First child of Deucalion and Pyrrha — though some say Zeus begat him; father of Dorus, Xuthus and Aeolus, he gave his own name to the peoples who had been called Greeks: the Hellenes.1
Apollodorus makes him the firstfruit of the renewed world: Deucalion had children by Pyrrha, first Hellen — 'whose father some say was Zeus', the mythographer admits in the same breath — then Amphictyon, and a daughter Protogeneia. The eponym of all the Greeks thus enters the record with his paternity already under dispute.2⚖
Hyginus has no doubts and no Deucalion: in his catalogue of the sons of Jove stands 'Hellen by Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus'. His Astronomica keeps the arithmetic consistent, calling Aeolus, Hellen's son, a grandson of Jove.3⚖
By the nymph Orseis, Hellen had Dorus, Xuthus and Aeolus. Those who were called Greeks he named Hellenes after himself, and he divided the country among his sons: Aeolus reigned over the regions about Thessaly and named the inhabitants Aeolians; Dorus took the country over against the Peloponnese and called the settlers Dorians after himself; and Xuthus received the Peloponnese and by Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus, fathered Achaeus and Ion. The whole map of the Greek peoples, in Apollodorus' telling, is one man's family tree.4
Pausanias preserves the quarrel after his death: the other sons of Hellen drove Xuthus out of Thessaly, charging that he had appropriated some of the ancestral property for himself; Xuthus fled to Athens, married the king's daughter, and his sons Achaeus and Ion carried the family names abroad.5
Homer knows the Hellenes but not the man: in the catalogue of ships, Hellas is a district of Achilles' realm in Phthia, and its people — Myrmidons, Hellenes, Achaeans — bear the name with no eponym in sight. It is Hyginus who later splices the family into the Odyssey, calling the Aeolus who hosts Ulysses and bags the winds a 'son of Hellen' — where Homer himself had named the wind-keeper a son of Hippotas.6
⁂
the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story