Peleus

Apollodorus makes Peleus and Telamon the sons of Aeacus, whom Zeus fathered on the nymph Aegina, on the island later named after her. Aeacus also fathered Phocus on the Nereid Psamathe. Phocus excelled at athletics, and his half-brothers plotted against him. The lot fell to Telamon, who killed him with a thrown quoit, and Peleus helped hide the body. When the murder came out, Aeacus drove both brothers from the island.

Peleus fled to Phthia, where King Eurytion purified him and gave him his daughter Antigone and a third of the land. On the hunt for the Calydonian boar he threw a spear at the animal and killed Eurytion by accident. Apollodorus's list of the boar hunters names him beside the huntress Atalanta. He fled again, to Acastus at Iolcus, and was purified a second time. There Astydamia, the wife of Acastus, fell in love with him. Rejected, she drove his wife to hang herself and told Acastus that Peleus had tried to seduce her.

Acastus would not kill a man he had purified himself. He took Peleus hunting on Mount Pelion instead, hid his sword in cow dung while he slept, and left him. Apollodorus says the centaurs caught Peleus and would have killed him, but Chiron saved him and gave back the sword. Peleus later took Iolcus with Jason and the Dioscuri, killed Astydamia, and marched his army into the city between the pieces of her body.

His marriage came out of a quarrel among the gods. Zeus and Poseidon both wanted Thetis, until Themis warned that her son would be mightier than his father. Pindar has Themis name Peleus as the most pious man on the plain of Iolcus. On Chiron's advice Peleus seized Thetis and held on while she became fire, water and a beast. The gods celebrated the wedding on Pelion with feasting and song.

Their son was Achilles. Apollodorus says Thetis hid the baby in fire by night to burn away his mortal part. Peleus saw him writhing in the flames and cried out, and Thetis left for the sea and the Nereids. Peleus took the child to Chiron to be raised. In the Iliad, Achilles tells Priam that the gods gave his father wealth, a kingdom and a goddess for a wife. They also gave him only one son, doomed to an early death far from home.

The poets tell the courtship differently. In the Iliad, Thetis tells Hephaestus that Zeus forced her alone of the sea goddesses to marry a mortal. She endured his bed against her will. Catullus says the opposite: Peleus burned for Thetis and she did not scorn a mortal husband. Ovid gives the prophecy about her son to Proteus, not Themis. His Proteus also teaches Peleus to bind her in her sleep so she cannot escape through her changing shapes.

Apollonius of Rhodes names both sons of Aeacus in his catalogue of the Argonauts, and says they left Aegina in exile after killing their brother Phocus. On the voyage home, Thetis appears to Peleus alone on the Tyrrhenian shore with a message from Hera. Apollonius then explains the pain it causes him. She had not come to him since she left their marriage in anger, when he cried out on seeing their baby in the fire.

Euripides puts Peleus on stage as an old man in the Andromache. He arrives in time to stop Menelaus from killing Andromache and her son, and attacks Menelaus as a coward who could not keep his own wife. After the death of his grandson Neoptolemus, Thetis appears and promises to make Peleus a god who will live with her in the halls of Nereus. Apollodorus gives him a plainer end: the sons of Acastus drove him out of Phthia, and he died.