Erichtonius. The Attic hero Erichthonius was the son of Hephaestus and, according to Apol-lodorus, either Atthis, daughter of Cranaus, or the chaste goddess Athena (Minerva). When Athena fought off Hephaestus’s advances, his seed fell to the ground and from it Erichthonius was born. The goddess reared the child and placed him in a chest, which she left in the care of Pandrosus, daughter of King Cecrops of Athens. She cautioned the girl not to look inside, but Pandrosus’s sisters Herse and Aglaurus opened the chest and found the child with a snake coiled around him (or saw that he had the tail of a serpent). The girls were then killed by the serpent (or, driven mad by the sight of the serpent’s tail, threw themselves off the Acropolis). Erichthonius subsequendy became king of Athens, where he was later worshiped in the form of a serpent.

The details of this tale vary with the sources. In the Metamorphoses, for example, Ovid says that Erichthonius was born without a mother and that, of the three sisters, only Aglaurus dared to open the chest in which Athena had placed the child. Erichthonius has sometimes been conflated or confused with his son or grandson, Erechtheus.



Classical Sources. Homer, Iliad 2.546—49. Euripides, Ion 20—24, 260—74, 1001. Plato, Timaeus 23DE. Virgil, Georgics 3.274. Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.553—63, 9.424. Apollodorus, Biblioteca 3.i4.6ff. Pliny, Naturalis historia 7.197. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.2.6, 1.14.6, 1.18.2, 1.24.7. Hyginus, Fabulae 166; Poetica astronomica 2.13.



Further Reference. Wolfgang Stechow, "The Finding of Erichthonius,” in Studies in Western Art, vol. 3 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 27—35. See also Herse and Aglaurus.