Androgeus

A son of Minos and Pasiphaë, or Crete, who is said to have conquered all his opponents in the games of the Panathenaea at Athens. This extraordinary good luck, however, became the cause of his destruction, though the mode of his death is related differently.

According to some accounts Aegeus sent the man he dreaded to fight against the Marathonian bull, who killed him; according to others, he was assassinated by his defeated rivals on his road to Thebes, whither he was going to take part in a solemn contest.1 According to Diodorus2 it was Aegeus himself who had him murdered near Oenoe, on the road to Thebes, because he feared lest Androgeus should support the sons of Pallas against him. Hyginus3 makes him fall in a battle during the war of his father Minos against the Athenians. (See some different accounts in Plutarch's Theseus, 15; Servius on Virgil's Aeneid vi, 14.) But the common tradition is, that Minos made war on the Athenians in consequence of the death of his son. Propertius4 relates that Androgeus was restored to life by Asclepius.

He was worshiped in Attica as a hero, an altar was erected to him in the port of Phalerus,5 and games, ἀνδρογεώνια (androgeōnia), were celebrated in his honor every year in the Cerameicus.6 He was also worshiped under the name Eurugues (Εὐρυγύης), i.e. he who plows or possesses extensive fields, whence it has been inferred that originally Androgeus was worshiped as the introducer of agriculture into Attica.

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References

Notes

  1. Pseudo-Apollodorus. The Library iii, 1.2, 15.7; Pausanias. Description of Greece i, 27.9.
  2. iv, 60.
  3. Fabulae, 41.
  4. ii, 1. 64.
  5. Pausanias. Description of Greece i, 1.4.
  6. Dictionary of Antiquities, s.v. Ἀνδρογεώνια.

Source

  • Smith, William. (1870). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. London: Taylor, Walton, and Maberly.

This article incorporates text from Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) by William Smith, which is in the public domain.