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CADMUS 100.00%

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A Greek historian. See LOGOGRAPHI.
 
SPARTI 53.34%
The men in full armour who sprang up from the teeth of the dragon of Ares when sown by Cadmus. On their birth they immediately fought with one another, till only five remained. The survivors helped Cadmus to found Thebes, and were the ancestors of the Theban nobility.
 
ECHION 52.07%

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One of the five Sparti who helped Cadmus to build Thebes; husband of Agave, the daughter of Cadmus, and father of Pentheus. (See SPARTI.)
 
POLYDORUS 39.09%
Son of Cadmus and Harmonia, father of Labdacus, and great-grandfather of CEdipfis.
 
AGENOR 38.69%
Son of Poseidon and Libya, king of Plicenicia, brother to Belus, and father of Cadmus and Europa (q.v.).
 
HARMONIA 32.74%
 
AGAVE 31.27%
Daugther of Cadmus and wife of Echion. She, with other women, in a bacchanalian frenzy tore to pieces her own son Pentheus (q.v.).
 
NYCTEUS 26.58%
Son of Poseidon and the Pleiad Celaeno, brother of Lycus (q.v., 1) and father of Antiope (q.v.). After the early death of Cadmus' son Polydorus he administered the government of Thebes for Labdacus, who was a minor, until be met his death in battle with Epopeus, his daughter's husband.
 
LAIUS 23.72%
The son of Labillcus, grandson of Polydorus, and great-grandson of Cadmus. When his guardian Lycus was banished or slain by Amphion (q.v.) and Zethus, he fled to Pelops. At the death of the usurpers, he ascended the throne of his fathers and married Jocasta. (See (EDIPUS.)
 
EPIGONI 18.02%

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The descendants of the seven princes who marched against Thebes: Aegialeus, son of Adrastus; Alcmaeon, son of Amphiaraus; Diomedes, son of Tydeus; Promachus, son of Parthenopaeus; Sthenelus, son of Capaneus; Thersander, son of Polynices; Euryalus, son of Mecisteus. To avenge the slain, they marched against Thebes, under the leadership of Adrastus, ten years after the first Theban war (see ADRASTUS). Unlike their ancestors, they started with the happiest auspices. The oracle of Amphiaraus at Thebes promises them victory, and a happy return to all, that is, except Aegialeus the son of Adrastus, the only warrior who escaped in the previous war. In the decisive battle at Glisas, Aegialeus falls by the hand of Laodamas, son of Eteocles, and leader of the Thebans. Laodamas is himself slain by Alemaeon. Part of the defeated Thebans, by the advice of Teiresias, fly before the city is taken, and settle in the territory of Hestiaeotis in Thessaly, or among the Illyrian Encheli, where the government is in the hands of descendants of Cadmus (see CADMUS). The victors having conquered and destroyed the city, send the best part of the booty, according to their vow, to the Delphic oracle. Thersander and his family are henceforth the rulers of Thebes.
 
PENTHEUS 17.86%
Son of Echion and Agave, the daughter of Cadmus, whom he succeeded in the sovereignty of Thebes. When Dionysus came to Thebes, and the women celebrated a Bacchic festival for him on Cihaeron, he hastened thither to prevent it, but was taken by his own mother for a wild beast, and torn to pieces by her and the other women [Eur., Bacchoe]. His grandson was Menoeceus, the father of Creon and locaste. See cut under AGAVE.
 
MENOECEUS 17.50%
Grandson of the above, son of Creon. At the siege of Thebes by the Seven, Tiresias prophesied that the Thebans would conquer if the wrath of Ares at the slaying of the dragon by Cadmus were appeased by the voluntary death of a descendant of the warriors that had sprung from the dragon's teeth. Menoeceus, one of the last of this race, slew himself, in spite of his father's prohibition, on the castle wall, and fell down into the chasm which had once been the haunt of the dragon as guardian of the spring Dirce.
 
ACTAEON 16.67%
Son of Aristaeus by Autonoe, the daughter of Cadmus, of Thebes was trained by Chiron into a finished huntsman. Having either seen Artemis (Diana) when bathing, or boasted his superiority in the chase, he was changed by her into a stag, and torn to pieces by his own hounds on Mount Cithaeron. The hounds looked everywhere for their master, and would not be pacified till Chiron showed them an image of him. His statue was often set up on hills and rocks as a protection against the dangerous heat of the dog-days, of which probably the myth itself is but a symbol.
 
EUROPE 15.81%
A figure in Greek mythology. In Homer she is the daughter of Phoenix, in the later story of the Phoenician Agenor, and sister of Cadmus. Zeus, in the shape of a bull, carried her over the sea to Crete, where she bore him Minos, Rhadamanthys, and according to the later legend, Sarpedon also. Zeus left her with Asterion, king of Crete, who brought up her sons and left them his kingdom. She was worshipped in Crete under the name of Hellotis, especially at Gortyn, where she was supposed to have been wedded with Zeus, and to have borne him her sons. A festival called Hellotia was held in her honour, at which her bones were carried in a wreath of myrtle.
 
