Son of Aristomachus and a leader of the returning Heraclidae, the Dorian descendants of Heracles who reclaimed the Peloponnese; Argos fell to Temenus.1
When the sons of Aristomachus had grown to manhood, they sought the oracle concerning their return to the Peloponnese. Having obeyed the god and still met with disaster, Temenus reproached Apollo, saying that when they had followed the oracle they had been unfortunate; but the god answered that they themselves were to blame, for they had misread the oracles, taking "the third crop" to mean the third year rather than the third generation.2
On a second consulting, when the fleet was wrecked and the host scattered by famine, the god declared the calamity the work of a soothsayer the Heraclids had slain, bidding them banish the killer for ten years and take for their guide the Three-Eyed One. They found that guide in Oxylus, a man riding a one-eyed horse, and made him their leader; he brought the Dorians across into the peninsula.3
The brothers set three lots for the three lands — the first for Argos, the second for Lacedaemon, the third for Messene — and cast them into a pitcher of water. Temenus and the two sons of the dead Aristodemus, Procles and Eurysthenes, threw in stones, but Cresphontes, coveting Messene, threw in a clod of earth, which dissolved and so left him that allotment. The lot of Temenus came up first, and Argos fell to him.4
Pausanias sets the Return in the reign of Tisamenus son of Orestes: Temenus and Cresphontes, the sons of Aristomachus, came with the sons of the third brother Aristodemus, who had died. Seizing and fortifying the place called Temenium in Argive territory — named for him ever after — Temenus made it his base, and from there waged the Dorian war against Tisamenus and the Achaeans to win Argos.5
Having taken Argos, Temenus passed over his sons — Agelaus, Eurypylus, and Callias — and favoured his daughter Hyrnetho and her husband Deiphontes; so his sons hired men to murder their father. When the deed was done, the army judged that the kingdom belonged to Hyrnetho and Deiphontes.6
Pausanias tells it so: in place of his sons Temenus openly employed Deiphontes — already his son-in-law, husband of his favourite daughter Hyrnetho — as general in war and counsellor in all things, and was suspected of meaning to divert the throne to the pair. For this his sons plotted against him, and Ceisus, the eldest, seized the kingdom.7
⁂
the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
