Alcmaeon

← Encyclopedia

Alcmaeon was a hero of Greek myth, son of the seer-warrior Amphiaraus and of Eriphyle, remembered above all for killing his own mother and for the madness that followed. The Greeks set his story beside that of Orestes, the other great matricide of legend, and the pairing was deliberate: two sons who killed a parent at a dead father’s command, and were hunted afterward by the avenging Erinyes.

The chain of guilt began a generation earlier. Eriphyle, bribed with the necklace of Harmonia, forced her husband Amphiaraus to join the doomed expedition of the Seven against Thebes, though he foresaw his own death in it. Before he marched, he charged his sons to avenge him on their mother. Years later Alcmaeon led the Epigoni — the sons of the fallen Seven — in a second campaign that succeeded where the first had failed and took the city. Then, under his father’s old injunction, he killed Eriphyle.

What the texts say of the aftermath follows the older pattern of pollution and flight. The Furies drove Alcmaeon mad, and he wandered in search of a land that could purify him, much as Orestes wandered. The accounts that survive give him a tangled later history: a first marriage to Arsinoe, daughter of the king Phegeus; a cure found only on new-made ground at the mouth of the river Achelous, where no earth had existed at the time of the murder; a second union with the river-god’s daughter Callirhoe; and the fatal reappearance of the same cursed necklace, which drew him back to Phegeus’s house and to his death at the hands of Phegeus’s sons. The details vary from source to source, and much of the fullest material reaches us only through later mythographers.

Alcmaeon’s story was prominent in archaic and classical Greece, and is now largely lost. A whole early epic, the Alcmaeonis, took his name, and the great tragedians are recorded to have written plays about him; almost none of this text survives except in fragments and summaries. What scholarship can establish is mostly the shape of the tradition rather than any single canonical version — the figure is attested widely, but the narrative that has come down is composite, assembled from scattered notices.

The interest the figure held for the Greeks lay in the bind itself. A father’s command and a mother’s blood pulled in opposite directions, and obedience to one was a crime against the other; the law of vengeance and the horror of kin-murder could not both be satisfied. That the same impasse was given two heroes, Alcmaeon and Orestes, suggests it was the dilemma, not the man, that the tradition was working through — a question about justice that mere justice could not close. Where Orestes was finally acquitted, Alcmaeon found no such release. He was purified, and then undone, by the same cursed gift that had set the whole sequence moving.

→ Related: Oenone · Glaucus