Daughter of Temenus, the Heraclid king of Argos, and wife of Deiphontes. Favoured by her father above his sons, she and her husband seemed marked to inherit the throne — the very favour that drove her brothers to hire men and murder Temenus.1
Hyrnetho was the favourite child of Temenus, who had won Argos when the Heraclidae returned to the Peloponnese. Her husband Deiphontes — by Pausanias' reckoning the son of Antimachus, son of Thrasyanor, son of Ctesippus, son of Heracles — served the king as his general in war and his adviser on all occasions, and had been made his son-in-law even before this.2
Apollodorus tells that Temenus, passing over his sons Agelaus, Eurypylus, and Callias, favoured Hyrnetho and Deiphontes; the slighted sons therefore hired men to murder their father, and when the deed was done the army judged that the kingdom belonged to Hyrnetho and Deiphontes.3
Pausanias gives a harder ending: suspecting that Temenus meant to divert the throne to his daughter and son-in-law, the sons plotted against him, and Ceisus, the eldest, seized the kingdom in spite of them.4
After Temenus' death Deiphontes and Hyrnetho, hating the sons of Temenus, broke with the other Argives and took possession of Epidauria, the army siding with them because it respected the pair more than Ceisus and his brothers. There, Pausanias says, two of those brothers, Cerynes and Phalces — for Agraeus the youngest disapproved of the plan — came to Epidaurus and, staying their chariot beneath the wall, sent a herald summoning their sister to a parley.5
The young men accused Deiphontes and begged Hyrnetho to return to Argos, promising her a husband who ruled more subjects and a richer land. Pained by their words, she gave as good as she got: Deiphontes, she answered, was a dear husband to her and had shown himself a blameless son-in-law to Temenus, while they deserved to be called their father's murderers. Without further reply they seized her, set her in the chariot, and drove off.6
Warned by an Epidaurian that his wife had been carried off against her will, Deiphontes gave chase with the men of Epidaurus and overtook the runaways. He shot Cerynes dead, but dared not loose an arrow at Phalces, who was holding Hyrnetho; in his grasp she perished, and Phalces, realizing what he had done to his sister, drove off the more recklessly. Deiphontes and his children — Antimenes, Xanthippus, Argeus, and a daughter Orsobia — took up her body and bore it to the place thereafter called the Hyrnethium.7
There they built her a hero-shrine and gave her many honours: above all it became the custom that no one should carry home or put to any use the boughs that broke from the olives and other trees growing about the precinct, but leave them on the spot, sacred to Hyrnetho. At Argos, by Hollow Street, was shown what some called her grave — though Pausanias judged it more likely a cenotaph than her true resting place.8
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