Aepytus was the youngest son of Cresphontes, the Heraclid who held Messenia in the partition of the Peloponnese, and of Merope, daughter of Cypselus king of the Arcadians. Sole survivor of the slaughter that destroyed his father and brothers, he was reared away from his homeland, returned grown, slew the usurper Polyphontes, and won back the kingdom of his fathers — honoured so greatly that his descendants were called the Aepytidae instead of the Heracleidae.1
Cresphontes took to wife Merope, daughter of Cypselus then king of the Arcadians, and by her, with other children, was born to him Aepytus his youngest. Cresphontes himself was son of Aristomachus and brother of Temenus, who held Argos, and of Aristodemus, whose twin sons held Lacedaemon.2
Apollodorus tells that Cresphontes had not long reigned over Messene when he was murdered together with two of his sons, and that Polyphontes, himself one of the true Heraclids, came to the throne and took Merope, the wife of the murdered man, to wife against her will. Hyginus likewise names Polyphontes as the slayer of Cresphontes, son of Aristomachus, who thereby seized both the kingdom and the queen.3
Pausanias gives the deed a different agency: because Cresphontes governed largely in favour of the common people, the rich rose in revolt and killed him and all his sons but one, and Polyphontes was the man who afterward held the throne.4
One son escaped the massacre: Aepytus. By Apollodorus and Pausanias his mother gave the infant to her own father, Cypselus, to be brought up among the Arcadians, far from the usurper who had taken his mother and his father's crown.5
Hyginus tells the boy's rescue otherwise: Merope hid the infant she had borne to Cresphontes and sent him away to a guest-friend in Aetolia, while Polyphontes hunted everywhere for him.6
Come to manhood, Aepytus returned in secret, killed Polyphontes, and recovered the kingdom of his fathers — so Apollodorus, and so Hyginus, who has him plan to avenge the deaths of his father and his brothers once he reached man's estate.7
Pausanias relates that on becoming king Aepytus punished his father's murderers and all who had shared in the crime, then won the Messenian nobles by deference and the people by gifts; the other Dorian kings, the sons of Aristodemus who held Sparta and Isthmius son of Temenus of Argos, helped to restore him. Elsewhere he cites the aid of the sons of Aristodemus again as proof that the Spartan house had not been at variance with Cresphontes. So great was the honour Aepytus won that his line was thereafter called the Aepytidae instead of the Heracleidae.8
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
