Echetus

Echetus (/ˈɛkɪtəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἔχετος, romanized: Ékhetos) is a mythical king and son of Euchenor (Εὐχήνωρ) and Phlogea (Φλόγεα) mentioned in Homer's Odyssey. The epic describes him as a frightening and cruel king.

Mythology

He is mentioned in Book 18 of Homer's Odyssey, as well as in Book 21 in which he is described as the "destroyer of all mortals" by Antinous (one of the suitors).

In Book 18, the beggar Irus was threatened with being handed over to Echetus, who would then have had Irus' nose, ears and testes cut off and thrown to his dogs. The story also described how Echetus had a daughter, Metope, who had an intrigue with a lover; as a punishment Echetus mutilated the lover and blinded Metope by piercing her eyes with bronze needles. He then incarcerated her in a tower and gave her grains of bronze, promising that she would regain her sight when she had ground these grains into flour.^[1][2]

Eustathius and the scholia on this passage call the daughter and her lover Amphissa and Aechmodicus respectively.^[3][4]

Modern analyses on Echetus

It is thought that Echetus was a mythological creation, used to scare disobedient children or used as the villain in bedtime stories. An alternate theory is that Echetus was a real king around the time of Homer, and that he was quite deformed and possibly a cannibal; no evidence currently exists to support this theory, however.^[5]

Some historians suggest that the word ἤπειρόνδε epironde "mainland", mentioned in the Odyssey in the passages involving king Echetus, must refer to mainland Greece from the perspective of Homer's Ithaca.^[6][7] Some scholars have conjectured that Echetus in the Odyssey is a mythical "king of Epirus",^[8][9] but Epirus as a region is not mentioned in the Odyssey, it is attested for the first time by Hecataeus of Miletus (6th century BCE),^[10] and a unified state of Epirus only emerged by encompassing all the major Epirote peoples (Molossians, Thesprotians and Chaonians) between the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods.^[11] In the Odyssey, king Echetus, who seems to belong to the mainland opposite Ithaca, is hostile to this island; by contrast Thesprotia, which is a region more distant than the area of Echetus, is an ally of Ithaca.^[7]