A god in the shape of a tame bull carries a girl off across the sea, and a father, robbed of his daughter, sends every son he has to walk the world until they bring her home. The witness on our shelf is the Greek mythographer’s handbook known as The Library (a compilation of the 1st–2nd century CE), where the tale is told with a chronicler’s economy. Zeus loves Europa; “turning himself into a tame bull”, he mounts her on his back and bears her through the sea to Crete. Then the quest opens: on the “dis-” appearance of Europa “her father Agenor sent out” “his sons in search of her, telling them not to return” “until they had found Europa”. Her mother Telephassa goes with them, and Thasus, and Cadmus, and Phoenix, and Cilix — a whole household scattered outward after one lost girl.

The shape of this quest is that it fails, and turns failure into founding. When at last, “after diligent search, they” “could not find Europa”, the searchers give up the road home one by one and settle where their walking has left them: Phoenix in Phoenicia, Cilix in the country he names Cilicia, Cadmus and Telephassa in Thrace. The sister is never recovered; the search becomes a map. The 19th-century editor of this text, James Frazer, reads the whole episode as sky-lore — should Europa be a moon in the shape of a cow, one might take “the quest of the sons of Agenor” “for their lost sister as a mythical description” of Phoenician sailors steering after the setting moon — but that gloss is the editor’s note, laid beside a narrative that stands without it. Only the Greek witness is wired to served text here; the Irish, Icelandic, and Indian authorities Thompson filed wait unread. When a search for a lost sister can end only in cities founded far from home, is the quest still for her, or has it quietly become the story of everywhere the searchers could not stop?