Aeacus
mythological figure · 13 works · 13 mentions · 17 anchored passages
in the texts
Letters
Mythic judge of the underworld, jestingly invoked to suggest even the righteous can wrong someone.
Why then, so has Aeacus, and Minos, and his brother as well!
Tusculan Disputations
Mythological judge of the underworld.
To think that, when you have escaped from those who wish to be reckoned in the number of judges, you should come to those who are truly called judges — Minos, Rhadamanthus, Aeacus, Triptolemus — and meet with those who have lived justly and in good faith — can this journey seem to you a mean one?
Stromata
Legendary king of Aegina whose prayer is said to have ended a Panhellenic drought, offered as a Greek parallel to Hebrew answered prayer.
Persuaded by them, then, Aeacus went up onto the Greek mountain, and stretching out his clean hands to heaven, calling on God as the common Father, prayed him to take pity on Hellas, worn down.
The Erotic Essay
Mythological figure cited as an example of one beloved by the gods for his discretion.
we shall find that Aeacus and Rhadamanthys were beloved by the gods for their discretion, Heracles, Castor and Pollux for their courage, and Ganymedes, Adonis, and others like them for their beauty, so that I at any rate am not astonished at those who covet your friendship but at those who are not so disposed.
Iphigenia in Aulis
Son of Zeus and Aegina, ruler of Oenone, ancestor of Achilles in the genealogy Agamemnon recites to Clytemnestra.
What son of Aeacus secured his father’s halls?
Zeus, and she bore Aeacus, the prince of Oenone.
Theogony
A mortal hero, father of Phocus by the Nereid Psamathe.
But of the daughters of Nereus, the Old man of the Sea, Psamathe the fair goddess, was loved by Aeacus through golden Aphrodite and bore Phocus.
Evagoras
Son of Zeus and ancestor of the Teucridae, renowned for piety and honored after death.
During his entire stay among men he ever enjoyed the fairest repute, and after his departure from life it is said that he sits by the side of Pluto and Kore in the enjoyment of the highest honors.
In the first place Aeacus, son of Zeus and ancestor of the family of the Teucridae, was so distinguished that when a drought visited the Greeks and many persons had perished, and when the magnitude of the calamity had passed all bounds, the leaders of the cities came as suppliants to him;
Panathenaicus
A mythic figure invoked as an example of virtue before Spartan settlement.
These things being so, if you speak the truth when you assert that they were the discoverers of the best ways of life, then it must follow that those who lived many generations before the Spartans settled there had no part in them—neither those who made the expedition against Troy nor those who were of the generation of Heracles and Theseus or of Minos, son of Zeus, or Rhadamanthus or Aeacus or an …
Isthmean
Legendary son of Zeus and the nymph Aegina, ancestor of the Aeacid heroic line (Peleus, Telamon, Achilles, Aias), renowned for his justice.
Aeacus settled disputes even for the gods.
And as for you, sons of Aeacus with your golden chariots,
But in Oenone the honors belong to the great-hearted spirits of Aeacus and his sons.
Nemean
Mythical son of Zeus and the nymph Aegina, founding ancestor and eponymous ruler of the Aeacid line celebrated throughout the odes.
I bid you to summon the Muse in honor of Aeacus and his race;
For they say that he planted the seed of Aeacus, received by the mother, to be a city-ruler in my illustrious fatherland, and to be a kindly friend and brother to you, Heracles.
As a suppliant I cling to the sacred knees of Aeacus, on behalf of his dear city and these citizens, bringing a Lydian crown embroidered with song, glory from Nemea in the double foot race for Deinias and his father Megas.
Alcibiades 1
Mythic king of Aegina, cited by Socrates as part of the modest ancestral claims available to Athenians like Alcibiades.
And then, suppose that you had to make what show you could of your ancestors, and of Salamis as the native land of Eurysaces, or of Aegina as the home of the yet earlier Aeacus, to impress Artaxerxes, son of Xerxes, how you must expect to be laughed at!
Apology
Mythological judge of the dead in the underworld
For if a man when he reaches the other world, after leaving behind these who claim to be judges, shall find those who are really judges who are said to sit in judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and all the other demigods who were just men in their lives, would the change of habitation be undesirable?