contention she planted on the Acropolis near the salt spring the long-lived olive which was to be the mother-tree of the Attic orchards. The witnesses awarded the dominion to Athene, whereupon Poseidon, angry at being dispossessed, covered the fertile plain of Attike with a flood. Kekrops now wedded Agraulos, the daughter of Aktaios, to whom some mythographers assigned the first kingship; and they had three daughters, Agraulos (Aglauros), Herse ("Dew," or "Offspring"), and Pandrosos ("All-Bedewing"), and a son Erysichthon, "a shadowy personality" who died childless.
Erichthonios.—On the death of Kekrops, Kranaos, another son of the soil and the most powerful of the native chieftains, became king, and when Atthis, one of his daughters, died, he attached the name of Attike to the country as a memorial to her. In his reign the flood of Deukalion occurred, and then came a series of dynastic changes. Kranaos was driven from the throne by Amphiktyon, also a son of the soil, and Amphiktyon was expelled in his turn by Erichthonios, whose father was Hephaistos and whose mother was either Athene, Earth, or Atthis. The legend which makes him the son of Athene relates that without the knowledge of the other gods she placed him as an infant in a chest, which she entrusted to Pandrosos with the injunction that on no account was it to be opened. Feminine curiosity, however, got the better of the sisters of Pandrosos and they opened the chest, out of which sprang a serpent that killed them, or, as some said, drove them mad so that they leaped to their death from the cliffs of the Acropolis.[1] Athene then took the child into her own care and reared him in her shrine; and when he had grown up, he expelled Amphiktyon, erected a wooden statue of his mother on the sacred hill, and established the Panathenaïc festival. After his death his body was buried In the precinct of Athene, and his kingdom was left to his son Pandion.
Boutes and Erechtheus.—Pandion is simply a link in a chain of genealogy. He was the father of the unhappy women,
- ↑ Miss Harrison (Myth. and Mon., pp. xxxiii, xxxv) advances the very probable suggestion that this story is primarily aetiological in character, being intended as an explanation of the ritual of the Arrephoria (or Hersephoria). The fate of the disobedient sisters is a detail added for the purpose of frightening officiating maidens into strict observance of the rules governing the ritual.
