AEACUS

Form: Gr. Aiakos.

Ancestor of the heroic Aeacidae; son of Zeus by Aegina, a daughter of the river-god Asopus in Phlius, whom the king of gods, in the form of an eagle, carried off to the island named after her, where her son was born. Asking of Aegina he ruled the Myrmidons, whom Zeus at his request created out of ants (Gr. myrmekes) to people his island, which, according to one story, was uninhabited, according to another, stricken with pestilence. Beloved by the gods for his piety, when a drought desolated Greece, his intercession obtained rain from Zeus; and the grateful Greeks built him in Aegina a temple enclosed by a marble wall. Pindar says he helped Poseidon and Apollo to rear the walls of Troy, erecting that very portion which was afterwards scaled by his son Telemon, and his grandson Neoptolemus. His justice caused him after death to be made a judge in the lower world. At Aegina and Athens he was worshipped as a demigod. His sons by Chiron's daughter Endeis were Telamon and Peleus, the fathers of Ajax and Achilles; another son Phocus, by the Nereid Psamathe; was slain by his half-brothers, for which their father banished them.