In Greek mythology, Peleus (; Ancient Greek: Πηλεύς Pēleus) was a hero, king of Phthia, husband of Thetis and the father of their son Achilles. This myth was already known to the hearers of Homer in the late 8th century BC.[Peleus is mentioned in Homer's Odyssey during the conversation between Odysseus and the dead Achilles.]
Biography
Peleus was the son of
Aeacus,
[Apollodorus, 1.9.16] king of the island of
Aegina,
[The island lies in the Saronic Gulf opposite the coast of Epidaurus; it had once been called Oenone, Pausanias was informed.] and Endeïs, the
oread of
Pelion in
Thessaly.
[In poetry he and Telamon are sometimes the Endeides, the "sons of Endeis"; see, for example, Pausanias 2.29.10.] He married the sea-nymph
Thetis with whom he fathered
Achilles.
Polymele, a daughter of Peleus, was one of the possible mothers of Patroclus by Menoetius.[Plutarch, Aristides 20.6]
Peleus and his brother Telamon were friends of Jason and both were counted as Argonauts.[Apollodorus, 1.9.16] Though there were no further kings in Aegina, the kings of Epirus claimed descent from Peleus in the historic period.[Pausanias, 2.29.4.]
Mythology
Peleus and his brother
Telamon killed their half-brother Phocus, perhaps in a hunting accident and certainly in an unthinking moment,
["A witless moment" (Apollonius, Argonautica, I. 93,] and fled
Aegina to escape punishment. In
Phthia, Peleus was purified by the city's ruler, Eurytion, and then married the latter's daughter, Antigone, by whom he had a daughter,
Polydora. Eurytion received the barest mention among the
Argonautica (both Peleus and Telamon joined the Argonauts themselves, "yet not together, nor from one place, for they dwelt far apart and distant from Aigina"
[Apollonius of Rhodes, 1.90-93, in Peter Green's translation (2007:45).]). However, Peleus accidentally killed Eurytion during the hunt for the
Calydonian boar and fled from Phthia.
Peleus was purified of the murder of Eurytion in Iolcus by Acastus. Acastus' wife, Astydamia, fell in love with Peleus and after he scorned her, she sent a messenger to Antigone to tell her that Peleus was to marry Acastus' daughter. As a result, Antigone hanged herself.
Astydamia then told Acastus that Peleus had tried to rape her. Acastus took Peleus on a hunting trip atop Mount Pelion and once Peleus fell asleep, Acastus hid his sword in cow dung and abandoned him on the mountainside. Peleus woke up and as a group of centaurs was about to attack him, the wise centaur Chiron, or, according to another source, Hermes, returned his sword to him and Peleus managed to escape.[Aristophanes, The Clouds 1063-1067] He pillaged Iolcus and dismembered Astydamia, then marched his army between the rended limbs. Astydamia were dead and the kingdom fell to Jason's son, Thessalus.
Marriage to Thetis
After Antigone's death, Peleus married the sea-nymph
Thetis. He was able to win her over with the aid of
Proteus, who instructed Peleus to hold onto her tightly through all of her physical transformations she used to try to escape.
[Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.219-74] Their wedding feast was attended by many of the
Olympian gods. As wedding presents,
Poseidon gave Peleus two immortal horses: Balius and Xanthus,
Hephaestus gave him a knife,
Aphrodite a bowl with an embossed
Eros,
Hera a
chlamys,
Athena a flute,
Nereus a basket of the divine salt which has an irresistible virtue for overeating, appetite and digestion and
Zeus gave Thetis, as present, the wings of
Arke.
[ Photius, Bibliotheca excerpts - GR][ Photius, Bibliotheca excerpts, 190.46 - EN]
During the feast, Eris, in revenge for not being invited, produced the apple of Discord, which started the quarrel that led to the judgement of Paris and eventually the Trojan War. The marriage of Peleus and Thetis produced seven sons, six of whom died in infancy. The only surviving son was Achilles.
Rescue of Achilles
Thetis attempted to render her son
Achilles invulnerable. In the well-known version, she dipped him in the
River Styx, holding him by one heel, which remained vulnerable. In an early and less popular version of the story, Thetis anointed the boy in
ambrosia and put him on top of a fire to burn away the mortal parts of his body. She was interrupted by Peleus and she abandoned both father and son in a rage, leaving his heel vulnerable.
A nearly identical story is told by Plutarch, in his On Isis and Osiris, of the goddess Isis burning away the mortality of Prince Maneros of Byblos, son of Queen Astarte, and being likewise interrupted before completing the process. Later on in life, Achilles is killed by Paris when he is shot in his vulnerable spot, the heel. This is where the term "Achilles' heel" is derived from.
Peleus gave Achilles to the centaur Chiron, to raise on Pelion, which took its name from Peleus. In the Iliad, Achilles uses Peleus' immortal horses and also wields his father's spear.
In hero-cult
Though the tomb of Aeacus remained in a shrine enclosure in the most conspicuous part of the port city, a quadrangular enclosure of white marble sculpted with bas-reliefs, in the form in which Pausanias saw it, with the tumulus of
Phocus nearby,
[Pausanias, 2.29.6-7] there was no
temenos of Peleus at Aegina. Two versions of Peleus' fate account for this; in
Euripides'
Troades, Acastus, son of
Pelias, has exiled him from
Phthia;
[Scholia on Euripides, Troades 1123-28 note that in some accounts the sons of Acastus have cast him out, and that he was received by Molon in his exile] and subsequently he dies in exile; in another, he is reunited with
Thetis and made immortal.
