Miletus and children

Miletus (Ancient Greek: Μίλητος)

Miletus was son of Apollo and Areia, daughter of Cleochus, of Crete.^[1] When Areia gave birth to her son she hid him at a place where the plant milax* was growing; Cleochus found the child there and named him Miletus after the plant.^[2] Another tradition relates that Miletus' mother by Apollo was Akakallis, the daughter of Minos. Fearing her father's wrath she exposed the child, but Apollo commanded the she-wolves to come down and nurse the child.^[3] Yet another source^[4] calls his mother Deione, and himself by the matronymic Deionides. Finally, one source gives Miletus as the son of Euxantius, himself son of Minos by a Telchinian woman Dexithea.^[2] 

He was loved by both Minos and Sarpedon, but showed preference for the latter, and this became the reason why Sarpedon was expelled from Crete by his brother. Following the advice of Sarpedon, Miletus also left Crete for Samos, then moved to Caria and became the mythical founder and eponym of the city of Miletus.^[1][2][3] Myths further relate that the hero Miletus founded the city only after slaying a giant named Asterius, son of Anax; and that the region known as Miletus was originally called 'Anactoria'.^[5] 

Miletus married either Eidothea, daughter of Eurytus, or Tragasia, daughter of Celaenus, or Cyanee, daughter of the river god Maeander, or Areia, and by her had a son Kaunos (Caunus) and a daughter Byblis, who happened to develop incestous feelings for each other.^{[6][3][7][8][9]}

*Milax = Smilax, a nymph beloved of Crocus, who in turn was beloved of Hermes. Crocus and Smilax are briefly alluded to -- Metamorphoses 4.283.

Byblis
In Greek mythology, Byblis or Bublis (Ancient Greek: Βυβλίς) was a daughter of Miletus. Her mother was either Tragasia, Cyanee, daughter of the river-god Meander, or Eidothea, daughter of King Eurytus of Caria. She fell in love with Caunus, her twin brother.

Caunus
In Greek mythology, Caunus or Kaunos (Ancient Greek: Καῦνος) was a son of Miletus, grandson of Apollo and brother of Byblis.

Caunus became the object of his own sister's passionate love. From some accounts it appears that Caunus was the first to develop the affection towards her;^[1][2] others describe Byblis' feelings as unrequited.^[3][4][5] All sources agree, however, that Caunus chose to flee from home in order to prevent himself from actually committing incest with Byblis, and that she followed him until she was completely exhausted by grief and died (or committed suicide). 

Caunus eventually came to Lycia, where he married the Naiad Pronoe and had by her a son Aegialus. Caunus became king of the land; when he died, Aegialus gathered all the people from scattered settlements in a newly founded city which he named Caunus after his father.^[1]

Miletus

Cities:

Miletus here and here.
Caunus
Byblos

Milesian Tales also here.

The Milesian tale (Milesiaka, in Latin fabula milesiaca, or Milesiae fabula) originates in ancient Greek and Roman literature. According to most authorities, it is a short story, fable, or folktale featuring love and adventure, usually being erotic and titillating. M. C. Howatson, in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1989), voices the traditional view that it is the source "of such medieval collections of tales as the Gesta Romanorum, the Decameron of Boccaccio, and the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre." 

But Gottskálk Jensson of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, offers a dissenting view or corrective, arguing that the original Milesian tale was 

a type of first-person novel, a travelogue told from memory by a narrator who every now and then would relate how he encountered other characters who told him stories which he would then incorporate into the main tale through the rhetorical technique of narrative impersonation. [1] 

This resulted in "a complicated narrative fabric: a travelogue carried by a main narrator with numerous subordinate tales carried by subordinate narrative voices." 

. . . the name Milesian tale originates from the Milesiaka[1] of Aristides of Miletus (flourished 2nd century BCE), who was a writer of shameless and amusing tales with some salacious content and unexpected plot twists. Aristides set his tales in Miletus, which had a reputation for a luxurious, easy-going lifestyle, akin to that of Sybaris in Magna Graecia; there is no reason to think that he was in any sense "of" Miletus himself.

Milesian tales gained a reputation for ribaldry: Ovid, in Tristia, contrasts the boldness of Aristides and others with his own Ars Amatoria, for which he was punished by exile.

From Tristia:

Aristides associated himself with Milesian vice,
but Aristides wasn’t driven from his city.

