Calchas
（
Κάλχας). A celebrated soothsayer, son of Thestor. He had
received from Apollo the knowledge of future events; and the Greeks, accordingly, on their
departure for the Trojan War, nominated him their high-priest and prophet. Among the
interpretations of events imputed to him, it is said that he predicted that Troy could not be
taken without the aid of Achilles; and that, having observed a serpent, during a solemn
sacrifice, glide from under an altar, ascend a tree, and devour nine young birds with their
mother, and afterwards become itself changed into stone, he inferred that the siege of Troy
would last ten years. He also foretold that the Grecian fleet, which was at that same time
detained by contrary winds in the harbour of Aulis, would not be able to sail until Agamemnon
should have sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia. Calchas likewise advised Agamemnon, during
the pestilence by which Apollo desolated the Grecian camp, to restore Chryseïs to her
father, as the only means of appeasing the god. (See
Trojan War.) He was consulted, indeed, on every
affair of importance, and appears to have often determined, with Agamemnon and Odysseus, the
import of the oracles which he expounded. His death is said to have happened as follows. After
the taking of Troy, he accompanied Amphilochus, son of Amphiaraüs, to Colophon in
Ionia. It had been predicted that he should not die until he found a prophet more skilful than
himself: this he experienced in the person of Mopsus. He was unable to tell how many figs were
on the branches of a certain fig-tree; and when Mopsus mentioned the exact number Calchas
retired to the wood of Claros, sacred to Apollo, where he expired of grief and mortification.
Calchas had the patronymic, Thestorides.
