Asopus

There were coals in the river. Travellers in the Peloponnese were told that men still fetched them out of the Asopus, black lumps lying in a bed of running water where nothing should have been burning, and that they had been there since the day Zeus threw lightning at a father who would not stop looking for his daughter.

Asopus was that father. The Greeks had two rivers of the name, and they never quite managed to keep the god of one apart from the god of the other. The first rose in the hill country of Phlius, ran north through the territory of Sicyon and came out on the Corinthian Gulf. The second came down off Mount Cithaeron in Boeotia and flowed east across the plain, the stream that marked the line between the land of Thebes and the land of Plataea. The Phliasians claimed the god for their river. Pindar, a Theban poet, claimed him for his. Pausanias, the travel writer of the second century AD, recorded the quarrel without settling it.

Nobody agreed on where Asopus came from either. The mythographer Apollodorus gives three answers in a single breath: a son of Ocean and Tethys, or of Poseidon and Pero according to the early writer Acusilaus, or of Zeus and Eurynome. The historian Diodorus files him among the children of Ocean who gave their names to rivers. The Sicyonians told Pausanias something plainer and stranger. Asopus, son of Poseidon and a woman named Celusa, was a man who found the river’s water for Aras, their earliest king, and the river kept his name. He married Metope, a daughter of the Arcadian river Ladon. Apollodorus gives the couple two sons, Ismenus and Pelagon, and twenty daughters. Diodorus makes it twelve.

The daughters are the reason Asopus is remembered. Almost every one of them carries the name of a place. Aegina became an island, Corcyra another, Salamis a third. Thebe gave her name to Thebes, Plataea to Plataea, Thespia and Tanagra to two more Boeotian towns, Cleone to a small city near Nemea and Nemea to that valley. Sinope ended up on the far shore of the Black Sea, where Apollonius of Rhodes says Zeus gave her a home and granted her wish to stay a virgin. Peirene became a spring in Corinth. Harpina lay with Ares and bore Oenomaus, king at Pisa. Herodotus, describing the ground at Plataea, mentions a little river called Oeroe that splits in two on its way down from Cithaeron, and the locals told him she too was a daughter of the Asopus. A river god with this many daughters is, among other things, a very convenient ancestor to have.

The story everyone told was about Aegina. Zeus carried her off. Asopus went looking for her, from his own valley down to Corinth, and there Sisyphus, the cleverest and least trustworthy king in Greece, told him who had taken her. Pausanias heard that Sisyphus would not talk until he was paid: Asopus had to give him a spring of water on the citadel of Acrocorinth first. Then Asopus went after Zeus himself. Zeus answered with thunderbolts and sent him back to his own streams. He carried Aegina to an island then called Oenone, which has been called Aegina ever since, and there she bore him a son, Aeacus. Because the boy was alone on the island, Zeus turned the ants into men to keep him company.

Sisyphus paid for the information. Apollodorus says that his stone in the underworld, rolled uphill forever, is the punishment for telling Asopus what he knew. An older writer, Pherecydes, said Zeus sent Death himself after the informer.

The poets were drawn to the injured father. Statius, writing in Latin in the first century AD, has the river rage in his banks over the stolen girl and declare war on the stars before the triple lightning beats him down, and he claims the proud flood still pants fiery ashes up at heaven. James Frazer suggested that this may be the poet’s version of mist rising off a river. Callimachus, telling how every river in Greece fled from the pregnant Leto, has Asopus bringing up the rear, heavy at the knee, because the thunderbolt had crippled him. Nonnus, late in antiquity, gives him the same dragging lame leg, and he imagines the shield of Aeacus with Zeus as an eagle carrying a woman in his talons, a river god on fire beside them, and Aegina turned away in grief. A fine bridal gift, she seems to say, to have destroyed my father.

The Boeotian poet Corinna told it differently, and her version survives on a damaged papyrus now in Berlin. In her poem Asopus has nine daughters, and four gods have taken them: three to Zeus, three to Poseidon, two to Apollo and one to Hermes, all of them pushed on by Eros and Aphrodite. Asopus cannot find out what has happened until a prophet named Acraephen, speaking from the oracle on Mount Ptoion, tells him. The daughters will bear a race of half-divine heroes. He is father-in-law to gods now, and he should stop grieving. Asopus weeps, takes the seer by the right hand, and promises wedding gifts. Brian McPhee, writing in *Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies* in 2018, argues that Corinna turned the single famous abduction of Aegina into nine so that places all over the Greek world would lead back to Boeotia. Corinna’s own date is still argued over.

Pindar used the family the same way. Thebe and Aegina, he wrote, were the youngest daughters of Asopus, and Zeus set one by the waters of Dirce to rule Thebes and carried the other to her island. That kinship had a political life. Herodotus tells how the Thebans, wanting revenge on Athens, were told by Delphi to ask help from their nearest. Their nearest neighbours were already their allies, so somebody pointed out that Thebe and Aegina had been sisters. Thebes sent to Aegina.

The Boeotian river had its own history in war. Before the battle of Plataea in 479 BC the Greek and Persian armies faced each other across it, and the Greek seer reported that the sacrifices were good if the Greeks stayed on the defensive and bad if they crossed the Asopus and attacked first. The Plataeans told Pausanias that they knew of no kings before Asopus except Cithaeron, who gave his name to the mountain.

Outside the poems, the god belonged to the people who drank from him. The Roman-era writer Aelian notes that the Sicyonians and Phliasians represented their Asopus in the form of a bull. The Phliasians also sent a sculpture group to Olympia: Nemea, Zeus seizing Aegina, Harpina, Corcyra and Thebe in a row, and at the end Asopus himself.

His power was the power of the water. He could give a spring to a king, father the founders of cities, and run high enough in flood that an invading army in Statius would not risk the crossing. His limit was Zeus. He could search, bargain and pursue, and in the end he was sent back to his bed with coals in it and a limp, and his daughters stayed where the gods had put them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Asopus in Greek mythology?

Asopus is the Greek god of the river Asopus. Two rivers had the name, one in the Peloponnese near Phlius and Sicyon and one in Boeotia between Thebes and Plataea, and the stories of their gods were often mixed together.

Why did Zeus strike Asopus with thunderbolts?

Zeus carried off Asopus’s daughter Aegina, and Asopus pursued him after Sisyphus told him who had taken her. According to Apollodorus, Zeus drove Asopus back to his own streams with thunderbolts, which is why coals were later said to be found in the river.

Who were the daughters of Asopus?

The sources give Asopus twelve, twenty or, in the poet Corinna, nine daughters. Many gave their names to places, including Aegina, Corcyra, Salamis, Thebe, Plataea, Thespia, Tanagra, Sinope, Cleone, Nemea and the Corinthian spring Peirene.

What did Sisyphus have to do with Asopus?

Sisyphus, king of Corinth, told Asopus that Zeus had abducted Aegina, and Pausanias says he demanded a spring on Acrocorinth in return. Apollodorus says the endless rolling of Sisyphus’s stone in the underworld is his punishment for informing on Zeus.

How was Asopus worshipped?

Aelian records that the Sicyonians and Phliasians represented Asopus in the form of a bull. The Phliasians also dedicated a sculpture group at Olympia showing Asopus, several of his daughters, and Zeus seizing Aegina.

Related Entries

Sisyphus, Zeus, Antiope, Thanatos, Myrmidons, Oceanus, Tethys, Poseidon, Leto, Potamoi, Achelous, Naiad, Boann, Ganga, Hapi