Cleopatra, daughter of Idas and Marpessa, was the wedded wife of Meleager of Calydon; in Homer it is her supplication that finally rouses her husband to take up his arms.1
Cleopatra was the daughter of Marpessa of the fair ankles, child of Evenus, and of Idas, mightiest of the men then upon the earth — who had once taken up his bow against Phoebus Apollo himself for the sake of the fair-ankled maid. Her parents called her by a second name, Alcyone, because her mother had wept like the halcyon-bird when Apollo carried Marpessa away.2
The grief behind the name lay in that abduction: Evenus begat Marpessa, wooed by Apollo, but Idas son of Aphareus carried her off in a winged chariot he had received from Poseidon. So Cleopatra's by-name Alcyone preserved in her the sorrow of the mother whose marriage Apollo had contested.3
Pausanias records simply that Idas had by Marpessa a daughter, Cleopatra, who married Meleager.4
Apollodorus tells that Meleager, though he already had Cleopatra to wife, wished to get children also by Atalanta, and so insisted that she share in the hunt of the Calydonian boar.5
In Homer's telling, when Meleager withdrew in anger and lay beside Cleopatra while the foe stormed Calydon's walls, his fair-girdled wife besought him with wailing. She recounted all the woes that fall upon men whose city is taken — the people slain, the town consumed by fire, the children and deep-girdled women led away captive — and her words at last stirred his spirit to don his armour and go out to fight.6
After Meleager's death, Apollodorus tells, Althaea and Cleopatra hanged themselves, and the women who mourned the dead man were turned into birds — a metamorphosis that echoes the halcyon grief from which Cleopatra's other name had been drawn.7
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
