Eucleia

A divinity who was worshiped at Athens, and to whom a sanctuary was dedicated there out of the spoils which the Athenians had taken in the battle of Marathon.1 The goddess was only a personification of the glory which the Athenians had reaped in the day of that memorable battle.2

Eucleia was also used at Athens as a surname of Artemis, and her sanctuary was of an earlier date, for Euchidas died in it.3 Plutarch remarks, that many took Eucleia for Artemis, and thus made her the same as Artemis Eucleia, but that others described her as a daughter of Heracles and Myrto, a daughter of Menoetius; and he adds that this Eucleia died as a maiden, and was worshiped in Boeotia and Locris, where she had an altar and a statue in every market-place, on which persons on the point of marrying used to offer sacrifices to her.

Whether and what connexion there existed between the Attic and Boeotian Eucleia is unknown, though it is probable that the Attic divinity was, as is remarked above, a mere personification, and consequently quite independent of Eucleia, the daughter of Heracles. Artemis Eucleia had also a temple at Thebes.

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References

Notes

  1. Pausanias. Description of Greece i, 14.4.
  2. Comp. Böckh. Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, n. 258.
  3. Plutarch. Aristeides, 20.
  4. Pausanias. Description of Greece ix, 17.1.

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.