Agapenor, son of Ancaeus, was the Arcadian king who led the inland highlanders of Tegea, Mantineia and Stymphalus to the Trojan War, and who afterward, storm-driven to Cyprus, founded Paphos and built there the sanctuary of Aphrodite.1
Every account that names him calls him son of Ancaeus: Homer's patronymic in the Catalogue, Apollodorus' muster-roll at Aulis, and the genealogy Pausanias preserves all agree on the name.2
Pausanias sets him precisely in the Arcadian succession: his father Ancaeus was son of Lycurgus, and Agapenor came to the throne after the reign of Echemus.3
Hyginus alone gives him a mother, naming her Iotis, and so calls him 'Agapenor, son of Ancaeus and Iotis, from Arcadia' — a maternal name found nowhere else among the sources.4
Before the war he was among the throng of princes who came to Sparta to woo Helen; Apollodorus and Hyginus both enrol 'Agapenor, son of Ancaeus' in the long list of her suitors, so that the oath sworn there to defend her chosen husband bound him, with the rest, to the Trojan expedition.5
In the Catalogue of Ships he leads the Arcadians who held Cyllene, Pheneos, Orchomenos, Rhipe, Stratie, wind-swept Enispe, Tegea, Mantineia, Stymphalus and Parrhasia. Homer adds a telling note: Agamemnon himself, the king of men, gave the Arcadians their benched vessels to cross the wine-dark sea, for these landlocked highlanders had nothing to do with seafaring.6
The size of his fleet is disputed. Homer counts sixty ships under Agapenor, a figure Hyginus likewise reckons at sixty; but Apollodorus, in his muster at Aulis, gives the divergent number of seven ships for the Arcadians under his command.7
When Troy had fallen, the storm that scattered the Greeks on their homeward course swept Agapenor and the whole Arcadian fleet to Cyprus. There, Pausanias says, he became the founder of Paphos and raised the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Palaepaphos, Old Paphos; until that time the Cyprians had worshipped the goddess in the district called Golgi. Because Agapenor never came home from Troy, his line ended in Arcadia and the kingdom passed to Hippothous, son of Cercyon.8
Apollodorus too, listing the wanderers dispersed after the sack of Troy, sets 'Agapenor in Cyprus', independently confirming that he settled on the island and did not return.9
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story