Son of Bias and Pero and king in the Biantid succession at Argos, Talaus married Lysimache and fathered Adrastus — the line from which the Seven against Thebes and the Epigoni would come.1
Talaus was the child for whose sake Melampus endured bondage among the cattle of Phylacus. When Bias could not drive off the herds Neleus demanded as Pero's bride-price, his brother Melampus stole them, and the seer gave Pero to Bias; of that marriage Apollodorus names Talaus as the son.2
He married Lysimache, daughter of Abas, son of Melampus, and begot Adrastus. In the same genealogical passage Apollodorus also attaches to Talaus' house the names Pronax, Mecisteus, Aristomachus, and Eriphyle — the kindred who would marry, prophesy, and fall at Thebes — though the Arcadian Parthenopaeus who marched among the Seven belongs to a separate parentage in the same author's later books.3
Homer knows the house through a later generation: among Diomedes' Argives sails Euryalus, son of Mecisteus, son of Talaus — a warrior whose grandfather had once come to Thebes for the burial of Oedipus and worsted all the sons of Cadmus in the funeral games.4
Pausanias places Talaus in the Biantid roll that ruled Argos after Melampus and Bias divided the kingdom: five kings descended from Bias for four generations down to Cyanippus, with Adrastus the best remembered name in the chain.5
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story