Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Temenus.
The gallery
The Heraclidae Drawing Lots (woodcut of a Graeco-Roman engraved gem)
Unknown (woodcut published by C. W. King), 1869 (after a 1st-century BCE gem)
This nineteenth-century woodcut reproduces a Graeco-Roman engraved gemstone from the Luynes collection in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Cabinet des Médailles, inv. Luynes.110). It shows three warriors drawing lots from an urn, a scene the numismatist Ernest Babelon identified as the Heraclidae casting lots to divide the conquered Peloponnese. According to Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 2.8.4), Temenus, together with Cresphontes and the twin sons of Aristodemus, threw their tokens into a pitcher of water to apportion Argos, Lacedaemon and Messene; the lot of Temenus came up for Argos. The image renders this defining moment of his story, in which the Return of the Heraclidae is sealed by the allotment of kingdoms. The woodcut was published in C. W. King's edition of the Odes of Horace (London, 1869).
Heracles and Athena flanked by Doric and Ionic columns (drawing of a Greek amphora)
Eduard Gerhard (after a late-6th-century BCE amphora), 1858 (vase c. 510 BCE)
Eduard Gerhard's nineteenth-century line drawing reproduces a late sixth-century BCE Attic amphora, now in the British Museum (1843,1103.96), published in his Auserlesene griechische Vasenbilder (Berlin, 1858, pl. 246). Heracles stands at left beside a Doric column while Athena stands at right beside an Ionic one, a deliberate pairing that figures the ancient association between Heracles and Dorian identity. That association underpins the legend of Temenus, the eldest Heraclid who, claiming descent from Heracles through Hyllus, Cleodaeus and Aristomachus, led the Dorian Return of the Heraclidae and won Argos. The vase image thus stands as the visual ancestry of Temenus's claim: the Dorian recovery of the inheritance of their hero forefather.