Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/314

 282 M1STUKY OF OKL'ECE therefore Alkmrcon yet might find a tranquil shelter. The promise was realized at the mouth of the river Achelous, whose turbid stream was perpetually depositing new earth and forming additional islands. Upon one of these, near CEniadae, Alkmaeon settled, permanently and in peace: he became the primitive hero of Akarnania, to which his son Akarnan gave name. 1 The necklace was found among the treasures of Delphi, together with that which had been given by Aphrodite to Helen, by the Pho- kian plunderers who stripped the temple in the time of Philip of Macedon. The Phokian women quarrelled about these valu- able ornaments : and we are told that the necklace of Eriphyle was allotted to a woman of gloomy and malignant disposition, who ended by putting her husband to death ; that of Helen to a beautiful but volatile wife, who abandoned her husband from a ^reference for a young Epirot. 2 There were several other legends respecting the distracted Alkmaeon, either appropriated or invented by the Attic trage- dians. He went to Phegeus, king of Psophis in Arcadia, whose daughter Arsinoe he married, giving as a nuptial present the necklace of Eriphyle. Being however unable to remain there, in consequence of the unremitting persecutions of the maternal Erinnys, he sought shelter at the residence of king Achelous, whose daughter Kallirhoe he made his wife, and on whose soil he obtained repose. 3 But Kallirhoe would not be satisfied without 1 Thucyd. ii. 68-102. 2 Athcnse. 1. c. 3 Apollodor. iii. 7, 5-6; Pausan. viii. 24, 4. These two authors have pre- served the story of the Akarnanians and the old form of the legend, repre- senting Alkmaeon as having found shelter at the abode of the person or king Achelous, and married his daughter : Thucydides omits the personality of Achelous, and merely announces the wanderer as having settled on certain new islands deposited by the river. I may remark that this is a singularly happy adaptation of a legend to an existing topographical fact. Generally speaking, before any such adaptation can be rendered plausible, the legend is of necessity much transformed ; here it is taken exactly as it stands, and still fits on with great precision. Ephorus recounted the whole sequence of events as so much political his- tory, divesting it altogether of the legendary character. Alkmseon and Dio- medes, after having taken Thebes with the other Epigoni, jointly undertook an expedition into jEtolia and Akarnania : they first punished the enemies of ihe old CEneus, grandfather of Diomedes, and established the latter as king in Kalydon : next they conquered Akarnania for Alkmjeon. Alkmaeon,