Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Amphictyon is named among Deucalion’s children—brother to Hellen (and to others such as Protogeneia in fuller lists)—and also, in Attic king-lists, an autochthon or interloper who seizes power at Athens. Apollodorus records that after Cranaus, Amphictyon reigned: he dethroned Cranaus and ruled twelve years (or a brief span), then was himself cast out by Erichthonius. Pausanias knows him as entertainer of Dionysus and as a figure who taught the mixing of wine with water—an aetiology for sober symposia—and associates him with the Amphictyonic league’s name in popular etymology (though the league’s roots are wider). As Deucalion’s son he ties the Panhellenic flood house to Attica’s second-to-third kingship; as deposer and deposed he is a hinge between Cranaus’s flood-dated reign and the Erichthonius–Erechtheus line. Little combat attaches to him; his myth is genealogical, onomastic, and briefly Dionysiac. Catalogue him to complete the Deucalionid set beside Hellen and the tribal sons.