The Myrmidons

When Zeus turns the ants into people

Aeacus is alone on Aegina. Apollodorus reaches that condition through the island’s naming: Zeus carries Aegina, daughter of the river Asopus, to Oenone, fathers Aeacus there and gives the island her name. With no other people around the child, Zeus turns its ants into human beings.

The account is brief enough to leave basic questions unanswered. It does not say that disease destroyed an earlier population, describe Aeacus praying or name the new people in the surviving sentence. The wordplay supplies what readers already knew: the Greek word for ant stands behind the name Myrmidon, and Aeacus’s subjects emerge from the island’s smallest workers.

This makes Aegina their first ground even though Homer will place them elsewhere. Their genealogy follows Aeacus through Peleus to Achilles. The people who accompany Achilles to Troy are therefore attached to the same family as the Aeginetan transformation.

Ovid gives the island a plague first

Ovid turns the compressed origin into a long account of loss and replacement. A pestilence sent by Juno moves through Aegina. Animals die first, then people; houses and roads fill with bodies, and Aeacus watches almost the entire population disappear.

He asks Jupiter to restore his people and points to ants moving on an oak sacred to the god. That night he dreams that the insects grow, stand upright and shed their former bodies. In the morning voices fill the deserted palace. Aeacus goes outside and recognises men shaped like those in the dream.

Ovid has him distribute empty farms and houses among them and give them the name Myrmidons. He also carries their imagined ancestry into character: they work patiently, store what they gain and guard it. Those qualities belong to Ovid’s completed transformation, not to the shorter version in Apollodorus.

The difference matters because the two accounts cannot be collapsed into one. In Apollodorus, Aeacus begins alone. In Ovid, he loses a kingdom to pestilence and receives a replacement population after prayer and dream. Aegina and the ants are shared; the disaster before them is not.

Strabo refuses the transformation

Strabo records the myth and then replaces it with an explanation drawn from the island’s ground. Aegina is fertile below the surface but rocky above it. He says the inhabitants were called Myrmidons because they excavated like ants, spread earth over rock to make cultivable plots and lived in dugouts rather than using soil for bricks.

This is not neutral corroboration of the origin story. Strabo explicitly says the Aeginetans were called Myrmidons, but rejects the claim that ants became people in answer to Aeacus. His account is valuable because it preserves both the island association and an ancient argument against taking the transformation literally.

Three sources thus keep Aegina fixed while changing what the name means: divine creation in Apollodorus, civic restoration in Ovid and human labour in Strabo.

The fifty ships held beside Achilles

The Iliad meets the Myrmidons in Thessaly rather than Aegina. The Catalogue of Ships places them in Phthia and neighbouring settlements, calls Achilles their captain and counts fifty ships. Yet they do not fight when the poem begins. Achilles’s anger at Agamemnon keeps their force beside the vessels.

Patroclus eventually asks to wear Achilles’s armour and lead the Myrmidons against the Trojans. Before they move, Homer gives their army an exact structure. Each of the fifty ships had carried fifty men. Achilles divides them into five companies led by Menesthius, Eudorus, Pisander, Phoenix and Alcimedon, while retaining command over all.

He then reminds the Myrmidons how often they blamed him for holding them back. Their return to battle proves the cost of that delay. They drive the Trojans from the ships under Patroclus, but continue beyond the limit Achilles set, towards the death that brings Achilles himself back into the war.

Aegina supplies the people’s origin under Aeacus; Phthia and Troy supply their Homeric action under his grandson. The distance between those places is held by one ruling line and by a name that ancient writers never stopped explaining.