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Lynceus reigned over Argos after Danaus and begat a son Abas by Hypermnestra; and Abas had twin sons Acrisius and Proetus1 by Aglaia, daughter of Mantineus. These two quarrelled with each other while they were still in the womb, and when they were grown up they waged war for the kingdom,2 and in the course of the war they were the first to invent shields. And Acrisius gained the mastery and drove Proetus from Argos; and Proetus went to Lycia to the court of Iobates or, as some say, of Amphianax, and married his daughter, whom Homer calls Antia,3 but the tragic poets call her Stheneboea.4 His in-law restored him to his own land with an army of Lycians, and he occupied Tiryns, which the Cyclopes had fortified for him.5 They divided the whole of the Argive territory between them and settled in it, Acrisius reigning over Argos and Proetus over Tiryns.


1 With this and what follows compare Paus. 2.16.2, Paus. 2.25.7.

2 So the twins Esau and Jacob quarrelled both in the womb and in after life (Genesis, xxv.21ff.). Compare Rendel Harris, Boanerges, pp. 279ff. who argues that Proetus was the elder twin, who, as in the case of Esau and Jacob, was worsted by his younger brother.

3 Hom. Il. 6.160.

4 See below, Apollod. 2.3.1, Apollod. 3.9.1. Euripides called her Stheneboea (Eustathius on Hom. Il. vi.158, p 632).

5 Compare Bacch. 10.77ff., ed. Jebb; Paus. 2.25.8; Strab. 8.6.8.

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