Merope was the wife of Cresphontes, the Heraclid who won Messene by a trick of the lots when the sons of Heracles returned to the Peloponnese. When her husband and two of their sons were murdered and the throne seized, she preserved her one surviving son, Aepytus, who grew up to kill the usurper and recover his father's kingdom.1
When the Dorian host of the Heraclidae bore down on the Peloponnese, Cypselus, king of the Arcadians, secured himself by alliance: learning of the expedition, he married his daughter to Cresphontes, son of Aristomachus, whom he found without a wife, and so he and the Arcadians had nothing at all to fear from the invaders. The daughter given in this marriage was Merope.2
Cresphontes took Merope to wife and by her, among other children, became father of Aepytus, his youngest son. In the division of the conquered land he had drawn Messene by baking his clay lot hard while the rival lots crumbled in the water, and there Merope reigned as his queen.3
The reign was short. Apollodorus tells that Cresphontes had not long ruled over Messene when he was murdered together with two of his sons, and that Polyphontes, one of the true Heraclids, came to the throne. Pausanias reports the killing differently: because Cresphontes governed for the most part in favour of the common people, the rich rebelled and killed him and all his sons save Aepytus alone. Hyginus, like Apollodorus, names the slayer Polyphontes, king of Messenia, who killed Cresphontes, son of Aristomachus, and so gained possession of his kingdom and his wife.4
Polyphontes made Merope his own wife, the widow of the man he had murdered — in Apollodorus against her will. Yet one son escaped the slaughter, and the two sources tell his rescue differently. In Apollodorus, Merope had a third son, Aepytus, whom she gave to her own father to bring up. In Hyginus she hid the infant she had borne to Cresphontes and sent him away to a guest-friend in Aetolia, while Polyphontes hunted for the child with great assiduity and promised gold to whoever should kill him.5
Grown to manhood, Aepytus returned, killed Polyphontes, and recovered the kingdom of his fathers — and so Merope's saved son avenged Cresphontes and restored the Messenian line. Pausanias too has the surviving Aepytus, reared by Cypselus, brought back to Messene, where he punished his father's murderers and ruled so well that his descendants were called Aepytidae rather than Heracleidae.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
