Parthenopaeus

Youngest of the Seven against Thebes, an Arcadian whose name (πάρθενος, 'maiden') was taken by the Hellenistic mythographers as evidence that his mother was the virgin huntress Atalanta. The sources cannot agree on his father: Hyginus *Fabulae* 70 names **Meleager** the Calydonian (consistent with the boar-hunt tradition Atalanta belongs to); Hyginus *Fab.* 99 names **Ares**; the Aeschylean and Euripidean tragic tradition leaves him fatherless and emphasises his exposure on Mount Parthenion in Arcadia and his rearing by shepherds — Apollodorus 3.9.2 reports the etiology and notes Atalanta's later marriage to Meilanion (after the foot-race) but does **not** make Meilanion the father of Parthenopaeus; the Meilanion-paternity reading is a late marginal scholiastic tradition. Statius *Thebaid* 4.246–348 + 9.570–907 makes him the lyric protagonist of the war's youth-and-pity register — a boy too young to be at war, distinguished by his shield blazoned with the Calydonian boar (his mother's hunt) and his death by a spear-cast of Dryas at the gate (Aeschylus puts him at the Borrhaian gate facing Actor with a Sphinx-blazoned shield, *Sept.* 526–567). Euripides *Phoenissae* 1153–1162 grants him the showcase death in the gate-by-gate report that closes the play.

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