HELLEN
Hellēn (Ἕλλην)
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THE STORY
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, who reigned over Attica after Cranaus, and a daughter Protogeneia. The eponym of all the Greeks thus enters the record with his paternity already under dispute. 1⚖
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. 2⚖
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' people became the Dorians; and from Xuthus' sons Achaeus and Ion the Achaeans and Ionians took their names. The whole map of the Greek peoples, in Apollodorus' telling, is one man's family tree. 3
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. 4
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. 5