Minyas

Minyas was a legendary king of Orchomenus in Boeotia, famous for his wealth and the first treasury built to hold it. The Minyans were named after him, and his daughters, the Minyades, were the women who refused to join the worship of Dionysus. The sources give him different fathers, and his daughter Clymene links him to the Argonaut Jason (Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.36.4; Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.1–42).

Parentage

The ancient writers do not agree about his family. Pausanias says that Chryses, son of Poseidon and Chrysogeneia, daughter of Almus, had a son Minyas, and that Minyas had a son named Orchomenus, after whom the city and its men were called Orchomenians, though the Orchomenians kept the extra name Minyans to distinguish them from those of Orchomenus in Arcadia (Description of Greece 9.36.4, 9.36.6). Pherecydes reversed the relationship and made Minyas the son of Orchomenus (Pherecydes, fragment 84). In the Argonautica, Jason says that Minyas, son of Aeolus, built Orchomenus, on the border of the Cadmeians (Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 3.1093–1094). A fragment of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, quoted by a scholiast on the Odyssey, calls Minyas a son of Poseidon (Hesiod, Catalogue of Women, fragment on Odyssey 11.326). In the Catalogue of Ships, Homer calls the city “Minyan Orchomenus” (Iliad 2.511).

King of Orchomenus

Pausanias writes that the revenues of Minyas were so great that he surpassed all earlier kings in wealth and was the first man known to have built a treasury for his riches (Description of Greece 9.36.4). He also remarks that the treasury of Minyas and the walls of Tiryns deserved as much attention as the Egyptian pyramids (Description of Greece 9.36.5). At Orchomenus Pausanias describes the treasury as a wonder second to none in Greece or elsewhere: a round building of stone, rising to a blunt apex, with the highest stone said to hold the whole structure together (Description of Greece 9.38.2). Close by were the graves of Minyas and of Hesiod (Description of Greece 9.38.3). No ancient source records how Minyas died.

The people of Orchomenus, the Minyans, were later said to have forced Thebes to pay tribute under their king Erginus, until Heracles, grown to manhood in Thebes, freed the Thebans and defeated the Minyans (Pausanias 9.37.1–2).

The Daughters of Minyas

Clymene

Clymene, a daughter of Minyas, is the mother of Alcimede, whose son was Jason; Apollonius says that most of the heroes of the Argo were called Minyans because they traced their descent from daughters of Minyas, and Jason was among them (Argonautica 1.229–233). Apollodorus names her as the wife of Iasus and mother of Atalanta (Library 3.9.2), and the epic called the Returns made her the wife of Cephalus and mother of Iphiclus (Pausanias 10.29.6). The Hesiodic Catalogue names her mother as Euryanassa, daughter of Hyperphas, and makes Clymene the wife of Phylacus, son of Deion, and mother of the swift runner Iphiclus (Hesiod, Catalogue of Women, fragment on Odyssey 11.326).

The Minyades and Dionysus

The Minyades are best known for rejecting Dionysus. In Ovid, Alcithoe, Minyas’ daughter, and her two sisters did not accept the rites of the god and denied that Bacchus was a son of Jupiter. While every other woman of Thebes left her loom for the festival, the daughters of Minyas stayed indoors, carding wool and spinning (Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.1–42). At dusk, drums and flutes sounded from nowhere, the looms turned to vines and ivy, and the house shook with flames and the howls of phantom beasts. As the sisters hid in the smoke-filled house, thin membranes spread over their limbs and they became bats, which hate the light and fly at night (Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.389–415).

Plutarch gives a darker story from Orchomenus. The daughters of Minyas, Leucippe, Arsinoe and Alcathoe, went mad, craved human flesh and drew lots for their children, and the lot fell on Leucippe, who gave up her son Hippasus to be torn to pieces. Their husbands, who put on dark garments for grief, were called Psoloeis, and the women Oleiae, the destroyers. At the yearly festival of the Agrionia, the priest of Dionysus pursued their descendants with a drawn sword and was allowed to kill any he caught (Plutarch, Greek Questions 38).

Minyas Sources

Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.36.4–6, 9.37.1–2, 9.38.2–3, 10.29.6; Homer, Iliad 2.511; Hesiod, Catalogue of Women (fragment on Odyssey 11.326); Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 1.229–233, 3.1093–1094; Apollodorus, Library 3.9.2; Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.1–42, 4.389–415; Plutarch, Greek Questions 38; Pherecydes, fragment 84 (Müller).

See Also: Dionysus, Minyades, Jason, Argonauts, Poseidon, Heracles, Thebes