Son of Eumolpus and, in Pausanias' reckoning, the Eleusinian general whom Erechtheus killed when the Athenians and Eleusinians went to war — the slain commander whom other accounts replace with his father Eumolpus.1
Pausanias names the man Erechtheus cut down. Among the eponymous heroes of the Athenians he lists Erechtheus, who conquered the Eleusinians in battle and killed their general — and that general, he says, was not Eumolpus but Immaradus, the son of Eumolpus. The victor's victim is the son, not the father.2
He repeats the correction before a monument. On the Athenian Acropolis stood large bronze figures of two men set facing each other for a fight, one called Erechtheus and the other Eumolpus; yet, Pausanias insists, the Athenians acquainted with antiquity must know that this victim of Erechtheus was Immaradus, the son of Eumolpus. The statues name the father, the learned tradition the son.3
The same death recurs at Eleusis. When the Eleusinians fought the Athenians, Erechtheus their king was killed, and so too was Immaradus, son of Eumolpus. The war closed on terms — the Eleusinians keeping independent control of the mysteries, but in all else subject to the Athenians — and Eumolpus himself survived, remaining at Eleusis as a minister of the Two Goddesses. It is the son who falls, not the father.4
Pausanias traces the father's line to Thrace and the north wind. Eumolpus, he reports, came from Thrace as the son of Poseidon and Chione, and Chione was the daughter of Boreas the wind and Orithyia. By that descent Immaradus, his son, springs from sea and storm on his father's side.5
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story