Dardanus

In Greek mythology, Dardanus (/ˈdɑːrdənəs/; Greek: Δάρδανος) was a son of Zeus and Electra, daughter of Atlas, and founder of the city of Dardanus at the foot of Mount Ida in the Troad.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1.61–62) states that Dardanus' original home was in Arcadia, where Dardanus and his elder brother Iasus (elsewhere more commonly called Iasion) reigned as kings following Atlas. Dardanus married Chryse, daughter of Pallas, by whom he fathered two sons: Idaeus and Deimas. When a great flood occurred, the survivors, who were living on mountains that had now become islands, split into two groups: one group remained and took Deimas as king while the other sailed away, eventually settling in the island of Samothrace. There Iasus (Iasion) was slain by Zeus for lying with Demeter. Dardanus and his people found the land poor and so most of them set sail for Asia.

A different account in Virgil's Aeneid (3.163f) has Aeneas in a dream learn from his ancestral Penates that "Dardanus and Father Iasius" and the Penates themselves originally came from Hesperia, afterwards renamed as Italy. This tradition holds that Dardanus was a Tyrrhenian prince, and that his mother Electra was married to Corythus, king of Tarquinia (Aeneid 7.195-242; 8. 596 ss.; 9. 10; Servio, ad Vergilium, Aeneidos, 9.10).

Dardanus (city)

Dardanus was an ancient city in the Troad. It was sometimes called Dardania, a term used also for the district around it.Pliny the Elder called it Dardanium.

Location

At the time of the geographer Strabo, the city of Dardanus stood one mile south of the headland of Dardanis, the point at which the Hellespont, the strait now called, after the name of the city, the Dardanelles, begins to narrow.Abydos lay about 70 stadia (14 kilometres) to the north and Rhoeteum about the same distance to the south.

History

The town that Strabo knew was a colony of Aeolians and was distinct from the by then vanished Dardanus or Dardania presented in the Iliad as situated at the foot of Mount Ida and reputed to be named after Dardanus, who founded it earlier than the founding of Ilium.

The historical city was one of those that the Achaemenid Empire reduced in 497 BC in the course of its suppression of the Ionian Revolt. Nearly two centuries later, the taking by surprise of Spartan ships on that coast led to the Athenian victory of the Battle of Abydos in 411 BC. Dardanus was also the place where in 85 BC Sulla and Mithridates VI of Pontus met and agreed on the Treaty of Dardanos.

Dardanus (genus)

Dardanus is a genus of hermit crabs belonging to the Diogenidae family.

List of species

This genus contains the following species: