Characters
- Adrastus and the Seven — founders of the funeral games
- Amphiaraus — seer who names the omen Archemorus
- Euneus, Thoas — Hypsipyle’s sons (recognition subplot in some versions)
- Eurydice — mother of Opheltes
- Hypsipyle — Lemnian exile; nurse who leaves the child to fetch water
- Lycus — king of Nemea; father of Opheltes
- Opheltes — infant prince of Nemea; killed by the serpent; eponym of “beginning of doom”
- The serpent — guardian or chance killer in the Nemean grove
Places
- Argos–Thebes road — route of the Seven’s halt
- Lycia — Hypsipyle’s former home (background)
- Thebes — spring, grove, tomb, and site of the games
Themes
Narrative
On the road to Thebes the Argive host halted at Nemea, thirsty in a waterless stretch. They met Hypsipyle, former queen of Lemnos, then slave-nurse in the house of Lycurgus (or Lycus) of Nemea, tending the infant Opheltes, son of Lycurgus and Eurydice (or Amphithea). She left the child on the ground—or in a bed of wild celery (selinon)—to lead the heroes to a spring. While she was gone, a serpent of the grove killed the boy.
Amphiaraus read the omen: the death was “the beginning of doom” (*arche moros*), and the child was thereafter called Archemorus. The Seven buried him, instituted funeral games in his honour—the origin of the Nemean Games—and took celery as the crown of victory in memory of his bed of greens. Lycurgus would have punished Hypsipyle; the Argives protected her, and in some tellings she was recognised by her sons Euneus and Thoas. The games and the name Archemorus thus stand as the expedition’s first blood and its lasting Nemean aetiology—distinct from Heracles’ later Nemean lion labor as cult charter.