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The Arcadian divine or heroic pedigree begins with Pelasgus, whom both Hesiod and Asius considered as an indigenous man, though Akusilaus the Argeian represented him as brother of Argos and son of Zeus by Niobê, daughter of Phorôneus: this logographer wished to establish a community of origin between the Argeians and the Arcadians.

Lykaôn son of Pelasgus and king of Arcadia, had, by different wives, fifty sons, the most savage, impious and wicked of mankind: Mænalus was the eldest of them. Zeus, in order that he might himself become a witness of their misdeeds, presented himself to them in disguise. They killed a child and served it up to him for a meal; but the god overturned the table and struck dead with thunder Lykaôn and all his fifty sons, with the single exception of Nyktimus, the youngest, whom he spared at the earnest intercession of the goddess Gæa (the Earth). The town near which the table was overturned received the name of Trapezus (Tabletown).

This singular legend (framed on the same etymological type as that of the ants in Ægina, recounted elsewhere) seems ancient, and may probably belong to the Hesiodic Catalogue. But Pausanias tells us a story in many respects different, which was represented to him in Arcadia as the primitive local account, and which becomes the more interesting, as he tells us that he himself fully believes it. Both tales indeed go to illustrate the same point—the ferocity of Lykaôn’s character, as well as the cruel rites which he practised. The latter was the first who established the worship and solemn games of Zeus Lykæus: he offered up a child to Zeus, and made libations with the blood upon the altar. Immediately after having perpetrated this act, he was changed into a wolf.410

“Of the truth of this narrative (observes Pausanias) I feel persuaded: it has been repeated by the Arcadians from old times, and it carries probability along with it. For the men of that day, from their justice and piety, were guests and companions at table with the gods, who manifested towards them approbation when they were good, and anger if they behaved ill, in a palpable manner: indeed at that time there were some, who having once been men, became gods, and who yet retain their privileges as such—Aristæus, the Krêtan Britomartis, Hêraklês son of Alkmêna, Amphiaraus the son of Oiklês, and Pollux and Kastôr besides. We may therefore believe that Lykaôn became a wild beast, and that Niobê, the daughter of Tantalus, became a stone. But in my time, wickedness having enormously increased, so as to overrun the whole earth and all the cities in it, there are no farther examples of men exalted into gods, except by mere title and from adulation towards the powerful: moreover the anger of the gods falls tardily upon the wicked, and is reserved for them after their departure from hence.”

Pausanias then proceeds to censure those who, by multiplying false miracles in more recent times, tended to rob the old and genuine miracles of their legitimate credit and esteem. The passage illustrates forcibly the views which a religious and instructed pagan took of his past time—how inseparably he blended together in it gods and men, and how little he either recognized or expected to find in it the naked phænomena and historical laws of connection which belonged to the world before him. He treats the past as the province of legend, the present as that of history; and in doing this he is more sceptical than the persons with whom he conversed, who believed not only in the ancient, but even in the recent and falsely reported miracles. It is true that Pausanias does not always proceed consistently with this position: he often rationalizes the stories of the past, as if he expected to find historical threads of connection; and sometimes, though more rarely, accepts the miracles of the present. But in the present instance he draws a broad line of distinction between present and past, or rather between what is recent and what is ancient: his criticism is, in the main, analogous to that of Arrian in regard to the Amazons—denying their existence during times of recorded history, but admitting it during the early and unrecorded ages.

In the narrative of Pausanias, the sons of Lykaôn, instead of perishing by thunder from Zeus, become the founders of the various towns in Arcadia. And as that region was subdivided into a great number of small and independent townships, each having its own eponym, so the Arcadian heroic genealogy appears broken up and subdivided. Pallas, Orestheus, Phigalus, Trapezeus, Mænalus, Mantinêus, and Tegeatês, are all numbered among the sons of Lykaôn, and are all eponyms of various Arcadian towns.411

The legend respecting Kallistô and Arkas, the eponym of Arcadia generally, seems to have been originally quite independent of and distinct from that of Lykaôn. Eumêlus, indeed, and some other poets made Kallistô daughter of Lykaôn; but neither Hesiod, nor Asius, nor Pherekydês, acknowledged any relationship between them.412 The beautiful Kallistô, companion of Artemis in the chase, had bound herself by a vow of chastity. Zeus, either by persuasion or by force, obtained a violation of the vow, to the grievous displeasure both of Hêrê and Artemis. The former changed Kallistô into a bear, the latter when she was in that shape killed her with an arrow. Zeus gave to the unfortunate Kallistô a place among the stars, as the constellation of the Bear: he also preserved the child Arkas, of which she was pregnant by him, and gave it to the Atlantid nymph Maia to bring up.413

