Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Auge.
The gallery
Heracles and Auge (bronze mirror case from Elis)
Unknown, c. 340–325 BC
This engraved bronze mirror case from Elis, dated to the late Classical period, condenses the founding violence of Auge's story into a single image: the priestess of Athena Alea confronted by a drunken Heracles. The scene depicts the assault at Tegea that, in Apollodorus' telling (Bibliotheca 2.7.4), Heracles committed 'not knowing her to be a daughter of Aleus' — the union that would produce Telephus and set in motion Auge's exile to Mysia. Now held in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens (Room 43, formerly the Stathatos collection), it is among the earliest surviving artistic treatments of the myth.
Marble tondo with Heracles and Auge
Unknown, 2nd century BC (Hellenistic)
A circular marble relief (tondo) showing Heracles seizing Auge, recovered from the villa of Herodes Atticus in Arcadia — the very region of Auge's home city of Tegea, where she served as priestess of Athena Alea. Pausanias (8.47.4) located the encounter at a Tegean fountain. The Hellenistic composition treats the moment of the assault that begets Telephus, framing the local Arcadian heroine within the visual language of mythological relief sculpture. The tondo survives in the collections documenting the Herodes Atticus villa finds.
Telephus Frieze: carpenters building the boat to send Auge to sea (Pergamon Altar, panels 4–6)
Unknown, c. 160 BC
Part of the great Telephus frieze of the Pergamon Altar, this Hellenistic marble relief shows carpenters constructing the boat (or chest) in which Auge is to be cast out upon the sea. The scene follows the Hecataeus variant preserved by Pausanias (8.4.9), in which Aleus, on discovering his daughter's child, set Auge adrift to drift to Teuthras' kingdom on the Caicus. As the dynastic myth of the Pergamene kings — who claimed descent from Telephus — the frieze gives Auge a prominent place in the city's foundation narrative. Now in the Pergamonmuseum, Berlin.
Telephus Frieze: Telephus receives weapons from Auge (Pergamon Altar, panels 16–17)
Unknown, c. 160 BC
A later episode of the Pergamon Altar's Telephus frieze, depicting the reunited mother and son in Mysia: Auge, now established at the court of Teuthras, hands weapons to her grown son Telephus. The image follows the recognition-story of mother and son at Teuthras' Mysian court (Hyginus, Fabulae 100), reconciling Auge's Arcadian origins with the Pergamene royal line she helped found. Carved in marble around 160 BC, the relief is preserved in the Pergamonmuseum, Berlin.