Oeneus
Family: Calydon · Role: king · First appears: Apollodorus, Library 1.7
🌐 Also appears in: The Iliad (as Oeneus) · The Metamorphoses of Ovid (as Œneus) · Greek Tragedy — The Same Myth, Three Voices (as Oeneus)
Oeneus, king of Calydon, was the son of Porthaon and Euryte, and brother of Agrius and Alcathous. He married Althaea, with whom he had Thyreus, Clymenus, Gorge, Deianira, and Meleager, and later married Periboea, by whom he begat Tydeus. He also married Podarce. Dionysus gave him a vine-plant, making Oeneus the first to receive one, though in sacrificing the year’s first fruits to the gods he forgot Artemis. Zeus willed him to fall in love with his own daughter, Gorge.
“When Tydeus had grown to be a gallant man,” Tydeus was banished after, according to one account, killing Alcathous. Later, the sons of Agrius—Thersites, Onchestus, Prothous, Celeutor, Lycopeus, and Melanippus—seized Oeneus’s kingdom, gave it to Agrius, and imprisoned and tormented him. Diomedes took Oeneus with him to the Peloponnese; when the surviving sons of Agrius ambushed and killed Oeneus at Telephus’s hearth in Arcadia, Diomedes carried his body to Argos and buried him. Oeneus was also connected as guardian to Agamemnon and Menelaus, who were sent to him.
Relationship record
Life events
- Tydeus was banished after killing Alcathous, according to one account.(Apollodorus, Library 1.8)
- Agrius’s sons seized Oeneus’s kingdom and imprisoned him.(Apollodorus, Library 1.8 · 📍 Calydon)
- With: Agrius
- “But the sons of Agrius, to wit, Thersites, Onchestus, Prothous, Celeutor, Lycopeus, Melanippus, wrested the kingdom from Oeneus and gave it to their father, and more than that they imprisoned Oeneus in his lifetime and tormented him.”
- The surviving sons of Agrius ambushed and killed Oeneus at Telephus’s hearth.(Apollodorus, Library 1.8 · 📍 Arcadia)