A son of Erechtheus and Praxithea, brother of Cecrops and Pandorus among the Athenian princes. Metion himself does little, but his sons — the Metionidae — seize the throne of Athens in sedition, expelling Pandion the Second to Megara, and from his line the master-craftsman Daedalus descends.1
Apollodorus places Metion among the children Erechtheus had by Praxithea, daughter of Phrasimus: the sons Cecrops, Pandorus, and Metion, and the daughters Procris, Creusa, Chthonia, and Orithyia, whom Boreas carried off. So Metion stands as one branch of the Erechtheid stock, a name in the king-list whose weight lies entirely in what his descendants do.2
His significance is dynastic strife. When Cecrops the Second died, his son Pandion succeeded; but this Pandion, says Apollodorus, was driven out by the sons of Metion in a sedition. The exiled king fled to Pylas at Megara, married his daughter Pylia, and in time was made king of the Megarid in his place. Pausanias tells it the same way: the Pandion who was son of Cecrops the Second was deposed from his kingdom by the Metionidae and fled to Megara, his children banished with him, and there he sickened and died, his tomb shown on the Megarian coast at the rock called Athena Aethyia.3
The usurpation did not hold. After Pandion's death his sons marched on Athens, expelled the Metionidae, and divided the rule four ways — though Aegeus, as the eldest, held the whole power. So Pausanias too records that Pandion's children drove out the Metionidae and returned from their Megarian banishment, and Aegeus became king. Metion's line is thus the interlude of usurpers between the two Pandionid spines of the Athenian house.4
Yet the line left a famous heir. Apollodorus traces Daedalus the architect back to Metion: his father was Eupalamus, son of Metion, his mother Alcippe — and he was the first inventor of carved images, who fled Athens after hurling his nephew Talos from the acropolis. Pausanias names the same descent, calling Daedalus a man of the royal Athenian clan, the Metionidae, renowned alike for his art and for his wanderings and misfortunes.5
Pausanias preserves a competing genealogy that pulls Metion's son elsewhere. Discussing the founder of Sicyon, he reports that some say Sicyon was not the son of Marathon but of Metion the son of Erechtheus, and that the poet Asius confirms it — though Hesiod makes Sicyon a son of Erechtheus directly, and Ibycus calls his father Pelops. The variant scatters Metion's offspring beyond Attica and into the founding-lines of the Peloponnese.6
⁂
the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story