Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Neleus of Pylos would give his daughter Pero only to the man who brought him the cattle of Phylacus (kept at Phylace, guarded with a fierce dog). Bias, brother of Melampus, desired Pero. Melampus undertook the theft, foreseeing that he would be caught and imprisoned for a year. He was taken; in the cell he overheard woodworms predicting the collapse of a beam, warned his jailer, and won Phylacus’s trust. He then cured Phylacus’s son Iphiclus of impotence—caused, the seer learned, by a childhood fright at a bloody gelding-knife—by applying rust from that same knife in a potion. Grateful, Phylacus surrendered the cattle. Melampus drove them to Pylos; Bias married Pero. The *Odyssey* names Pero and the bride-price among the famous women of the nekyia and in Theoclymenus’s Melampodid genealogy. Catalogue the cattle-and-marriage plot apart from Melampus’s serpentine initiation and the later Argive cure of the Proetides.