Eurypylus

A son of Euaemon and Ops.1 He appears in the different traditions about him, as a hero of Ormenion, or Hyria, or as a king of Cyrene. In the Iliad he is represented as having led the men of Ormenion and other places to Troy with forty ships, and he is one of those who offer to fight with Hector.2 He slew many a Trojan, and when he himself was wounded by Paris, he was nursed and cured by Patroclus.

According to a genealogy of the heroes of Ormenion he was a son of Hyperochus, and the father of Ormenus.3 Among the heroes of Hyria, he is mentioned as a son of Poseidon and Celaeno, and went to Libya before Cyrene who fought against the lion that attacked his flocks, and in Libya he became connected with the Argonauts.4 He is said to have been married to Sterope, the daughter of Helios, by whom he became the father of Lycaon and Leucippus.5

After Troy was captured and the spoils were divided, Eurypylus was given a chest. Inside was an image of Dionysus, made by Hephaestus, and when he looked upon it, he went mad. During one of his lucid moments he went to Cirrha. Going up to Delphi he inquired of the oracle about his illness. He was told that he would come upon a people offering a strange sacrifice and that he should set down the chest and make his home there.

When his ship landed neared Aroe, he came upon a youth and a maiden who had been brought to the altar of Triclaria. The people there remembered what their own oracle had said before — that a stranger would come and bring them a foreign deity, delivering them from their yearly obligation of sacrificing a youth and a maiden to the goddess. And so the malady of Eurypylus and the sacrifice of these people came to an end. See also Aesymnetes.

Eurypylus dedicated a sanctuary to Soteria at Patrae,6 which also contained a monument of him, and where sacrifices were offered to him every year after the festival of Dionysus.7 From Pausanias we learn that Eurypylus was called by some a son of Dexamenus.8

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References

Notes

  1. Hyginus. Fabulae, 81.
  2. Iliad ii, 734; vii, 167.
  3. Scholiast on Pindar's Olympian Odes vii, 42.
  4. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius, iv, 1561; Tzetzes on Lycophron, 902.
  5. Scholiast on Pindar's Pythian Odes iv, 57; Tzetzes on Lycophron, 886.
  6. Pausanias. Description of Greece vii, 21.2.
  7. ibid. vii, 19.1, 3; ix, 41.1.
  8. Comp. Müller. Orchomenos und die Minyer, p. 341 ff. (2nd ed.)

Sources

  • Homer. Iliad xii, 841, xv, 390; comp. Pseudo-Apollodorus. The Library iii, 10.8.
  • Hyginus. Fabulae, 97.
  • Ovid. Metamorphoses xiii, 357.
  • Pausanias. Description of Greece vii, 19 and 20, 21.12.
  • 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.