Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

While Heracles hunted the lion of Cithaeron that preyed on the herds of Amphitryon and of Thespius, king of Thespiae, Thespius entertained him for fifty days (or fifty nights). Wishing that all his daughters should have children by the hero, the king sent a different daughter to Heracles’ bed each night; Heracles, exhausted from the hunt, thought he was always with the same woman and so fathered fifty sons (the Thespiades’ offspring). One daughter, in some notices, refused and was condemned to lifelong virginity as a priestess; the rest bore sons who later colonized Sardinia under Iolaus in Diodoran expansion, or remained local Thespian stock in Pausanias. The episode sits between the Cithaeronian lion and Heracles’ return to Thebes; it is hospitality weaponized into dynastic breeding, not a consensual romance cycle. Catalogue it apart from the youth omnibus so the Thespian progeny-myth stands clear.