SEMELE 14.37%

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Daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, beloved of Zeus. Hera, jealous of her, took the form of her nurse Beroe, and induced her to obtain of Zeus a solemn promise to fulfil her wish, and then to request him to show himself to her in all his divine splendour. When Zeus appeared amid thunder and lightning, Semele was consumed by the flames, and, dying, gave birth to a six months' child, Dionysus, whom Zeus saved from the fire and hid in his thigh till the due time of birth. Her son, on being made a god, raised her up from the world below, and set her in the heavens under the name of Thyone. See DIONYSUS; and for Dionysus and Semele see MIRRORS.
 
INO 13.60%
Daughter of Cadmus, and wife of Athamus (q.v.). Being followed by the latter when he had been seized with madness, she fled to the cliff Moluris, between Megara and Corinth, and there threw herself into the sea with her infant son Me1icertes. At the isthmus, however, mother and child were carried ashore by a dolphin, and, from that time forward, honoured as marine divinities along the shores of the Mediterranean, especially on the coast of Megara and at the Isthmus of Corinth. Ino was worshipped as Leucothea, and Melicertes as Paloemon. They were regarded as divinities who aided men in peril on the sea. As early as Homer, we have Ino mentioned as rescuing Odysseus from danger by throwing him her veil [Od. v 333-353). Among the Romans Ino was identified with Matuta (q.v.).
 
ARISTAEUS 12.67%
A beneficent deity worshipped in various parts of Greece, especially in Thessaly, Boeotia, the African colony of Cyrene, and the Islands of Ceos, Corcyra, Sicily and Sardinia. He gives his blessing to herds, hunting, bee-keeping, wine, oil and every kind of husbandry. In particular he defends men, animals and plants from the destructive heat of the dog-days. According to the story most in vogue, he is the son of Apollo by the Thessalian nymph Cyrene, whom the god carried off to the country named after her. She is the daughter of Hypseus, and granddaughter (another story says daughter) of the river-god Peneus. After his birth Hermes took Aristaeus to the Hours and Gaea, the goddess of the earth, who brought him up and made him an immortal god. Sometimes he is called the son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth). In the Theban legend he and Autonoe the daughter of Cadmus are represented as the parents of Actaeon. He brought destruction upon the nymph Eurydice, the beloved of Orpheus; for in fleeing from his persecutions she was killed by a snake. [Vergil, Georg. iv 316-558.]
 
ELYSIUM 11.62%
In Homer Elysium is a beautiful meadow at the western extremity of the earth, on the banks of the river Oceanus. Thither the favoured of Zeus such as Rhadamanthys his son, and his son-in-law Menelaus, are carried without having seen death. They live a life of perfect happiness, there is no snow, nor storm, nor rain, but the cool west wind breathes there for ever. Hesiod speaks of the islands of the blest by the Ocean, where some of the heroes of the fourth generation of men live a life without pain, and where the earth produces her fruits three times in the year. According to Pindar, all who have three times passed blamelessly through life live there in perfect bliss under the sway of Cronus and his assessor Rhadamanthys. Such are Cadmus and Peleus, and Achilles through the intercession of his mother Thetis with Zeus. Like Cronus, the Titans, after their reconciliation with Zeus, dwell on these islands. In later times Elysium with its bliss was localized in the world below, and regarded as the abode of those whom the judges of the dead had pronounced worthy of it. (Cp. HADES, REALM OF.)
 
