[8]
Now Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus and Alcidice, was brought up by Cretheus, brother of
Salmoneus, and conceived a passion for the river Enipeus, and often would she hie to its
running waters and utter her plaint to them. But Poseidon in the likeness of
Enipeus lay with her,1 and she secretly gave birth to twin sons, whom she
exposed. As the babes lay forlorn, a mare, belonging to some passing horsekeepers, kicked
with its hoof one of the two infants and left a livid mark on its face. The horsekeeper
took up both the children and reared them; and the one with the livid （pelion） mark he called Pelias, and the other Neleus.2
When they were grown up, they discovered their mother and killed their stepmother Sidero.
For knowing that their mother was ill-used by her, they attacked her, but before they
could catch her she had taken refuge in the precinct of Hera.3 However, Pelias cut her down on the very altars,
and ever after he continued to treat Hera with contumely.
1 As to the passion of Tyro for the river Enipeus, see Hom. Od. 11.235ff.; Lucian, Dial. Marin. 13; Diod. 4.68.3; Eustathius on Hom. Od. xi.234, p. 1681. Sophocles wrote two plays, both called Tyro, on the romantic love and sorrows of this heroine. See TGF (Nauck 2nd ed.), pp. 272ff.; The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. A. C. Pearson, vol. ii. pp. 270ff.
2 As to the exposure and discovery of the twins Pelias and Neleus, see Menander, Epitrepontes 108-116 (Four Plays of Menander, ed. E. Capps, pp. 60ff.); Scholiast on Hom. Il. x.334; Eustathius on Hom. Od. xi.253, p. 1681. According to Eustathius and the Scholiast on Hom. Od. xi.253, Pelias was suckled by a mare and Neleus by a bitch. Compare Ael., Var. Hist. xii.42. Aristotle says （Aristot. Poet. 1454b 25） that in Sophocles's play Tyro the recognition of the forsaken babes was effected by means of the ark （σκάφη） in which they were found. Menander seems to have followed a somewhat different tradition, for he says that the children were found by an old goatherd, and that the token by which they were recognized was a small scrip or wallet （πηρίδιον）. The legend of the exposed twins, the children of a divine father by a human mother, who were suckled by animals, reared by a peasant, and grew up to quarrel about a kingdom, presents points of resemblance to the legend of Romulus and Remus; and it has even been suggested that the Greek tale, as dramatized by Sophocles, was the ultimate source of the Roman story, having filtered to the early Roman historian Q. Fabius Pictor through the medium of the Greek historian Diocles of Peparethus, whom Fabius Pictor appears to have followed on this and many other points of early Roman history （Plut. Romulus 3）. The same word σκάφη which Sophocles seems to have applied to the ark in which Pelias and Neleus were exposed, is applied by Plut. Romulus 3 to the ark in which Romulus and Remus were exposed. See C. Trieber, “Die Romulussage,” Rheinisches Museum, N.F. xliii. （1888）, pp. 569-582.
3 Compare Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lycophron 175, who seems to have copied Apollodorus.
Apollodorus. Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Includes Frazer's notes.
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