This Greek name or term appears first in Homer: a lyre-playing youth ‘sings of Linus’, or ‘sings a Linus song’ (Iliad, xviii.569–72). The scene, a vintage festival, contains no suggestion of mourning; but Hesiod (Evelyn-White, frag.1) spoke of Linus whom ‘all bards and kithara players bewail (thrēneusin; the thrēnos was a ritual lament)’. Three centuries later, Herodotus (ii.79.2–3) offered a similar description, and the tragic poets (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 121; Sophocles, Ajax, 627; Euripides, Helen, 172, Orestes, 1395) used ailinon as a lyric cry of grief. Usually it has been translated ‘alas for Linus!’ but it is often equated with the Phoenician ai lanu, ‘woe to us!’. The contradiction can be resolved only by accepting the hypothesis that the Linus song of the Iliad was a form of lament for the vintage, imagined as undergoing a kind of death.
Genealogies of Linus, who emerged as a mythological figure at a comparatively late stage in Greek history, likewise display two quite different orientations. The more persistent and developed of these, a tradition of the central mainland and especially Thebes (a city with a brilliant musical culture), singled out Apollo and one or another of the Muses as his parents. He came increasingly to be given musical attributes: in a wide variety of sources he appears, for example, as Heracles' teacher and the rival of Apollo, as a master singer or kithara player and a composer of thrēnoi, and as the discoverer of several technical innovations and ultimately of music itself. Whether this elaborate and occasionally fantastic development began with the personification of a vintage song remains uncertain. The legends of Linus's death are also varied: in one he is killed by his father Apollo for presuming to be equal to the god as a musician (Pausanias, Description of Greece, ix.29.6; cf Diogenes Laertius, Lives, i.4); in another he is killed by his pupil Heracles for reprimanding his awkwardness in playing the lyre (Apollodorus, ii.4.9).
H.G. Evelyn-White, ed. and trans.: Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (London and Cambridge, MA, 1914, 2/1936/R)
H. Abert: ‘Linos (1)’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, xiii/1 (Stuttgart, 1926), 715–17
W.F. Otto: Die Musen und der göttliche Ursprung des Singens und Sagens (Düsseldorf, 1955, 2/1956), 40–45
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN