Athamas—according to some both Athamas and Inô—were afterwards driven mad by the anger of the goddess Hêrê; insomuch that the father shot his own son Learchus, and would also have put to death his other son Melikertês, if Inô had not snatched him away. She fled with the boy, across the Megarian territory and Mount Geraneia, to the rock Moluris, overhanging the Sarônic Gulf: Athamas pursued her, and in order to escape him she leaped into the sea. She became a sea-goddess under the title of Leukothea; while the body of Melikertês was cast ashore on the neighboring territory of Schœnus, and buried by his uncle Sisyphus, who was directed by the Nereïds to pay to him heroic honors under the name of Palæmôn. The Isthmian games, one of the great periodical festivals of Greece, were celebrated in honor of the god Poseidôn, in conjunction with Palæmôn as a hero. Athamas abandoned his territory, and became the first settler of a neighboring region called from him Athmantia, or the Athamantian plain. [272]
[272] Eurip. Mêd. 1250, with the Scholia, according to which story Inô killed both her children:—
Ἴνω μανεῖσαν ἐκ θεῶν, ὅθ᾽ ἡ Διὸς Δάμαρ νιν ἐξέπεμψε δώματων ἄλῃ.
Compare Valckenaer, Diatribe in Eurip.; Apollodôr. i. 9, 1-2; Schol. ad Pindar. Argum. ad Isthm. p. 180. The many varieties of the fable of Athamas and his family may be seen in Hygin. fab. 1-5; Philostephanus ap. Schol. Iliad, vii. 86: it was a favorite subject with the tragedians, and was handled by Æschylus, Sophoklês and Euripidês in more than one drama (see Welcker, Griechische Tragöd. vol. i. p. 312-332; vol. ii. p. 612). Heyne says that the proper reading of the name is _Phrixus_, not _Phryxus_,—incorrectly, I think: Φρύξος connects the name both with the story of roasting the wheat (φρύγειν), and also with the country Φρυγία, of which it was pretended that Phryxus was the Eponymus. Inô, or Leukothea, was worshipped as a heroine at Megara as well as at Corinth (Pausan. i. 42, 3): the celebrity of the Isthmian games carried her worship, as well as that of Palæmôn, throughout most parts of Greece (Cicero, De Nat. Deor. iii. 16). She is the only personage of this family noticed either in the Iliad or Odyssey: in the latter poem she is a sea-goddess, who has once been a mortal, daughter of Kadmus; she saves Odysseus from imminent danger at sea by presenting to him her κρήδεμνον (Odyss. v. 433; see the refinements of Aristidês, Orat. iii. p. 27). The voyage of Phryxus and Hellê to Kolchis was related in the Hesiodic Eoiai: we find the names of the children of Phryxus by the daughter of Æêtês quoted from that poem (Schol. ad Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 1123) both Hesiod and Pherekydês mentioned the golden fleece of the ram (Eratosthen. Catasterism. 19; Pherekyd. Fragm. 53, Didot).