Elder son of Lelex, the aboriginal first king of Laconia, and the second to reign over the Leleges; on his father's death the kingdom passed to him, his younger brother Polycaon remaining a private man. From Myles the line ran to his son Eurotas and the river that bears that name.1
In the deep antiquity of Laconia, Pausanias says, Lelex an aboriginal was the first king, and after him the people were called Leleges. Lelex had a son Myles and a younger one, Polycaon; and when Lelex died, Myles as the elder received the kingdom, while Polycaon, being the younger, remained a private person until he married Messene and a foreign throne carried him off elsewhere. So Myles stands second in the oldest royal line the land remembers.2
His very name carries his deed. At a place called Alesiae, the Place of Grinding, on the road toward Taygetus, the Lacedaemonians said that Myles the son of Lelex — Myles meaning Mill-man — was the first human being to invent a mill, and that it was here he ground his corn. The tale survives in Pausanias alone, a king reckoned not by conquest but by the founding gift of bread.3
On the death of Myles his son Eurotas succeeded to the throne; and it was Eurotas who drained the standing water of the plain down to the sea by a trench and gave his name to the river left behind. Through his daughter Sparta, wedded to Lacedaemon, the founding house of Laconia descended onward from the miller-king. Pausanias adds that the Spartans kept hero-shrines from this age — of Lelex himself, and of one Iops said to have been born in the time of Lelex or of Myles.4
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story