OENEUS

Form: i.e. vintner.

Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /www/www-ccat/data/classics/myth/php/tools/dictionary.php on line 64 King of Calydon, in Aetolia, the hills of which he was the first to plant with the vine received from Dionysus. He was son of Portheus or Porthaon, and brother of Agrius and Melas; by Althaea, daughter of Thestius, he became the father of Tydeus, Meleager, and Deianira. (See HERACLES.) As he once forgot Artemis in a sacrifice, she sent the Calydonian boar, which ravaged the country, and, even after its slaughter in the famous Calydonian Hunt, occasioned the death of Meleager (q.v.). From the plots of his brother Melas he had been delivered by Tydeus through the murder of Melas and his sons, but after the deaths of Tydeus and Meleager, his other brother Agrius, and the sons of that brother, deprived him of his throne and cast him into prison. His grandson Diomedes however revenged him with the aid of Alcmaeon, to whom he had once given hospitable entertainment, and who was desirous of taking OEneus with him to Argos, after he had given over the throne of Calydon to his son-in-law Andraemon, whose son Thoas, in Homer [Il. ii 638], leads the Aetolians to Troy. But the two sons of Agrius, who have escaped death, lie in wait for him in Arcadia, and there slay the old man. Diomedes carries his body to Argos, and deposits it in the city which after him was called OEnoe. While in Homer OEneus is dead before the expedition to Troy, later mythology represents him as surviving the Trojan War, and as restored to his kingdom by Diomedes on the latter's flight from Argos.