Lycaon, son of Pelasgus, was the second king of the Arcadians; by his many wives he begot some fifty sons, of whom Nyctimus is named first, and (so others said) a daughter, Callisto.1
Lycaon was the son of Pelasgus the Arcadian — whom, on Apollodorus' report, some called a son of Zeus and Niobe while others made him a son of the soil. His mother is given as Meliboea, a daughter of Ocean, or, as others say, the nymph Cyllene. Reigning over the Arcadians, Lycaon by many wives begot fifty sons, of whom Nyctimus is named first.2
He was a founder-king as well as a sinner. Pausanias records that Lycaon built the city of Lycosura on Mount Lycaeus, gave to Zeus the surname Lycaeus, and established the Lycaean games — the first ordinances of a settled Arcadia.3
The impiety that undid him is told in conflicting ways. Pausanias has Lycaon himself bring a human infant to the altar of Lycaean Zeus and sacrifice it, pouring its blood upon the stone; immediately after the offering he was changed from a man into a wolf — lykos.4
Ovid tells it as a host's treachery: Lycaon, tyrant of Arcadia, doubting Jove's godhead, cut the throat of a Molossian hostage and served the cooked flesh to his divine guest. Jove overturned the house upon its gods with avenging fire, and the tyrant fled into the fields and became a wolf — fit lupus — keeping in his savage jaws the traces of his former self. In Ovid this outrage is the stated cause of the flood that follows.5
Hyginus shifts the deed to the next generation and ties Lycaon's house to the birth of Arcas: Jove came as a guest to Lycaon, son of Pelasgus, and seduced his daughter Callisto, of whom Arcas was born; then the sons of Lycaon, wishing to test whether their visitor were truly a god, mixed human flesh with the rest of the meat and set it before him at the banquet.6
Apollodorus too lays the deluge of Deucalion's age to the impiety of Lycaon's sons, and records — on the authority of Eumelus and certain others — that Lycaon had a daughter Callisto, though others made her no child of his but a nymph.7
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
