Younger son of Athamas and Ino, and brother of Learchus. When Hera's madness fell upon the house, his mother carried him into the sea; both were changed into sea-deities, she Leucothea and he Palaemon, and the Isthmian games were founded in his honour.1
Melicertes was the younger child of Athamas, son of Aeolus and king over Boeotia, by his wife Ino, daughter of Cadmus; his brother was Learchus. Through these two lines he stood grandson at once of the Aeolid house and of Cadmus and Harmonia of Thebes.2
When Hera in her wrath drove the household mad, Athamas shot Learchus dead, and Ino cast herself and Melicertes into the sea. So Apollodorus tells it in one place; elsewhere he says that in her frenzy Ino threw Melicertes into a boiling cauldron and then, carrying it with the dead child, sprang into the deep. Ovid keeps the leap, naming the goddess Juno and the Fury Tisiphone who fired the palace: Athamas dashed Learchus on the rocks, and Ino with the boy in her arms flung herself from the cliff.3
From the leap the two were taken up among the powers of the sea. Ino became the goddess Leucothea and the boy became Palaemon, names they receive from sailors, for they succour storm-tossed mariners; Ovid likewise tells how the gods stripped from them their mortal dross and gave Melicerta the new name Palaemon, who in a later song names himself the son of Athamas, reared on land but god of the waters.4
Apollodorus adds that the Isthmian games were instituted by Sisyphus in honour of Melicertes. Pausanias fills out the manner of it: the boy, they say, was landed on the Corinthian Isthmus by a dolphin, where Sisyphus found him lying, gave him burial, and established the games in his honour, while the Molurian rock from which Ino had leaped the Megarians held sacred to Leucothea and to Palaemon.5
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