Arkas, when he became king, obtained from Triptolemus and communicated to his people the first rudiments of agriculture; he also taught them to make bread, to spin, and to weave. He had three sons—Azan, Apheidas, and Elatus: the first was the eponym of Azania, the northern region of Arcadia; the second was one of the heroes of Tegea; the third was father of Ischys (rival of Apollo for the affections of Korônis), as well as of Æpytus and Kyllên: the name of Æpytus among the heroes of Arcadia is as old as the Catalogue in the Iliad.414

Aleus, son of Apheidas and king of Tegea, was the founder of the celebrated temple and worship of Athênê Alea in that town. Lykurgus and Kêpheus were his sons, Augê his daughter, who was seduced by Hêraklês, and secretly bore to him a child: the father, discovering what had happened, sent Augê to Nauplius to be sold into slavery: Teuthras, king of Mysia in Asia Minor, purchased her and made her his wife: her tomb was shown at Pergamus on the river Kaïkus even in the time of Pausanias.415

The child Têlephus, exposed on Mount Parthenius, was wonderfully sustained by the milk of a doe: the herdsmen of Korythus brought him up, and he was directed by the Delphian oracle to go and find his parents in Mysia. Teuthras adopted him, and he succeeded to the throne: in the first attempt of the army of Agamemnôn against Troy, on which occasion they mistook their point and landed in Mysia, his valor signally contributed to the repulse of the Greeks, though he was at last vanquished and desperately wounded by the spear of Achilles—by whom however he was afterwards healed, under the injunction of the oracle, and became the guide of the Greeks in their renewed attack upon the Trojans.416

From Lykurgus,417 the son of Aleus and brother of Augê, we pass to his son Ankæus, numbered among the Argonauts, finally killed in the chase of the Kalydônian boar, and father of Agapenôr, who leads the Arcadian contingent against Troy,—(the adventurers of his niece, the Tegeatic huntress Atalanta, have already been touched upon),—then to Echemus, son of Aëropus and grandson of the brother of Lykurgus, Kêpheus. Echemus is the chief heroic ornament of Tegea. When Hyllus, the son of Hêraklês, conducted the Hêrakleids on their first expedition against Peloponnêsus, Echemus commanded the Tegean troops who assembled along with the other Peloponnêsians at the isthmus of Corinth to repel the invasion: it was agreed that the dispute should be determined by single combat, and Echemus, as the champion of Peloponnêsus, encountered and killed Hyllus. Pursuant to the stipulation by which they had bound themselves, the Hêrakleids retired, and abstained for three generations from pressing their claim upon Peloponnêsus. This valorous exploit of their great martial hero was cited and appealed to by the Tegeates before the battle of Platæa, as the principal evidence of their claim to the second post in the combined army, next in point of honor to that of the Lacedæmônians, and superior to that of the Athenians: the latter replied to them by producing as counter-evidence the splendid heroic deeds of Athens,—the protection of the Hêrakleids against Eurystheus, the victory over the Kadmeians of Thêbes, and the complete defeat of the Amazons in Attica.418 Nor can there be any doubt that these legendary glories were both recited by the speakers, and heard by the listeners, with profound and undoubting faith, as well as with heart-stirring admiration.

One other person there is—Ischys, son of Elatus and grandson of Arkas—in the fabulous genealogy of Arcadia whom it would be improper to pass over, inasmuch as his name and adventures are connected with the genesis of the memorable god or hero Æsculapius, or Asklêpius. Korônis, daughter of Phlegyas, and resident near the lake Bœbëis in Thessaly, was beloved by Apollo and became pregnant by him: unfaithful to the god, she listened to the propositions of Ischys son of Elatus, and consented to wed him: a raven brought to Apollo the fatal news, which so incensed him that he changed the color of the bird from white, as it previously had been, into black.419 Artemis, to avenge the wounded dignity of her brother, put Korônis to death; but Apollo preserved the male child of which she was about to be delivered, and consigned it to the Centaur Cheirôn to be brought up. The child was named Asklêpius or Æsculapius, and acquired, partly from the teaching of the beneficent leech Cheirôn, partly from inborn and superhuman aptitude, a knowledge of the virtues of herbs and a mastery of medicine and surgery, such as had never before been witnessed. He not only cured the sick, the wounded, and the dying, but even restored the dead to life. Kapaneus, Eriphylê, Hippolytus, Tyndareus and Glaukus were all affirmed by different poets and logographers to have been endued by him with a new life.420 But Zeus now found himself under the necessity of taking precautions lest mankind, thus unexpectedly protected against sickness and death, should no longer stand in need of the immortal gods: he smote Asklêpius with thunder and killed him. Apollo was so exasperated by this slaughter of his highly-gifted son, that he killed the Cyclôpes who had fabricated the thunder, and Zeus was about to condemn him to Tartarus for doing so; but on the intercession of Latôna he relented, and was satisfied with imposing upon him a temporary servitude in the house of Admêtus at Pheræ.

