Demophon of Elaeus

Demophon, whose name means “voice of the people,” was a king of the Greek colony of Elaeus in Thrace, on the Gallipoli peninsula. His story, known only from the first-century Roman text De astronomia by Gaius Julius Hyginus—who credits the third-century BC Greek historian Phylarchus—involves a plague, human sacrifice, and a brutal cycle of revenge.

Mythology

When a deadly disease struck Elaeus, Demophon consulted the oracle of Apollo. The god told him the plague could only be stopped by sacrificing a noble-born maiden each year to the city’s ancestral gods. Demophon followed this instruction, selecting the victims by lot—but he always ensured his own daughters were excluded from the drawing.

This continued until a nobleman named Mastusius objected. He refused to let his daughter be entered in the lottery unless Demophon’s daughters were included as well. Enraged, Demophon sacrificed Mastusius’s daughter without drawing lots at all. Mastusius hid his anger out of patriotism, pretending his daughter might have been chosen anyway, and Demophon soon forgot the incident.

Mastusius then acted friendly and invited the king and his daughters to a solemn sacrifice. Demophon sent his daughters ahead while he finished some duties. When the girls arrived, Mastusius seized them, killed them all, and mixed their blood with wine in a bowl.

When Demophon arrived and asked for his daughters, he was offered the bowl to drink. Realizing what had happened, he ordered Mastusius and the bowl thrown into the sea. The cape there was later called Mastusian, and the harbor the Bowl, after the vessel. The bowl itself was placed among the stars as the constellation Crater (the Wine-cup).

Culture

The myth survives only in Hyginus’s work, where it is attributed to Phylarchus, a Greek historian known for sensational tales. The story may connect to Phylarchus’s claim that human sacrifice was common when setting out against an enemy, and to his tendency to blend myth with historical practices like animal sacrifice. In antiquity, the tale was used to teach a moral lesson about the persistence of hatred. It also belongs to a group of myths in which young girls die because of their virginity—often forced into sacrificial roles—reinforcing the idea that a girl’s value was defined by her virginity.