A son of Pandion, born at Megara, and brother of Aegeus, Pallas, and Nisus, with whom he shared in the four-fold partition of Attica after their father's death, though Aegeus held the whole power.1
When Pandion had been driven from Athens by the sons of Metion and had taken refuge with Pylas at Megara, he begat there four sons — Aegeus, Pallas, Nisus, and Lycus. After their father's death the brothers marched on Athens, expelled the Metionids, and divided the government in four, though Aegeus held the whole power; among that brotherhood Lycus is the least of the heirs, named but not throned.2
The quarrel over Attica did not end in peace for Lycus. Pausanias records that he fled when Aegeus turned against him, and that the Lyceum, sacred to Apollo from of old and the place where the god was first named Lyceus, bore his name; further, that the Termilae to whom he fled were called Lycii after him, so that a people far from Athens was said to carry his memory.3
His true fame lay in the rites he carried abroad. Pausanias says that the mysteries of the Great Goddesses, first taught at Andania by Caucon, were raised to greater honor many years later by Lycus, son of Pandion, who purified the celebrants in an oak grove still called Lycus' wood in the verse of Rhianus the Cretan; the inscription on the statue of Methapus, who reworked the rites, confirmed that this Lycus was Pandion's son and that he brought all the Attic ritual to wise Andania.4
Pausanias adds that on his flight from Athens — driven out, he says again, by his brother Aegeus — Lycus came to Arene and there revealed the rites of the Great Goddesses to Aphareus, to his children, and to his wife Arene; yet it was to Andania that he brought the rites and disclosed them, on the spot where Caucon had once initiated Messene.5
His voice outlasted his exile. Pausanias reckons Lycus, son of Pandion, among the men through whom a god prophesied, beside the Athenian Musaeus and the Cyprian Euclus, though he confesses he had never read his oracles; and in the Messenian struggle those oracles told that a hidden pledge, if kept, would one day win the Messenians back their land — the secret Aristomenes buried by night on Ithome in trust of its promise.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story