Son of Panopeus and a champion of the Achaeans at Troy, best remembered as the craftsman who, with Athena's help, built the Wooden Horse by which Ilios was taken.1
Homer fixes his parentage in the funeral games for Patroclus, where a man valiant and tall rose for the boxing, "Epeius, son of Panopeus," and laid hold of the sturdy mule set as the prize. Boasting that none of the Achaeans should worst him with his fists, he made good the word at a single blow, felling the bold Euryalus so that his shining limbs gave way beneath him, and Epeius set him on his feet again with his own hands and bore off the mule.2
His true fame is in timber, not fists. In the hall of Alcinous, Odysseus asks the bard Demodocus to sing of the building of the horse of wood "which Epeius made with Athena's help," the horse that Odysseus led up into the citadel as a thing of guile when he had filled it with the men who sacked Ilios — so that the craftsman of the engine and the captain who used it are named in one breath.3
Apollodorus tells how the work was done: Odysseus contrived the stratagem and proposed it to Epeus, an architect, who felled timber on Ida and constructed the horse with a hollow interior and an opening in its side, into which Odysseus persuaded the chosen warriors to climb.4
Hyginus likewise credits Epeus, who at Minerva's suggestion built a wooden horse of remarkable size, its flank inscribed as a gift to the goddess while the Achaeans struck camp and drew off to Tenedos.5
Pausanias places him in the pedigree of the Aeacidae — Phocus' son Panopeus fathered Epeus, who made the wooden horse "according to Homer" — and saw him again in art: in Polygnotus' great painting at Delphi Epeius stands naked, razing the Trojan wall to the ground, the head of the horse rising only just above the masonry behind it.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
