The Androktasiai are the personified spirits of manslaughter and the slaughter of men in battle — a plural brood borne fatherless by Eris (Strife) among the dark powers that beset mortal life.1
Hard-hearted Eris, herself born of Night without a father, continued the dark genealogy in turn, bringing forth a brood of grim children with no father of their own. Among them Hesiod names the Androktasiai — the Manslaughters, the spirits of men slain in war — counted in Strife's catalogue of the powers that afflict humankind.2⚖
Their name marks a specific face of war: androktasia is the killing of men in the press of battle, the heaped slaughter of warriors, distinct from the private crime that the kindred Phonoi (Murders) embody. In the Greek line the two stand side by side, so that murder and battle-slaughter are siblings of one nature, twin harvests of the violence that Strife sows wherever it touches mortal life.3
Like their fellow spirits in this catalogue, the Androktasiai are given no adventure, no cult and no parentage beyond Eris: their place in the litany is their identity. They share that litany with Ponos (Toil), Lethe (Forgetfulness), Limos (Famine), the tearful Algea (Sorrows), the Hysminai (Combats), the Machai (Fights), the Phonoi (Murders), Neikea (Quarrels), Pseudea (Lies), Logoi (Disputes), Amphillogiai (Ambiguities), Dysnomia (Lawlessness), Ate (Ruin) and Horkos (Oath) — all, the poet says, born of one hateful mother and all of one grim nature.4
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story