Kokalos

Kokalos (Latin Cocalus) is the legendary king of the Sicani whose court at the rock-citadel of Kamikos, near later Akragas, is the setting of the oldest Greek story told of pre-Greek Sicily. When Daedalus fled from Crete, Kokalos took him in, and Sicilian tradition credited the craftsman with marvellous works for his host, above all the impregnable citadel of Kamikos where the king kept his treasure. Minos pursued the fugitive with a great fleet and unmasked him by offering a reward to whoever could thread a spiral seashell, a riddle only Daedalus could solve; Kokalos then promised the king everything, received him as a guest, and destroyed him in the bath, either keeping him in the scalding water himself, as Diodorus tells it, or through his daughters, who at Daedalus' prompting poured boiling water over the guest. Herodotus already knew that Minos died a violent death at Kamikos in Sikania and that the Cretans besieged the town for five years in vain. The tale was dramatized in Sophocles' lost Men of Kamikos and Aristophanes' lost comedy Kokalos, and its possible kernel of Bronze Age Aegean contact with Sicily has been debated since T. J. Dunbabin's classic study; the Palermo journal of ancient Sicilian history is named Kokalos after the king.

Domains

• kingship among the sicani
• hospitality and protection of suppliants

Powers

• to shelter the fugitive craftsman Daedalus against the power of Minos
• to destroy an invading king through cunning hospitality

Relations

• slayer of: MinosIn Diodorus' Sicilian account Kokalos himself killed Minos by holding him too long in the scalding bath and returned the body to the Cretans as an accident; the commoner version makes his daughters, advised by Daedalus, pour boiling water over the king. Herodotus knows only that Minos, having come to Sicania in search of Daedalus, died there a violent death at Kamikos.Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4.79.2 (trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library 340, Harvard University Press, 1939) (secondary); Herodotus, The Persian Wars 7.170 (trans. A. D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library 119, Harvard University Press, 1922) (secondary)

Sources

• Kokalos is the legendary king of the Sicani at Kamikos who sheltered the fugitive Daedalus and brought about the death of Minos of Crete in the bath, the central native figure of the oldest Greek legend attached to pre-Greek Sicily.: T. J. Dunbabin, 'Minos and Daidalos in Sicily', Papers of the British School at Rome 16 (1948), pp. 1-18 (secondary); Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4.78-79 (trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library 340, Harvard University Press, 1939) (secondary); E. Sjöqvist, Sicily and the Greeks: Studies in the Interrelationship between the Indigenous Populations and the Greek Colonists (Jerome Lectures 9; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973) (secondary)