Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Aleus.
The gallery
Telephus Frieze, Panels 2-3: The Court of King Aleos
Unknown (Pergamene court sculptors under Eumenes II), c. 160 BCE
These two adjoining marble panels from the inner Telephus frieze of the Great Altar of Pergamon stage the household of Aleus, king of Tegea. Panel 2 sets the scene at the royal court of Aleos, while panel 3 shows Heracles catching sight of the king's daughter Auge in the precinct of Athena. The frieze, carved in low relief along the colonnaded inner courtyard, traces the saga of Telephus, the child Auge bore to Heracles and the legendary founder of Pergamon; the Attalid dynasty commissioned it to root its own lineage in the heroic house of Aleus. Now in the Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, it is the principal ancient image to place Aleus's court at the head of a continuous mythological narrative.
Telephus Frieze, Panels 4-6: Carpenters Building the Boat for Auge's Exposure
Unknown (Pergamene court sculptors under Eumenes II), c. 160 BCE
Continuing the Telephus narrative on the Great Altar of Pergamon, these Hellenistic marble panels show carpenters at work on the boat in which Auge, daughter of King Aleus, is to be cast adrift on the sea. The episode springs directly from Aleus's discovery that his priestess-daughter had borne a child within Athena's sanctuary at Tegea: enraged, the Tegean king orders both the infant Telephus exposed in the wilderness (panel 4) and Auge set out to sea. The relief's matter-of-fact depiction of shipwrights, rare in monumental Greek sculpture, makes Aleus's harsh paternal decree the engine of the whole heroic genealogy. Pergamonmuseum, Berlin.
The Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea (ruins)
Unknown architect; classical temple attributed to Scopas, on a sanctuary founded by Aleus, Sanctuary founded in legendary times by Aleus; surviving 4th-century BCE temple, photographed in modern times
The ruined sanctuary of Athena Alea at Tegea in Arcadia, the cult site whose foundation defines Aleus's place in myth. Pausanias reports that Aleus, son of Apheidas, built the original sanctuary of Athena Alea and made Tegea his capital (Description of Greece 8.4.8, 8.45.4); the surviving Doric temple seen here, generally credited to the sculptor-architect Scopas, replaced that archaic shrine after a fire in the 4th century BCE. Though no portrait of the legendary king survives, this site is his enduring monument, the precinct where his daughter Auge served as priestess and where Heracles fathered Telephus. The remains stand near the modern village of Alea, Greece.