Admetus, king of the Molossians
Admetus (Gr. Αδμητος) was a king of the Molossians in
the time of Themistocles, who, when supreme at Athens, had
opposed him, perhaps not without insult, in some suit to the people. But Themistocles, when flying from the officers who were
ordered to seize him as a party to the treason of Pausanias, and driven from
Corcyra to Epirus, found himself upon some emergency, with no hope
of refuge but the house of Admetus. Admetus was absent; but Phthia his queen welcomed the stranger, and bade him, as the most
solemn form of supplication among the Molossians, take her son, the young prince, and sit with him in his hands upon the hearth.
Admetus on his return home assured him of protection; according to another account in Plutarch,
he himself, and not Phthia enjoined the form as affording him a pretext for refusal: he, at any rate, shut his ears to all that
the Athenian and Lacedaemonian commissioners, who soon afterwards arrived, could say; and sent
Themistocles safely to Pydna on his way to the
References
- ^ Thucydides, i. 136, 137
- ^ Plutarch, Themistocles 24
- ^ Clough, Arthur Hugh (1867), "Admetus (2)", in Smith, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. 1, Boston, pp. 19
This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology by William Smith (1867).
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