OEDIPUS 9.07%

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Son of Laius, descendant of Cadmus through his paternal grandfather Labdacus and his great-grandfather Polydorus. According to Homer [Od. xi 271-280], he kills his father and marries his mother Epicaste (in later accounts Iocaste); the gods, however, immediately cause the misdeed to be known, and Epicaste hangs herself; OEdipus however rules on in Thebes, haunted with many sufferings by the vengeful spirit of his mother. Homer also mentions the funeral games celebrated in his honour [Il. xxiii 679], but does not tell of the birth of his sons and the grounds of their feud. According to the ancient OEdipodeia of Cinaethon, OEdipus after Iocaste's death marries Euryganeia, whence sprang his sons Eteocles and Polynices, and his daughters Antigone and Ismene [Paus., ix 5, 11]. According to the ancient legend, OEdipus curses his sons either because Polynices had set before him at the banquet the table and goblet which Cadmus and Laius had used (which he regarded as an attempt to remind him of his transgression), or because they had inadvertently sent him the haunch-bone of a victim instead of the shoulder-bone. In the hands of the tragedians, especially of Aeschylus and Sophocles (in the OEdipus Tyrannus), the legend has been changed into the following form. Laius, husband of Iocaste, daughter of Menceceus, and sister of Creon, has a curse resting on him in consequence of some misdeed. He is told by the oracle of Apollo that he will die by the hand of his son. When a son is born to him, he accordingly orders a slave to expose him, with his feet pierced, upon Cithaeron. The slave consigns the child to the care of a shepherd belonging to the king of Corinth, Polybus, and he takes it to his master. The boy, who derives the name OEdipus (Swellfoot), from his swollen feet, is adopted by the childless Polybus and his wife Periboea in place of offspring of their own. On reaching manhood, he is reproached during a carousal with not being the son of his presumptive parents, and betakes himself without their knowledge to Delphi, in order to find out the truth. The terrible response of the oracle, to the effect that he will slay his own father and then beget children in wedlock with his mother, causes him to avoid Corinth. At the place in Phocis where the road from Delphi to Daulis leaves the road to Thebes, lie is met by his real father, who is on a journey to Delphi to question the god concerning the devastation of his land by the Sphinx. As OEdipus will not move aside, a quarrel arises, and he kills his father together with his attendants one of whom alone escapes. He proceeds to Thebes, and there frees the city from its plague by solving the Sphinx's riddle; as a reward he receives from Creon the dominion of Thebes and the late king's widow, Iocaste, for a wife; and the latter bears him four children (given by the older myth to Euryganeia). Years afterwards failure of crops and pestilence come upon Thebes, and the oracle promises liberation from the disaster only if the murder of Laius be requited by the banishment of the murderer. The result of OEdipus' eager endeavours to identify this person is the discovery of the horrors which he has unconsciously perpetrated. Iocaste hangs herself in despair, and CEdipus puts out his own eyes. Deposed from his throne, and imprisoned at Thebes by his sons to conceal his shame from men's eyes, or (according to another account) driven by them into banishment, whither his daughters accompany him, he pronounces against his sons a curse, to the effect that they shall divide their inheritance with each other by means of the sword, a curse which is fulfilled with awful exactness. (See SEVEN AGAINST THEBES.) His grave was afterwards shown at the village of Eteonus, on the borders of Attica and Bceotia, in the sanctuary of Demeter, and worship done to him as to a hero. At Athens too, in a sacred demesne of the Erinyes, between the Areopagus and the Acropolis, was a monument to OEdipus, whose bones were supposed to have been brought hither from Thebes.--Sophocles, in his OEdipus at Colonus, follows another legend. He represents him as coming to the Attic deme of Colonus at the bidding of Apollo, and as finding there, in the sanctuary of the now propitiated Eumenides, the longed-for peace of the grave. His bones, the place of burial of which was known to none, are a precious treasure for the country, to guard it from hostile invasions.
 
LOGOGRAPHI 7.85%
The name given to the oldest Greek historians, who by their first attempts at disquisitions in prose marked the transition from narrative poetry to prose history. As in the case of epic poetry, so these earliest historical writings emanated from Ionia, where the first attempts at an exposition of philosophic reflexions in prose were made at about the same time by Pherecydes, Anaximander, and Anaximeues; and, in both cases alike, it was the Ionic dialect that was used. This class of writing long preserved in its language the poetic character which it inherited from its origin in the epic narrative. It was only by degrees that it approached the tone of true prose. It confined itself absolutely to the simple telling of its story, which was largely made up of family and local traditions. It never classified its materials from a more elevated point of view, or scrutinised them with critical acumen. The logographers flourished from about 550 B.C. down to the Persian Wars. Their latest representatives extend, however, down to the time of the Peloponnesian War. When true history arose with Herodotus, they soon lapsed into oblivion, whence they were rescued in Alexandrian days. Many of the works ascribed to them were however believed to be spurious, or at least interpolated. We possess fragments only of a few. The larger number of the historic writers who are described as logographers were Asiatic Greeks, e.g. CADMUS of Miletus, author of a history of the founding of Miletus and the colonization of Ionia (he lived about 540 B.C., and was considered the first writer of historic prose); further, DIONYSIUS of Miletus, a writer of Persian history, HECATAeUS (q.v.) Of MiletUS (550-476), XANTHUS of Sardis (about 496), a writer of Lydian history, HELLANICUS (q.v.) of Lesbos (about 480-400), CHARON of Lampsacus (about 456), a compiler of Persian history and annals of his native town, PHERECYDES of the Carian island Leros (died about 400 B.C.), who lived at Athens, and in his great collection of myths in ten books treated chiefly of the early days of Attica. Some belonged to the colonies in the West, e.g. HIPPYS of Rhegium, at the time of the Persian War the oldest writer on Sicily and Italy. The only representative from Greece itself is ACUSILAUS of Argos in Boeotia, the author of a genealogical work.
 
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