An early king of Arcadia, eldest of the five sons of Elatus, who came to the throne after the childless Cleitor and died of a snakebite while hunting on Mount Sepia.1
Pausanias counts Aepytus first among the five sons of Elatus — Aepytus, Pereus, Cyllen, Ischys, and Stymphalus — set at the head of the third generation of the Arcadian house.2
When Cleitor, the son of Azan, died without children, the sovereignty of the Arcadians devolved upon Aepytus. While out hunting he was killed — not by any of the more powerful beasts, but by a seps that he failed to notice underfoot, a small ash-coloured snake like the least of the adders, which Pausanias says he had himself examined.3
He was struck down on Mount Sepia, not far from the spring Tricrena, and because they could not carry the body away they made his grave on the very spot; the Arcadians told Pausanias that such snakes were still to be found on the mountain. After Aepytus the throne passed to Aleus, son of Apheidas, reckoned two generations from Arcas where the sons of Stymphalus stood three.4
Pausanias was especially anxious to see the grave, because Homer in his verses on the Arcadians names the tomb of Aepytus; he found it a mound of earth of no great size, ringed by a circular base of stone — the small monument that fixes the Homeric landmark to this Elatid Aepytus rather than to his Messenian or Mantinean namesakes.5
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