Manto is, then, precisely the kind of wandering, intersecting, inconsistent, local figure that MANTO is designed to track. This ‘marginal’ figure left traces across the Aegean. We hope that our relational and location-based approach will reveal how important she and other such seemingly-obscure figures were to the shared storyworld of Greek myth.

(For more on Manto’s significance, there is Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s excellent Foundation myths and politics in ancient Ionia (CUP, 2013).)