Telephos. In Greek mythology, Telephus was the son of Heracles and Auge, who was the daughter of king Aleus of Tegea. He was adopted by Teuthras, the king of Mysia, in Asia Minor, whom he succeeded as king. Telephus was wounded by Achilles when the Achaeans came to his kingdom on their way to sack Troy and bring Helen back to Sparta, and later healed by Achilles. He was the father of Eurypylus, who fought alongside the Trojans against the Greeks in the Trojan War. Telephus' story was popular in ancient Greek and Roman iconography and tragedy. Telephus' name and mythology were possibly derived from the Hittite god Telepinu. Telephus' mother was Auge, the daughter of Aleus, the king of Tegea, a city in Arcadia, in the Peloponnese of mainland Greece. His father was Heracles, who had seduced or raped Auge, a priestess of Athena. When Aleus found out, he tried to dispose of mother and child, but eventually both ended up in Asia Minor at the court of Teuthras, king of Mysia, where Telephus is adopted as the childless king's heir. There were three versions of how Telephus, the son of an Arcadian princess, came to be the heir of a Mysian king. In the oldest extant account, Auge goes to Mysia, is raised as a daughter by Teuthras, and Telephus is born there. In some accounts Telephus arrives in Mysia as an infant with his mother, where Teuthras marries Auge, and adopts Telephus. In others, while Auge is delivered to the Mysian court where she again becomes wife to the king, Telephus is instead left behind in Arcadia, having been abandoned on Mount Parthenion, either by Aleus, or by Auge when she gave birth while being taken to the sea by Nauplius to be drowned. However Telephus is suckled by a deer found and raised by King Corythus, or his herdsmen. Seeking knowledge of his mother, Telephus consulted the Delphic oracle which directed him to Mysia, where he was reunited with Auge and adopted by Teuthras. A surviving fragment of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, representing perhaps the oldest tradition, places Telephus' birth in Mysia. In this telling Telephus' mother Auge had been received at the court of Teuthras in Mysia and raised by him as a daughter. And It is in Mysia that Heracles, while seeking the horses of Laomedon, fathers Telephus. All other surviving sources have Telephus born in Arcadia. The oldest such account, by the historian and geographer Hecataeus, says that Heracles used to have sex with Auge whenever he came to Tegea. We are told this by the second-century geographer Pausanias, who goes on to say, perhaps drawing upon Hecataeus, that when Aleus discovered that Auge had given birth to Telephus, he had mother and child shut up in a wooden chest and cast adrift on the open sea. The chest made its way from Arcadia to the Caicus river plain in Asia Minor, where the local king Teuthras married Auge. Sophocles, in the fifth century BC, wrote a tragedy Aleadae, which apparently told the circumstances of Telephus' birth. The play is lost and only fragments now remain, but a declamation attributed to the fourth-century BC orator Alcidamas probably used Sophocles' Aleadae for one of its sources. According to Alcidamas, Auge's father Aleus had been warned by the Delphic oracle that if Auge had a son, then this grandson would kill Aleus' sons, so Aleus made Auge a priestess of Athena, telling her she must remain a virgin, on pain of death. But Heracles passing through Tegea, being entertained by Aleus in the temple of Athena, became enamored of Auge and while drunk had sex with her. Aleus discovered that Auge was pregnant and gave her to Nauplius to be drowned. But, on the way to the sea, Auge gave birth to Telephus on Mount Parthenion, and according to Alcidamas, Nauplius, ignoring his orders, sold mother and child to the childless Mysian king Teuthras, who married Auge and adopted Telephus, and later gave him to Priam to be educated at Troy. Alcidamas' version of the story must have diverged from Sophocles in at least this last respect. For, rather than the infant Telephus being sold to Teuthras, as in Alcidamas, an Aleadae fragment seems to insure that in the Sophoclean play, as in many later accounts, the new-born Telephus was instead abandoned, where he is suckled by a deer. Euripides wrote a play Auge which also dealt with Telephus' birth. The play is lost, but a summary of the plot can be pieced together from various later sources, in particular a narrative summary, given by the Armenian historian Moses of Chorene. A drunken Heracles, during a festival of Athena, rapes Athena's priestess Auge, daughter of Aleus, as she conducted the dances during the nocturnal rites.