A son of Aleus from Arcadia, who dwelt at Tegea and sailed with Jason among the Argonauts.1
In the catalogue of the Argo, two sons of Aleus came from Arcadia — Amphidamas and Cepheus, who inhabited Tegea and the allotment of Apheidas — and Ancaeus, sent by his father Lycurgus, followed them as a third.2
Apollodorus and Hyginus likewise name Cepheus, son of Aleus, among the heroes who sailed with Jason. They differ on his mother: Hyginus makes him a son of Aleus by Cleobule, while Apollodorus elsewhere reckons the children of Aleus — Cepheus, Lycurgus and Auge — by Neaera, daughter of Pereus.3
In Pausanias's reckoning of the Arcadian house, the sons of Aleus were Lycurgus, Amphidamas and Cepheus, and he had besides a daughter, Auge — she whose son by Heracles was the hero Telephus. So Cepheus stood among the kings of Tegea, brother to Lycurgus and to Auge.4
When Heracles mustered against the Lacedaemonians and the sons of Hippocoon, he came into Arcadia and begged Cepheus to join him with his sons, of whom he had twenty. But Cepheus feared that, were he to quit Tegea, the Argives would march against it, and refused. So Heracles, who had received from Athena a lock of the Gorgon's hair in a bronze jar, gave it to Sterope, daughter of Cepheus: if an army advanced she was to hold it up thrice from the walls, looking not before her, and the enemy would be turned to flight. On these terms Cepheus took the field — and there he and his sons fell.5
Pausanias kept the same boon as a thing remembered at Tegea. At the sanctuary of Athena named Eryma, the Defence, he tells that Cepheus, son of Aleus, received from the goddess the gift that Tegea should never be taken while time endures, for she had cut off some of Medusa's hair and given it to him as a guard for the city — the aetiology of the lock that, in the tale, was entrusted to his daughter.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
