Aegimius

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For the ancient Greek physician sometimes called Aegimius, see Aegimus.

Aegimius (Gr. Αιγίμιος) was the Greek mythological ancestor of the Dorians, who is described as their king and lawgiver at the time when they were yet in­habiting the northern parts of Thessaly.[1] He asked Heracles for help in a war against the Lapiths and, in gratitude, offered him one-third of his kingdom. The Lapiths were conquered, but Heracles did not take for himself the territory promised to him by Aegimius, and left it in trust to the king who was to preserve it for the sons of Heracles.[2][3]

Aegimius had two sons, Dymas and Pamphylus, who migrated to the Peloponnese and were regarded as the ancestors of two branches of the Doric race (Dymanes and Pamphylians), while the third branch derived its name from Hyllas (Hylleans), the son of Heracles, who had been adopted by Aegimius.[4][5]

There existed in antiquity an epic poem called "Aegimius," of which a few fragments are still extant, [6] and which is sometimes ascribed to Hesiod and sometimes to Cercops of Miletus.[7][8] The poem survives in fewer than a dozen quotations, and seems to have been in part concerned with the myth of Io and Argos Panoptes.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Pindar, Pythian Odes i. 124, v. 96
  2. ^ Apollodorus, ii. 7. § 7
  3. ^ Diodorus Siculus, iv. 37
  4. ^ Apollodorus ii. 8. § 3
  5. ^ Schol. ad Pind. Pyth. i. 121
  6. ^ Schmitz, Leonhard (1867), “Aegimius”, in Smith, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. 1, Boston, pp. 26 
  7. ^ Athen. xi. p. 503
  8. ^ Stephanus of Byzantium, s.v. Αβαντίς

[edit] External links

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