Auge

ALEUS, king of Tegea, the son of Apheidas, married Neaera, a daughter of Pereus, who bore him Auge, Cepheus, Lycurgus, and Aphidamas. An ancient shrine of Athene Alta, founded at Tegea by Aleus, still contains a sacred couch of the goddess.
b. When, on a visit to Delphi, Aleus was warned by the Oracle that Neaera’s two brothers would die by the hand of her daughter’s son, he hurried home and appointed Auge a priestess of Athene, threatening to kill her if she were unchaste. Whether Heracles came to Tegea on his way to fight King Augeias, or on his return from Sparta, is disputed; at all events, Aleus entertained him hospitably in Athene’s temple. There, flushed with wine, Heracles violated the virgin-priestess beside a fountain which is still shown to the north of the shrine; since, however, Auge made no outcry, it is often suggested that she came there by assignation.

c. Heracles continued on his way, and at Stymphalus begot Eures on Parthenope, the daughter of Stymphalus; But meanwhile pestilence and famine came upon Tegea, and Aleus, informed by the Pythoness that a crime had been committed in Athene’s sacred precinct, visited it and found Auge far gone with child. Though she wept and declared that Heracles  had violated her in a fit of drunkenness, Aleus would not believe this, He dragged her to the Tegean market place, where she fell upon her knees at the site of the present temple of Eileithyia, famed for its image of ‘Auge on her Knees’. Ashamed to kill his daughter in public, Aleus engaged King Nauplius to drown her. Nauplius accordingly set out with Auge for Nauplia; But on Mount Parthenius she was overtaken by labour-pangs, and made some excuse to turn aside into a wood. There she gave birth to a son and, hiding him in a thicket, returned  to where Nauplius was patiently waiting for her by the roadside. However, having no  intention of drowning a princess when he could dispose of her at a high price in the slave- market, he sold Auge to some Carian merchants who had just arrived at Nauplia and who, in turn, sold her to Teuthras, king of Mysian Teuthrania.
d. Auge’s son was suckled by a doe on Mount Parthenius (where he now has a sacred precinct) and some cattle-men found him, named him Telephus, and took him to their master, King Corythus. At the same time, by a coincidence, Corythus’s shepherds discovered Atalanta’s intent son, whom she had borne to Meleager, exposed on the same hillside: they named him Parthenopaeus, which is ‘son of a pierced maidenhead’, because Atalanta was pretending to be still a virgin.
e. When Telephus grew to manhood, he approached the Delphic Oracle for news of his parents. He was told: ‘Sail and seek King Teuthras the Mysian.’ In Mysia he found Auge, now married to Teuthras, from whom he learned that she was his mother and Heracles his father; and this he could well believe, for no woman had ever borne Heracles a son so like himself. Teuthras thereupon gave Telephus daughter Argiope in marriage, and appointed him heir to the kingdom.

f. Others say that Telephus, after having killed Hippothous and Nereus, his maternal uncles, went silent and speechless to Mysia in search of his mother. ‘The silence of Telephus’ became proverbial; but Parthenopaeus came with him as spokesman. It happened that the renowned Argonaut Idas, son of Aphareus, was about to seize the Mysian throne,  and Teuthras in desperation promised to resign it to Telephus and give him his adopted daughter  in marriage, if only Idas were driven away. Thereupon Telephus, with Parthenopaeus’s help, routed Idas in a single battle. Now, Teuthras’s adopted daughter happened to be Auge, who did not recognize Telephus, nor did he know that she was his mother. Faithful to Heracles’s memory, she took a sword into her bedroom on the wedding night, and would have killed Telephus when he entered, had not the gods sent a large serpent between them. Auge threw down the sword in alarm and confessed her murderous intentions. She then apostrophized Heracles; and Telephus, who had been on the point of matricide, was inspired to cry out: ‘O mother, mother!’ They fell weeping into each other’s arms and, the next day, returned with Teuthras’s blessing to their native land. Auge’s tomb is shown at Pergamus beside the river Caicus. The Pergamenians claim to be Arcadian emigrants who crossed to Asia with Telephus, and offer him heroic sacrifices.
g. Others say that Telephus married Astyoche, or Laodice, a daughter of Trojan Priam. Others, again, that Heracles had lain with Auge at Troy when he went there to fetch Laomedon’s immortal horses. Still others, that Aleus locked Auge and her infant in an ark, which he committed to the waves; and that, under Athene’s watchful care, the chest drifted towards Asia Minor and was cast ashore at the mouth of the river Caicus, where King Teuthras married Auge and adopted Telephus.
h. This Teuthras, hunting on Mount Teuthras, once pursued a monstrous boar, which fled to the temple of Orthosian Artemis. He was about to force his way in, when the boar  cried out: ‘Spare me, my lord! I am the Goddess’s nursling!’ Teuthras paid no attention, and killed it, thereby offending Artemis so deeply that she restored the boar

1. …. a sacred king to ensure good crops. Relics of this custom were found in Heracles’s temple at Rome, where his bride was called Acca-counterpart of the Peloponnesian White Goddess Acco-and at Jerusalem where before the religious reforms of the Exile, a sacred marriage seems to have been celebrated every September between the High-priest, a representative of Jehovah, and the goddess Anatha. Professor Raphael Patai summarizes the evidence for the Jerusalem marriage in his Man and Temple. The divine children supposedly born of such unions became the Corn-spirits of the coming year; thus Athene Alta was a corn-goddess, patroness of corn-mills. The numerous sons whom Heracles fathered on nymphs witness to the prevalence of this religion theory. He is credited with only one anomalous daughter, Macaria (‘blessed’). The Auge myth has been told to account for an Arcadian emigration to Mysia, probably under pressure from the Achaeans; also for Tegean festivities in honour of the New Year god as fawn which, to judge from the Hesiod fragment, had their counterpart in the Troad.
2. That Auge and her child drived in an ark to the river Caicus-a scene illustrated on the altar of Pergamus, and on Permanence coins-means merely that the cult of Auge and Telephus had been imported into Mysia by Tegean colonists, and that Auge, as the Moon- goddess, was supposed to ride in her crescent boat to the New Year celebrations. Athene’s subsequent change from orgiastic bride to chaste warrior-maiden has confused the story: in some versions Teuthras becomes Auge’s bridegroom, but in others he piously adopts her. Hyginus’s version is based on some late and artificial drama.
3. The myth of the golden boar refers partly to the curative properties of the antipathies stone on Mount Teuthras; partly, perhaps, to a Mysian custom of avenging the death of Adonis, who had been killed by Apollo in the form of a boar. It looks as if Adonis’s representative, a man wearing a boar’s hide with golden tusks, was now spared if he could take refuge from his pursuers in the sanctuary of Apollo’s sister Artemis. The kings of Tegea, Auge’s birthplace, were, it seems, habitually killed by boars.
4. Phil’s adventure with the jay is an anecdotal fancy, supposed to account for the name of the spring, which may originally have been sacred to a jay totem-clan.