In antiquity, according to a fragment of Callimachus' lost Aitia,[One of the fragmentary Oxyrhynchus papyri, noted by Lewis Richard Farnell, Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality: the Gifford Lectures, "The Cults of Epic Heroes: Peleus" 1921:310f.] there was a tomb of Peleus in Alonissos, an island of the northern Sporades; there Peleus was venerated as "king of the Myrmidons" and the Nostos was celebrated annually.[Farnell 1921:310f; Farnell remarks on "some ethnic tradition that escapes us, but which led the inhabitants to attach the name of Peleus to some forgotten grave," so deep was the cultural discontinuity between Mycenaean Greece and the rise of hero-cults in the 8th century BC.] And there was his tomb, according to a poem in the Greek Anthology.[Greek Anthology, 7.2.]
The only other reference to veneration of Peleus comes from the Christian Clement of Alexandria, in his polemical Exhortation to the Greeks. Clement attributes his source to a "collection of marvels" by a certain "Monimos" of whom nothing is known, and claims, in pursuit of his thesis that daimon-worshipers become as cruel as their gods, that in "Pella of Thessaly human sacrifice is offered to Peleus and Cheiron, the victim being an Achaean".[George William Butterworth, ed. and tr. Clement of Alexandria, "Exhortation to the Greeks" 1919:93.] Of this, the continuing association of Peleus and Chiron is the most dependable detail.[By way of apology for Clement, Farnell suggests "human sacrifice was occasionally an adjunct of hero-cults, and this at Pella may have been an exceptional rite prescribed at a crisis by some later oracle." (Farnell 1921:311). Dennis D. Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (Routledge, 1991) offers a skeptical view of the actuality of human sacrifices during historical times.]
In Athenian tragedy
A
Peleus by
Sophocles is lost. He appears as a character in
Euripides'
tragedy Andromache (c. 425 BC).
Gallery with Thetis
File:Thetis Peleus Louvre G373.jpg
File:Thetis Peleus Louvre G65.jpg
File:Peleus Thetis Staatliche Antikensammlungen 1415.jpg
File:Peleus Thetis Staatliche Antikensammlungen Schoen64.jpg
File:Kylix by Peithinos - Altes Museum Berlin from Harrison1894 0086 white balanced resized.png
File:Pyxis Peleus Thetis Louvre L55 by Wedding Painter.jpg
Wedding
File:The wedding of Peleus and Thetis, by Joachim Wtewael.jpg
File:The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis by Peter Paul Rubens.jpg
File:Gillis van Valckenborch - The marriage of Peleus and Thetis.jpg
File:WLANL - legalizefreedom - De bruiloft van Peleus en Thetis.jpg
File:The feast of the gods at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis.jpg
File:Hans Rottenhammer - Götterfest, Hochzeit von Peleus und Thetis (Ermitage).jpg
File:1715 Elliger Hochzeit von Peleus und Thetis anagoria.JPG
File:WeddingPeleusThetisWtewael.jpg
File:Jan van Balen (attr.) - The Marriage Feast of Peleus and Thetis.jpg
File:PeleusThetisWtewael2.jpg
File:Golden Apple of Discord by Jacob Jordaens.jpg
File:The Wedding Feast of Peleus and Thetis LACMA M.88.91.100.jpg
File:Jan Brueghel and Hendrick van Balen - The Marriage of the Goddess of the Sea, Thetis, and King Peleus, 1610.jpg
File:Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem - The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis (detail) - WGA05246.jpg
File:Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem - The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis (detail) - WGA05245.jpg
File:The Marriage of Peleus by Mazzola.jpg
File:Hendrick van Balen-Les noces de Thétis et Pêlée.jpg
File:The Feast of Peleus - Edward Burne-Jones.jpg
File:Agostino Carracci, Teti e Peleo, Palazzo del Giardino, Parma.jpg
File:Giovanni - Noces de Thétis et Pelée, Louvre RF 1346.jpg
File:Risdm-62-058Wtewael.jpg
File:Mythologisches Gastmahl flämisch 17Jh.jpg
File:Hans Rottenhammer 001.jpg
File:Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem - Massacre of the Innocents - WGA05256.jpg
File:Jan Erasmus Quellinus - Thetis Dips Achilles in a Vase with Water from the Styx - WGA18567.jpg
Notes
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Apollodorus, The Library with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. ISBN 0-674-99135-4. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. Greek text available from the same website.
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Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke I, ix, 16 and III, ix,2 and xii, 6- xiii,7; Epitome vi, 13.
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Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica translated by Robert Cooper Seaton (1853–1915), R. C. Loeb Classical Library Volume 001. London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1912. Online version at the Topos Text Project.
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Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica. George W. Mooney. London. Longmans, Green. 1912. Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
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Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica IV,805- 879
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Catullus, Poem 64
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Homer, Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924. . Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
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Homer, Homeri Opera in five volumes. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 1920. . Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
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Homer, Iliad XVIII, 78–87
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Ovid, Metamorphoses translated by Brookes More (1859–1942). Boston, Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
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Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses. Hugo Magnus. Gotha (Germany). Friedr. Andr. Perthes. 1892. Latin text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
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Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII, 299–381.
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Euripides, Andromache with an English translation by David Kovacs. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1994. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. Greek text available from the same website.
