[3]
Pelops, after being slaughtered and boiled at the banquet of the gods, was fairer than
ever when he came to life again,1 and on account
of his surpassing beauty he became a minion of Poseidon, who gave him a winged chariot,
such that even when it ran through the sea the axles were not wet.2
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
1 The story was that at a banquet of the gods, to which he had been invited, Tantalus served up the mangled limbs of his young son Pelops, which he had boiled in a kettle. But the murdered child was restored to life by being put back into the kettle and then drawn out of it, with an ivory shoulder to replace the shoulder of flesh which Demeter or, according to others, Thetis had unwittingly eaten. See Pind. O. 1.24(37)ff., with the Scholiast on Pind. O. 1.37; Lucian, De saltatione 54; Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lycophron 152; Nonnus, in Westermann's Mythographi Graeci, Appendix Narrationum 57, p. 380; Serv. Verg. A. 6.603, and on Verg. G. 3.7; Hyginus, Fab. 83; Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. Bode, i. pp. 109, 186 (Second Vatican Mythographer 102; Third Vatican Mythographer vi.21). The ivory shoulder of Pelops used afterwards to be exhibited at Elis (Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxviii.34); but it was no longer to be seen in the time of Pausanias (Paus. 1.13.6).
2 Compare Pind. O. 1.37(60)ff., Pind. O. 1.71(114)ff.; Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lycophron 156. Pindar describes how Pelops went to the shore of the sea and prayed to Poseidon to give him a swift chariot, and how the god came forth and bestowed on him a golden chariot with winged steeds. On the chest of Cypselus at Olympia the horses of Pelops in the chariot race were represented with wings (Paus. 5.17.7).
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.