MELICERTES  , in

Greek legend, the son of the Boeotian prince Athamas and Ino, daughter of Cadmus . Inc), pursued by her husband, who had been driven mad by Hera because Ino. had brought up the infant Dionysus, threw herself and Melicertes into the sea from a high rock between Megara and Corinth . Both were changed into marine deities—Ino as Leucothea, Melicertes as Palaemon . The body of the latter was carried by a dolphin to the Isthmus of Corinth and deposited under a pine tree . Here it was found by his uncle Sisyphus, who• had it removed to Corinth, and by command of the Nereids instituted the Isthmian games and sacrifices in his honour . There seems little doubt that the cult of Melicertes was of foreign, probably Phoenician, origin, and introduced by Phoenician navigators on the coasts and islands of the Aegean and Mediterranean . He is a native of Boeotia, where Phoenician influences were strong; at Tenedos he was propitiated by the sacrifice of children, which seems to point to his identity with Melkart . The premature death of the child in the Greek form of the legend is probably an allusion to this . The Romans identified Palaemon with Portunus (the harbour god) . No satisfactory origin of the name Palaemon has been liven . It has been suggested that it means the " wrestler " or ' struggler " (waXa(w) and is an epithet of Heracles, who is often identified with Melkart, but there does not appear to be any traditional connexion between Heracles and Palaemon . Meltcertes being Phoenician, Palaemon also has been explained as the " burning lord " (Baal-haman), but there seems little in common between a god of the sea and a god of fire .

See

Apollodorus iii . 4, 3; Ovid, Metam. iv . 416-542, Fasti, vi . 485; Hyginus, Fab . 2; Pausanias i . 44, ii . 1; Philostratus, Icones, ii . 16; articles by Toutain in Daremberg and Saglio's Diction'. naire des antiquites and by Stoll in Roscher's Lexikon der Mythologie; L . Preller, Griechische Mythologie; R . Brown, Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology (1898) .