Telephus, son of Heracles by Auge daughter of Aleus, was exposed at birth on Mount Parthenius and suckled by a doe, from which he took his name; bred in Arcadia, he sought his parents at Delphi, passed to Mysia, and there succeeded Teuthras as king of the Mysians.1
Passing through Tegea, Heracles debauched Auge, not knowing her to be a daughter of Aleus, and she bore a son in secret and laid him in the precinct of Athena. When pestilence wasted the land and Aleus, searching the sanctuary, discovered his daughter's motherhood, he exposed the babe on Mount Parthenius. There — by the providence of the gods, says Apollodorus — a doe that had just cast her fawn gave the child suck, and shepherds who took him up named him Telephus for the deer. Auge her father gave to Nauplius to sell far away in a foreign land, and Nauplius gave her to Teuthras, prince of Teuthrania, who made her his wife.2
Pausanias preserves a harsher transport. On the authority of Hecataeus he tells that Auge would lie with Heracles whenever he came to Tegea, and that when it was found she had borne him a child, Aleus set her with her infant in a chest and cast them out upon the sea; so she came to Teuthras, lord of the plain of the Caicus, who married her — and her tomb was still shown at Pergamus above that river.3
Bred by the neatherds of Corythus, the grown Telephus went to Delphi in quest of his parents, and on the god's word repaired to Mysia, where he became the adopted son of Teuthras and, on Teuthras' death, succeeded to the princedom. He was thus a grandson of Aleus of Tegea — that Aleid house whose line ran through Lycurgus to Ancaeus, Amphidamas and Iasus — but his kingdom lay across the sea, his throne won not by Arcadian inheritance but by a stranger's adoption in the land of the Caicus.4
When the Achaean armament, ignorant of the course to Troy, put in to Mysia and ravaged it as though it were the enemy's land, Telephus son of Heracles, king of the Mysians, armed his people, chased the Greeks in a crowd back to their ships and killed many — among them Thersander son of Polynices, who alone made a stand. But Telephus fled before Achilles, and being entangled in a vine-branch was wounded in the thigh with the spear. Afterward, his wound unhealed and Apollo having said that the one who wounded him must turn healer, he came from Mysia to Argos in rags, begged the help of Achilles and promised to show the course to Troy; Achilles healed him by scraping the rust of his Pelian spear, and Calchas confirmed that Telephus should be the fleet's guide.5
Hyginus tells the cure otherwise. The wound, he says, was dealt by the spear of Chiron, and when Apollo answered that none but the very weapon that struck him could mend it, Telephus went to Agamemnon and, by Clytemnestra's counsel, snatched the infant Orestes and threatened him at the altar; since an oracle held that Troy could not fall without Telephus' guidance, the Achaeans made peace, and Ulysses, reading the riddle as the spear, scraped its rust and healed him.6
Ovid lets Ulysses claim the double feat for Achilles' weapon — that twice Telephus felt the virtue of the spear, the wounding and, vanquished and a suppliant, the healing; the same spear thus both pierced and saved him. His son Eurypylus (`eurypylus-telephus`) fought at Troy with the Ceteians; Odysseus names him the comeliest warrior Neoptolemus slew, while Pausanias says he cut down Peneleos when the Boeotian captain led Thebes in young Tisamenus' stead.7
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
