Glaucus of Potniae and the Man-Eating Mares

Catalogue ID: 05-local-and-lesser/147-glaucus-potniae-mares-apollodorus

Cycle: Local and lesser — Boeotian / Corinthian Glaucus / tragic horse-horror

Version line: Apollodorean / Pausanian / Virgilian notice — mares of Potniae devour their master

Sources: Apollodorus, *Library* 2.3.1 (brief genealogical notice in Bellerophon context); Pausanias 6.20.19 (Olympia Glaucus hero); Hyginus, *Fabulae* 250, 273; Vergil, *Georgics* 3.266–268 (**Roman** brief notice—labeled); scholia on Euripides *Phoenissae*

Source file: /workspace/greek-myth-catalogue/05-local-and-lesser/147-glaucus-potniae-mares-apollodorus.md

Characters

Eros — divine cause of the madness (common strand)
Glaucus — horse-breeder; eaten by his mares
Mares of Potniae — maddened man-eaters
Sisyphus — father in the Corinthian stemma (background)

Places

Ethiopia — associated pasture and doom
Iolcus — Pelias’s games in one setting of the death
Rock tomb — Sisyphid homeland in one stemma

Themes

None detected.

Narrative

Glaucus son of Sisyphus (Corinthian line) or the Boeotian lord of Potniae kept mares that he denied natural mating or fed on human flesh to make them fiercer for racing—accounts vary. Aphrodite, angered at the frustration of the mares (or at Glaucus’s scorn), drove the horses mad at the funeral games of Pelias (or on the road at Potniae). They overturned his chariot and tore him apart, devouring their master. The tale aetiologizes the dread of Potnian horses and stands as a Greek horse-horror parallel to Diomedes’s Thracian mares (Heracles’ eighth labor). Pausanias knows a hero-cult Glaucus at Olympia linked to Taraxippos panic. Catalogue this Glaucus apart from Bellerophon’s Lycian ally and from Minos’s son restored by Polyidus.