Brother of the seer Melampus and son of Amythaon at Pylus, Bias won Pero daughter of Neleus only through Melampus' year of bondage among the cattle of Phylacus, and afterward shared in the Argive kingdom when his brother cured the maddened women — so the Aeolid stock throws off the line that runs through Talaus to Adrastus and the Seven against Thebes.1
Bias is the unmarvellous brother of a marvellous man. Apollodorus sets his birth at Pylus: Amythaon, one of the sons that Tyro bore to Cretheus, dwelt there and married Idomene, and to him were born two sons, Bias and Melampus — the latter a soothsayer who understood the voices of the birds, the former no seer at all but the one for whose sake his brother's gifts are spent. Within the same author the maternal descent is sorted two ways: at one place Idomene is daughter of Pheres, at another the mother of the seers is Idomene daughter of Abas.2
His one great want sets the whole tale in motion. Bias wooed Pero, the daughter of Neleus, but her suitors were many, and Neleus would give her only to the man who drove off the cattle of Phylacus — kine penned in Phylace and watched by a dog no man or beast could pass. Unable to steal them, Bias called in his brother; Melampus, foreknowing he would be caught and held a year, went, was taken, and in his cell overheard the worms gnawing the roof-beam, so that he asked to be moved and the cell collapsed behind him. Marvelling, Phylacus freed him to learn how his son Iphiclus might get children, and Melampus, reading the secret of the bloody gelding-knife from a vulture, won both the cure and the herd. He drove the cattle to Pylus, took Pero from Neleus, and gave her to Bias.3
Pausanias tells the bride-price the same way, and grounds the cattle in older legend: these were the herd of Iphiclus, father of Protesilaus, which Neleus demanded as the gift for his daughter's suitors, and it was on their account that Melampus went into Thessaly to gratify his brother Bias — bound by the herdsmen of Iphiclus, then rewarded with the kine for the prophecies he gave. So both authors make the seer the agent and Bias the beneficiary of the winning of Pero.4
From the marriage Apollodorus reckons the famous descent: Bias and Pero had a son Talaus, who married Lysimache and begat Adrastus, Parthenopaeus, Pronax, Mecisteus, Aristomachus, and Eriphyle whom Amphiaraus married — the kindred that would march in the war of the Seven and the Epigoni against Thebes. The same genealogist counts a daughter to his name as well: when Pelias dwelt in Thessaly, he married Anaxibia daughter of Bias, though some, Apollodorus notes, made his wife Phylomache daughter of Amphion instead.5
Bias' fortune is made a second time by his brother's cunning, and this time it is a throne. When Dionysus drove the daughters of Proetus — and then all the women of Argos — raving through the land, Melampus offered to heal them for a third of the kingdom; and when Proetus at last consented, the seer would proceed only if his brother Bias received a portion of land equal to his own. So Proetus gave the cured maidens in marriage to Melampus and Bias, and Bias, who had no gift of prophecy, gained by it a share of Argos. Pausanias keeps the division but names the contemporary king Anaxagoras, descendant of Megapenthes, not Proetus: the Argives, he says, were the only Greeks divided into three kingdoms, after Melampus cured the maddened women on condition that he and his brother Bias hold a share equal to the king's — and from Bias five kings reigned for four generations down to Cyanippus.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
