Aeacus

Aeacus is the son of Zeus and the nymph Aegina, father of Telamon and Peleus, and one of the three judges of the dead. He is the grandfather of Achilles, through Peleus, and of Ajax the Great, through Telamon.

Zeus carried Aegina off to a lonely island that would later bear her name, and there she gave birth to him. Aeacus grew up with no people to rule, or, in Ovid's telling, watched a plague sent by Hera empty the island, and he prayed to his father. Zeus turned the ants of a sacred oak into men: the Myrmidons, the ant-people, a name later borne by the warriors his grandson Achilles led to Troy.

With his wife Endeis he had Telamon and Peleus, and the sea-nymph Psamathe, who had turned herself into a seal to escape him, bore him a third son, Phocus. Phocus outshone his half-brothers at the games, and they killed him out of envy. In Apollodorus' version, Telamon struck him with a discus and Peleus helped hide the body; in Pausanias, it is Peleus who throws the stone. When the crime came to light, Aeacus banished them both. Telamon became king of Salamis and father of Ajax the Great; Peleus settled in Phthia and fathered Achilles. Only the early genealogist Pherecydes, as Apollodorus reports, made Telamon a friend of Peleus rather than his brother.

Apollodorus calls him the most pious of men. When a drought starved all of Greece, the oracles declared that only his prayers could end it, and the rain came back when he prayed. Pindar tells that Apollo and Poseidon took him as a fellow builder of the walls of Troy, and that the stretch raised by his mortal hands was where his own descendants would one day break into the city. His justice earned him a place among the dead: in Plato's Gorgias, Zeus makes him a judge beside Minos and Rhadamanthus, for the souls that come from Europe, and Apollodorus adds that he keeps the keys of the house of Hades.