A daughter of Minyas of Orchomenus and wife of the Arcadian Iasus, by whom she bore Atalanta, the runner of the Calydonian hunt.1
Clymene belonged to the wealthy Minyan stock of Orchomenus, a daughter of Minyas, the king whose name the Minyae carried. In Apollodorus' reckoning of the Arcadian house she was joined to Iasus, son of Lycurgus, and to him she bore a single daughter, Atalanta. The bare line of the Bibliotheca — "Iasus had a daughter Atalanta by Clymene, daughter of Minyas" — is the one place where mother, father and child stand named together, and it sets Clymene at the head of the most famous of Arcadia's huntresses.2
The fame of the daughter she bore stands edged with dispute over the father. Apollodorus himself, in the very paragraph that makes Atalanta the child of Iasus and Clymene, records that Hesiod and certain others called her instead the daughter of Schoeneus, while Euripides made her the daughter of Maenalus — and under those rival genealogies Clymene has no part in Atalanta at all.3
A second author keeps to the line that leaves room for Clymene. Hyginus names Atalanta "daughter of Iasius" — both among the Seven against Thebes, where Parthenopaeus is reckoned her son, and again elsewhere in his catalogues — preserving Iasus as her father, though without naming the mother.4
Clymene's blood ran out of Arcadia and into the Argonautic legend by a second descent. Apollonius explains that the heroes gathered to Jason were styled Minyae because the most and bravest of them claimed to be sprung from the daughters of Minyas — "thus Jason himself was the son of Alcimede who was born of Clymene the daughter of Minyas." By this line Clymene is mother of Alcimede and grandmother of Jason; the poet's own catalogue, which elsewhere calls Alcimede a daughter of Phylacus, leaves Phylacus her father and Clymene her mother.5
Hyginus preserves the same reckoning of the name. The Argonauts, he writes, were called Minyae either because daughters of Minyas bore most of them, or because Jason's mother was a daughter of Clymene, the daughter of Minyas — a second author setting Clymene at the root of the line through which the Minyan name passed to the ship's company.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
