Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Rhoeo, daughter of Staphylus (son of Dionysus) and Chrysothemis, became pregnant by Apollo. Her father, disbelieving a god’s paternity, cast her to sea in a chest. The chest washed ashore on Delos (or Euboea in a variant); there she bore Anius, whom Apollo claimed and made his prophet and priest-king of Delos. Anius’s wife was Dorippe; their daughters—the Oenotropae (Oeno, Spermo, Elais)—received from Dionysus the power to produce wine, grain, and oil at will. When the Achaeans sailed against Troy, Anius offered that his daughters could feed the army; in some strands Agamemnon demanded the girls as provisioners, and Dionysus turned them into doves (Ovid) when they fled, or they simply supplied the host for a time. Anius himself hosts Aeneas in later Trojan-aftermath poetry; for the Greek catalogue the core is Delian: Apollo’s mortal line on his birth-island, a chest-birth parallel to Danaë, and the wonder-working daughters who link Dionysus’s gifts to Apolline Delos. Rhoeo’s ordeal and Anius’s priesthood explain why Delos is both Apollo’s and a place of prophetic kingship in the legendary Aegean.