Cleodaeus, son of Hyllus and grandson of Heracles, is a link in the Heraclid descent toward the Return of the Dorians, honoured with a hero-shrine at Sparta near the sanctuary of Poseidon God of Kin, beside that of Oebalus.1
Cleodaeus stands a generation below his father Hyllus, the eldest son of Heracles. Hyllus' own premature attempt at the Return ended when, on the borders of the Peloponnese, he was challenged to single combat and slain by Echemus; the homecoming then passed to his descendants, who would attempt and fail it again before Temenus' generation at last carried it through.2
Cleodaeus' place in the line is fixed by his son: Pausanias names "Aristomachus, the son of Cleodaeus," who failed to understand the oracle given him and therefore failed to return to the Peloponnese.3
Apollodorus, tracing the same doomed Returns, records that when the army crossed in the reign of Tisamenus, son of Orestes, the Peloponnesians were victorious in battle and Aristomachus was slain.4
The Return came only with Cleodaeus' grandsons. After Aristomachus' death his sons Temenus and Cresphontes, together with the sons of the third brother Aristodemus, who had died, brought the Heracleidae back into the Peloponnese against Tisamenus, son of Orestes — three generations down from Cleodaeus, whose blood, but not whose hand, won back the land.5
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story