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Aeolus (son of Poseidon)

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In Greek mythology, Aeolus was a son of Poseidon by Arne, or Melanippe. He had a twin brother named Boeotus.

References

• Collard, Christopher and Martin Cropp, Euripides Fragments: Aegeus–Meleanger, Loeb Classical Library No. 504, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-674-99625-0. Online version at Harvard University Press.
• Kerényi, Karl, The Gods of the Greeks, Thames and Hudson, London, 1951. Internet Archive.
• Rose, H. J., s.v. Aeolus in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, second edition, Hammond, N.G.L. and Howard Hayes Scullard (editors), Oxford University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-19-869117-3.

Sources

Ancient

Euripides

Melanippe Wise

test. i (Collard and Cropp, pp. 572, 573)

Aeolus, son of Helen son of Zeus, fathered Cretheus, Salmoneus and Sisyphus by Eurydice, and by Chiron's daughter Hippe (he fathered) the exceedingly beautiful Melanippe. [5]

fr. 481 (Collard and Cropp, pp. 578, 579)

MELANIPPE

Zeus, as is told by reliable tradition,¹ fathered Hellen who was father to Aeolus. All of the land that Peneus and Asopus bound and enclose whithin their watery arms² acknowledges his rule and is named Aeolia after my father. This is one of the families descended from Hellen, and he sent forth other offspring to other areas ... (probably a line or two lost) ... ³ to glorias Athens Xuthus, whose bride Erechtheus's daughter, bore Ion to him on Crecropia's ridge.⁴

But I must bring my account †and my name†⁵ back to where I started from. My name is Melanippe; Chiron's daughter bore me to Aeolus.

Hyginus

Fabulae

186

MELANIPPE: Neptune seduced Melanippe, a very beautiful girl, daughter of Desmontes or as other poets say, of Aeolus, and begat by her two sons. When Desmontes found this out, he blinded Melanippe, and shut her in a prison, with commands that only scant food and water be given to her, and that the children be thrown to wild beasts. When they had been thrown out, a cow in milk came to the children and offered them her udders, and cowherds, seeing this, took the children to rear. In the meantime Metapontus, King of Icaria, demanded of his wife Theano that she bear children to him, or leave the kingdom. She, in fear, sent to the shepherds asking them to find a child she could present to the king. They sent her the two babies they had found, and she presented them to king Metapontus as her own. Theano later bore two sons to Metapontus. Since, however, Metapontus, was exceedingly fond of the first two, because they were very handsome, Theano sought to get rid of them and save the kingdom for her own sons. A day came when Metapontus went out to perform sacrifices to Diana Metapontina, and Theano, seizing the opportunity, revealed to her sons that the older boys were not her own. "So, when they go out to hunt, kill them with hunting knives." When they had gone out in the mountains, at their mother's instructions, they started fighting. But with the aid of Neptune, Neptune's sons overcame them and killed them. When their bodies were borne into the palace, Theano killed herself with a hunting knife. The avengers, Boeotus and Aeolus, fled to the shepherds where they had been reared, and there Neptune revealed to them that they were his sons and that their mother was held in custody. They went to Desmontes, killed him, and freed their mother, whose sight Neptune restored. Her sons brought her to Icaria to King Metapontus, and revealed Theano's treachery to him. After this, Metapontus married Melanippe, and adopted the two as his sons. In Propontis they founded towns called by their names — Boeotus, Boeotia, and Aeolus, Aeolia.

Modern

Collard and Cropp

p. 569

Melanippe (‘Black-Mare’) belongs to the complicated mythology of Thessaly and Boeotia, but her story is obscure in origin and varies considerably in extant accounts; her only notable appearance in Greek poetry is in Euripides’ plays. According to the incomplete hypothesis and prologue of Melanippe Wise (test. i and F 481 below), she was a daughter of Aeolus (ancestor of the Aeolian Greeks) and Hippo or HippH (‘Mare’, a daughter of the centaur Chiron), and mother by Poseidon of twins named Aeolus (identified with migrant Aeolians) and Boeotus (identified with Boeotia)—though in some genealogies the mother of these twins was Arne rather than Melanippe. Melanippe Wise, so called because of the wisdom its heroine inherited from Chiron and Hippo and displayed in the play (test. i, iia, F 482–4), was about the illicit birth and survival of the twins (cf. the plots of Alope, Auge, Danae, and probably Sophocles’ first Tyro). Melanippe was seduced or raped by Poseidon in her father’s absence, and when he returned she hid her recently born sons in a stable where herdsmen discovered them and brought them to Aeolus, superstitiously thinking they were the unnatural offspring of a cow. Aeolus’ father Hellen agreed and encouraged him to destroy them, but Melanippe defended them by arguing rationally that they must be the natural children of an unidentified girl.

H. J. Rose

s.v. Aeolus 3

Arne, or Melanippe, became by Posiedon mother of (3), another ancestor of the Aeolians; see Hyg. Fab. 186 and Rose ad loc.; EUripides, frags. of [Melanippe Captive] and [Melanippe Wise].