Meilichius

I.e. the god that can be propitiated, or the gracious, is used as a surname of several divinities.

  1. Of Zeus, as the protector of those who honored him with propitiatory sacrifices. At Athens cakes were offered to him every year at the festival of the Diasia.1 Altars were erected to Zeus Meilichius on the Cephissus,2 at Sicyon,3 and at Argos.4
  2. Of Dionysus in the island of Naxos.5
  3. Of Tyche or Fortune.6

The plural θεοὶ μειλίχιοι (theoi meilichioi) is also applied to certain divinities whom mortals used to propitiate with sacrifices at night, that they might avert all evil, as e.g. at Myonia in the country of the Ozolian Locrians.7

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References

Notes

  1. Thucydides, i, 126; Xenophon. Anabasis vii, 7.4.
  2. Pausanias. Description of Greece i, 37.3.
  3. ibid. ii, 9.6.
  4. ibid. ii, 20.1; Plutarch. On Controlling Anger, 9.
  5. Athenaeus, iii, p. 78.
  6. Orphic. Hymns 71.2.
  7. Pausanias. Description of Greece x, 38.4; comp. Orphic. E., 30.

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.