ERECHTHEUS  , in

Greek legend, a mythical king of Athens, originally identified with Erichthonius, but in later times distinguished from him . According to Homer, who knows nothing of Erichthonius, he was the son of Aroura (Earth), brought up by Athena, with whom his story is closely connected . In the later story, Erichthonius (son of Hephaestus and Atthis or Athena herself) was handed over by Athena to the three daughters of Cecrops—Aglauros (or Agraulos), Herse and Pandrosos—in a chest, which they were forbidden to open . Aglauros and Herse disobeyed the injunction, and when they saw the child (which had the form of a snake, or round which a snake was coiled) they went mad with fright, and threw themselves from the rock of the Acropolis (or were killed by the snake) . Athena herself then undertook the care of Erichthonius, who, when he grew up, drove out Amphictyon and took possession of the kingdom of Athens . Here he established the worship of Athena, instituted the Panathenaea, and built an Erechtheum . The Erechtheus of later times was supposed to be the grandson of Erechtheus-Erichthonius, and was also king of Athens . When Athens was attacked by the Thracian Eumolpus (or by the Eleusinians assisted by Eumolpus) victory was promised Erechtheus if he sacrificed one of his daughters . Eumolpus was slain and Erechtheus was victorious, but was himself killed by Poseidon, the father of Eumolpus, or by a thunderbolt from Zeus . The contest between Erechtheus and Eumolpus formed the subject of a lost tragedy by Euripides; Swinburne has utilized the legend in his Erechtheus . The scene of the opening of the chest is represented on a Greek vase in the British Museum . The name Erichthonius is connected with XBcav (" earth ") and the representation of him as half-snake, like Cecrops, indicates that he was regarded as one of the autochthones, the ancestors of the Athenians who sprung from the soil .

See

Apollodorus iii . 14 . 15; Euripides, Ion; Ovid, Metam. ii . 553; Hyginus, Poet. astron. ii . 13; Pausanias i . 2 . 5 . 8; E . Ermatinger, Die attische Autochthonensage (1897); article by J . A . Hild in Daremberg and Saglio's Dictionnaire des antiquites; B . Powell in Cornell Studies, xvii .

(1906), who identifies Erechtheus, Erichthonius, Poseidon and Cecrops, all denoting the sacred

serpent of Athena, whose cult she first contested, but then amalgamated with her own . The birth of Erichthonius (as a corn-spirit) is interpreted by Mannhardt as a mythical way of describing the growth of the corn, and by J . E . Harrison (Myths and Monuments of Ancient Athens, xxvii.-xxxvi.) as a fiction to explain the ceremony performed by the two maidens called Arrephori . See also Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, i . 27o; and Frazer's Pausanias, ii . 169 .