Asklêpius was worshipped with very great solemnity at Trikka, at Kôs, at Knidus, and in many different parts of Greece, but especially at Epidaurus, so that more than one legend had grown up respecting the details of his birth and adventures: in particular, his mother was by some called Arsinoê. But a formal application had been made on this subject (so the Epidaurians told Pausanias) to the oracle of Delphi, and the god in reply acknowledged that Asklêpius was his son by Korônis.421 The tale above recounted seems to have been both the oldest and the most current. It is adorned by Pindar in a noble ode, wherein however he omits all mention of the raven as messenger—not specifying who or what the spy was from whom Apollo learnt the infidelity of Korônis. By many this was considered as an improvement in respect of poetical effect, but it illustrates the mode in which the characteristic details and simplicity of the old fables422 came to be exchanged for dignified generalities, adapted to the altered taste of society.

Machaôn and Podaleirius, the two sons of Asklêpius, command the contingent from Trikka, in the north-west region of Thessaly, at the siege of Troy by Agamemnôn.423 They are the leeches of the Grecian army, highly prized and consulted by all the wounded chiefs. Their medical renown was further prolonged in the subsequent poem of Arktinus, the Iliu-Persis, wherein the one was represented as unrivalled in surgical operations, the other as sagacious in detecting and appreciating morbid symptoms. It was Podaleirius who first noticed the glaring eyes and disturbed deportment which preceded the suicide of Ajax.424

Galen appears uncertain whether Asklêpius (as well as Dionysus) was originally a god, or whether he was first a man and then became afterwards a god;425 but Apollodôrus professed to fix the exact date of his apotheosis.426 Throughout all the historical ages the descendants of Asklêpius were numerous and widely diffused. The many families or gentes called Asklêpiads, who devoted themselves to the study and practice of medicine, and who principally dwelt near the temples of Asklêpius whither sick and suffering men came to obtain relief—all recognized the god not merely as the object of their common worship, but also as their actual progenitor. Like Solôn, who reckoned Nêleus and Poseidôn as his ancestors, or the Milêsian Hekatæus, who traced his origin through fifteen successive links to a god—like the privileged gens at Pêlion in Thessaly,427 who considered the wise Centaur Cheirôn as their progenitor, and who inherited from him their precious secrets respecting the medicinal herbs of which their neighborhood was full,—Asklêpiads, even of the later times, numbered and specified all the intermediate links which separated them from their primitive divine parent. One of these genealogies has been preserved to us, and we may be sure that there were many such, as the Asklêpiads were found in many different places.428 Among them were enrolled highly instructed and accomplished men, such as the great Hippocratês and the historian Ktêsias, who prided themselves on the divine origin of themselves and their gens429—so much did the legendary element pervade even the most philosophical and positive minds of historical Greece. Nor can there be any doubt that their means of medical observation must have been largely extended by their vicinity to a temple so much frequented by the sick, who came in confident hopes of divine relief, and who, whilst they offered up sacrifice and prayer to Æsculapius, and slept in his temple in order to be favored with healing suggestions in their dreams, might, in case the god withheld his supernatural aid, consult his living descendants.430 The sick visitors at Kôs, or Trikka, or Epidaurus, were numerous and constant, and the tablets usually hung up to record the particulars of their maladies, the remedies resorted to, and the cures operated by the god, formed both an interesting decoration of the sacred ground and an instructive memorial to the Asklêpiads.431

The genealogical descent of Hippocratês and the other Asklêpiads from the god Asklêpius is not only analogous to that of Hekatæus and Solôn from their respective ancestoral gods, but also to that of the Lacedæmônian kings from Hêraklês, upon the basis of which the whole supposed chronology of the ante-historical times has been built, from Eratosthenês and Apollodôrus down to the chronologers of the present century.432 I shall revert to this hereafter.