Miletus and Maeander

The daedal fates of Icarus

As noted the other day, Ovid's Daedalus has much in common with his Arachne. Both are painstaking artificers who seek to go beyond merely imitating nature. Daedalus' design for the labyrinth of Crete was, Ovid notes, inspired by the Maeander River, near Miletus in ancient Caria:

No differently from the way in which the watery Maeander deludes the sight, flowing backwards and forwards in its changeable course, through the meadows of Phrygia, facing the running waves advancing to meet it, now directing its uncertain waters towards its source, now towards the open sea:

His design for his escape from Crete was based upon nature's model as well:

he applied his thought to new invention and altered the natural order of things. He laid down lines of feathers, beginning with the smallest, following the shorter with longer ones, so that you might think they had grown like that, on a slant. In that way, long ago, the rustic pan-pipes were graduated, with lengthening reeds. Then he fastened them together with thread at the middle, and bees’-wax at the base, and, when he had arranged them, he flexed each one into a gentle curve, so that they imitated real bird’s wings. (Kline)

Like Arachne, Daedalus is entirely absorbed by his art, his techne. He is a problem solver. He solves Pasiphae's problem, then has to contain the problematic issue of that "solution" for Minos:

The properties of the world

In Miletus, the pre-Socratic theories of Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. Were these men writing their own versions of Metamorphoses?

. . . before Plato, Socrates and the Golden Age of Pericles in Athens, the center of both trade and innovative thought in the world was Miletos, situated on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey. What emerged at Miletos was truly revolutionary - civilization's first attempt to replace myths with rational thought. In Miletos, the first map of the world was likely drawn, and Hecataeus wrote the works that gave him claim as the father of both geography and history. Once jutting out into a wide bay fed by the river Menderes and surrounded by fine harbors, today the city is a gaunt ruin, isolated by the marshlands that have crept relentlessly seawards, a victim partly of changing sea levels and partly of erosion from the flanking hills left bare by overgrazing:

"From the early second millennium BC, the promontory of Miletos was the home of traders closely linked to the Minoan and, later, the Mycenaean world. Later foundation myths tell of Ionian Greeks from Athens settling there, probably as early as 1000 BC. By 700 BC a thriving Archaic city spread across the headland, soon to be adorned with temples to Dionysos, Artemis and Aphrodite, Demeter and Athena, and protected by a city wall. The prosperity of the city was based partly on a hinterland productive of wool and oil, but more on its highly favoured location as a route node linking the long overland trek from the east, via the valley of the river Menderes, to the coastal shipping lanes which embraced the east Mediterranean and extended northwards into the Black Sea and to the Pontic steppe. Through the port of Miletos goods and people flowed, and with the sailors and traders came knowledge. For those anxious to learn of the world there could hardly have been a better place to sit and listen.

"From about 600 BC, Miletos became a centre of vibrant scholarship - a place where thinkers attempted to counter the colourful mythical view of the world revolving around a pantheon of deities with a new rationalism based partly on observational science and partly on philosophy. The earliest of these remarkable men to whom we can give a name was Thales, active in the early decades of the sixth century. He is said to have visited and studied in Egypt and is credited with developing the belief that the world originated from water and would eventually return to water. His pupil Anaximander (c.610-545) further developed this idea of a primordial element. For him it was not water but apeiron, probably best interpreted as that which is spatially unlimited or boundless. The products of this matter - such as wetness, dryness, heat, cold - in paired opposites gave rise to the many worlds of the universe. Anaximander is also credited with producing the first map of the world, which he envisaged to be a disc standing on a column suspended in space in the centre of the universe. The third of this remarkable group was Anaximenes (c.6oo-526), who may have been a pupil of Anaximander. His view of cosmogony was that everything derived from air either by rarefaction, giving rise to fire, or by condensation, leading successively to wind, cloud, water, earth and stone. He was also the first philosopher to envisage a human soul, which he believed to be a component of air.

"The three Milesian philosophers brought about a profound change in thought in the early part of the sixth century - a revolution that was to set the scene for the growth of philosophy in Athens in the following centuries. While one can discern there the influences of Babylonian and Egyptian thought, what emerged at Miletos was truly revolutionary. It attempted to replace myths dependent on the machinations of the gods with rational thought.

From Europe Between the Oceans, Barry Cunliffe, via Delancey Place.