Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Aeacus.
The gallery
Aeacus and Telamon
Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, late 18th century
An engraving by the French draughtsman and book illustrator Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune (1741–1814) showing Aeacus, the pious king of Aegina and son of Zeus by the nymph Aegina, in the company of his son Telamon. Renowned in antiquity for his justice and reverence toward the gods, Aeacus founded a line that would produce the greatest heroes of the Trojan War — through Telamon came Ajax, and through his other son Peleus came Achilles. The composition pairs father and son in the neoclassical idiom of late-eighteenth-century French printmaking, presenting the dynasty's patriarch as the embodiment of righteous kingship.
The Birth of the Myrmidons (Ortus Myrmidonum)
Virgil Solis, 1581
A woodcut engraving by the Nuremberg printmaker Virgil Solis (1514–1562), produced for an illustrated edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Frankfurt) and keyed to Book VII, lines 622–642. It depicts the legend by which Aeacus repopulated plague-stricken Aegina: praying to his father Zeus beside a sacred oak, the king watched a column of ants on its trunk transform into a race of men, the Myrmidons ("ant-people"), who would later march to Troy under Achilles. The print captures the moment of miraculous metamorphosis, with the new-made warriors emerging at the foot of the oak before the kneeling king.
The Court of the Dead (Die Unterwelt) — Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthys
After Ludwig Mack; lithograph by Rudolph Lohbauer, 1829
An 1829 Stuttgart lithograph by Rudolph Lohbauer reproducing the central section of a bas-relief, "Das Totengericht" (The Court of the Dead), by the sculptor Ludwig Mack (1799–1831). It shows the three judges of the Underworld enthroned together — Minos, Aeacus (here holding a scepter), and Rhadamanthys — as they interrogate the shades of the newly dead about their lives. In the afterlife tradition descending from Plato, the just king of Aegina was appointed alongside the two Cretan brothers to weigh mortal souls; Aeacus was often said to judge the shades of Europeans and to hold the keys of Hades.