The Myrmidons

Ants turned into people

The Myrmidons are the people of Aeacus, and later of his grandson Achilles, who led them to Troy. Their story begins on the island of Aegina.

Apollodorus, an ancient writer who retold the Greek myths, explains how the island got its name. The god Zeus carries off Aegina, daughter of the river Asopus, to an island then called Oenone. There he fathers Aeacus with her and names the island after her. Aeacus grows up with no other people around him. So Zeus turns the ants of the island into human beings.

This account is short and leaves basic questions open. It does not say that disease killed an earlier population. It does not describe Aeacus praying, and the surviving sentence does not name the new people. The wordplay fills the gap for readers who knew Greek: the Greek word for ant lies behind the name Myrmidon. The subjects of Aeacus come from the smallest workers on the island.

So Aegina is their first home, even though Homer places them elsewhere. Their family line runs from Aeacus through Peleus to Achilles. The people who go with Achilles to Troy belong to the same family as the ants of Aegina.

A plague comes first in Ovid

The poet Ovid turns the short origin into a long story of loss and replacement. A plague sent by the goddess Juno sweeps through Aegina. The animals die first, then the people. Houses and roads fill with bodies, and Aeacus watches almost the whole population vanish.

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

In Ovid, Aeacus shares out the empty farms and houses among them and names them Myrmidons. Ovid also gives them the character of ants: they work patiently, store what they gain and guard it. Those qualities belong to Ovid’s full version, not the short one in Apollodorus.

The two accounts cannot be folded into one. In Apollodorus, Aeacus starts out alone. In Ovid, he loses a kingdom to plague and then receives a new people after a prayer and a dream. Both share Aegina and the ants. Only Ovid has the disaster before them.

Strabo’s explanation

Strabo, an ancient geographer, records the myth and then sets it aside for an explanation drawn from the island’s soil. Aegina is fertile below the surface but rocky on top. He says the people were called Myrmidons because they dug like ants. They spread earth over the rock to make fields they could farm, and they lived in holes dug in the ground instead of using the soil to make bricks.

This does not simply confirm the origin story. Strabo says plainly that the people of Aegina were called Myrmidons. But he rejects the claim that ants became people in answer to Aeacus. His account keeps both the link to the island and an ancient argument against taking the transformation literally.

So all three sources tie the Myrmidons to Aegina, while each gives the name a different meaning. In Apollodorus it is the work of a god. In Ovid it is the rebuilding of a city, and in Strabo it is human labour.

Fifty ships at Troy

The Iliad, Homer’s epic of the war at Troy, finds the Myrmidons in Thessaly, not on Aegina. Its list of the Greek forces, the Catalogue of Ships, places them in Phthia and nearby towns. It calls Achilles their captain and counts 50 ships. Yet when the poem begins, they are not fighting. Achilles is angry with Agamemnon, another Greek leader, and keeps his men beside their ships.

In time Patroclus, a Greek warrior, asks to wear the armour of Achilles and lead them against the Trojans. Before they move, Homer sets out the exact shape of their army. Each of the 50 ships had carried 50 men. Achilles splits them into five companies. Their leaders are Menesthius, Eudorus, Pisander, Phoenix and Alcimedon, and Achilles keeps command over all of them.

Back into battle

Achilles reminds the Myrmidons how often they blamed him for holding them back. Their return to battle shows what the delay has cost. Under Patroclus, they drive the Trojans away from the ships. But they push on past the limit Achilles set, towards the death that brings Achilles himself back into the war.

Aegina gives the people their origin under Aeacus. Phthia and Troy give them their part in Homer under his grandson. One ruling family links those distant places, and so does a name that ancient writers never stopped trying to explain.