Elder son of Athamas the Aeolid and Ino daughter of Cadmus, and brother of Melicertes. When the wrath of Hera drove his father mad, Athamas shot him dead, and Ino cast herself into the sea with the younger boy.1
Learchus was born to Athamas, son of Aeolus and king over Boeotia, by his second wife Ino daughter of Cadmus, who bore him also a younger brother, Melicertes. Ino's plot against Nephele's children and the flight of the golden ram had already troubled the house before the wrath of Hera turned at last upon her own sons.2
When through the anger of Hera his father went mad, Learchus perished by his hand. Apollodorus tells it two ways: in one Athamas shot him through with an arrow; in the other — the madness sent because the house had reared the infant Dionysus — he hunted the boy down as though he were a deer and killed him.3
Ovid gives the killing its most savage shape: the raving Athamas, taking his wife for a wild lioness and the children for her whelps, snatched the smiling babe from Ino's breast, whirled him twice and thrice through the air like a stone from a whizzing sling, and dashed his infant body to pieces upon the rocks.4
Pausanias notes that the cause of the deed was disputed even in antiquity: some said Athamas slew Learchus, the elder of his sons, in a fit of madness; others that he turned an unbridled rage upon Ino and her children when he learned that the famine and the supposed death of Phrixus were no chance from heaven but the step-mother's intrigue. Whatever the cause, Learchus was killed by his father, while Ino flung herself from the Molurian rock into the sea with Melicertes.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
