Son of Poseidon by Chione, daughter of Boreas and Orithyia, who came out of Thrace to Eleusis and joined the Eleusinians in their war against Athens. In Apollodorus he falls there to Erechtheus; in Pausanias it is his son Immaradus who dies, while Eumolpus himself remains at Eleusis as a minister of the Two Goddesses.1
Chione, daughter of Boreas and Orithyia, lay with Poseidon and bore Eumolpus unknown to her father; to escape detection she flung the child into the deep. But Poseidon caught him up, carried him to Ethiopia, and gave him to Benthesicyme, his own daughter by Amphitrite, to rear. Grown to manhood, he was given one of Benthesicyme's two daughters by her husband, but when he tried to force his wife's sister he was banished, and went off toward Thrace with his son Ismarus.2
Pausanias gives the same descent from the Athenian side: this Eumolpus, they say, came from Thrace, son of Poseidon and Chione, and Chione was daughter of the wind Boreas and of Orithyia. He notes that Homer, naming Eumolpus only as 'manly,' says nothing of his lineage, and that Eleusinians and Athenians alike agreed in pointing out his tomb at Eleusis.3
Pausanias reckons Eumolpus a minister of the Two Goddesses and records the verses of the Hymn that set 'mighty Eumolpus' beside Triptolemus, Diocles, and Celeus among those to whom Demeter herself taught the cult of the holy rites.4
When war broke out between the Athenians and the Eleusinians, Eumolpus was called in by the Eleusinians and fought on their side with a large force of Thracians. Erechtheus inquired of the oracle how Athens might prevail and was told he must slaughter one of his daughters; he slew his youngest, and her sisters slew themselves after her. So in the battle, Apollodorus says, Erechtheus killed Eumolpus. Hyginus tells it that Eumolpus, son of Neptune, came against Athens claiming the Attic land was his father's, and was defeated and slain by the Athenians — after which Neptune demanded that Erechtheus' daughter Chthonia be sacrificed.5
Pausanias resists the killing of Eumolpus himself. The bronze figures on the Acropolis named Erechtheus and Eumolpus mislead, he warns: those who know antiquity understand that the man Erechtheus slew was Immaradus, son of Eumolpus, not Eumolpus. The war, he insists, ended not in a rout but in a treaty — the Eleusinians keeping independent control of the Mysteries while in all else subject to Athens — and Eumolpus himself remained at Eleusis.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
