ERECHTHEUS

This article appears in Volume V09, Page 736 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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ERECHTHEUS , in Greek legend, a mythical king of Athens, originally identified with Erichthonius, but in later times distinguished from him. According to

Homer

HOMER,
WINSLOW
- WINSLOW, EDWARD (1595-1655)
(1836-191o)

, who knows nothing of Erichthonius, he was the son of Aroura (Earth), brought up by

Athena

ATHENA (the Attic form of the Homeric Athene, also called Athenaia, Pallas Athene, Pallas)

, with whom his story is closely connected. In the later story, Erichthonius (son of

Hephaestus

HEPHAESTUS

and Atthis or

Athena

ATHENA (the Attic form of the Homeric Athene, also called Athenaia, Pallas Athene, Pallas)

herself) was handed over by Athena to the three daughters of CecropsAglauros (or Agraulos), Herse and Pandrososin a chest, which they were forbidden to open. Aglauros and Herse disobeyed the injunction, and when they saw the child (which had the form of a snake, or round which a snake was coiled) they went mad with fright, and threw themselves from the

rock

of the

Acropolis

ACROPOLIS (Gr. aKpos, top, a6)Xts, city)

(or were killed by the snake). Athena herself then undertook the care of Erichthonius, who, when he grew up, drove out Amphictyon and took possession of the kingdom of Athens. Here he established the

worship

WORSHIP (i.e. " worth-ship," O. Eng. weor8scipe)

of Athena, instituted the

Panathenaea

PANATHENAEA

, and built an Erechtheum. The Erechtheus of later times was supposed to be the grandson of Erechtheus-Erichthonius, and was also king of Athens. When Athens was attacked by the Thracian Eumolpus (or by the Eleusinians assisted by Eumolpus) victory was promised Erechtheus if he sacrificed one of his daughters. Eumolpus was slain and Erechtheus was victorious, but was himself killed by Poseidon, the father of Eumolpus, or by a thunderbolt from Zeus. The contest between Erechtheus and Eumolpus formed the subject of a lost tragedy by Euripides; Swinburne has utilized the legend in his Erechtheus. The scene of the opening of the chest is represented on a Greek vase in the British Museum. The name Erichthonius is connected with XBcav (" earth ") and the representation of him as half-snake, like Cecrops, indicates that he was regarded as one of the autochthones, the ancestors of the Athenians who sprung from the soil.
See Apollodorus iii. 14. 15; Euripides, Ion; Ovid, Metam. ii. 553; Hyginus, Poet. astron. ii. 13; Pausanias i. 2. 5. 8; E. Ermatinger, Die attische Autochthonensage (1897); article by J. A. Hild in Daremberg and Saglio's Dictionnaire des antiquites; B. Powell in Cornell Studies, xvii. (1906), who identifies Erechtheus, Erichthonius, Poseidon and Cecrops, all denoting the sacred serpent of Athena, whose cult she first contested, but then amalgamated with her own. The

birth

BIRTH (a word common in various forms to Teutonic languages from the root of the verb " to bear ")

of Erichthonius (as a corn-spirit) is interpreted by Mannhardt as a mythical way of describing the growth of the corn, and by J. E. Harrison (Myths and Monuments of Ancient Athens, xxvii.-xxxvi.) as a fiction to explain the ceremony performed by the two maidens called Arrephori. See also Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, i. 27o; and Frazer's Pausanias, ii. 169.

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