Fables

For of the three daughters of Thestius, whom they report as tracing their origin from Canace, daughter of Aeolus, when he had sought the occasion to commemorate the first from the Calydonian hunters, and the second—Hypermnestra, I say, the mother of Amphiaraus—from the seven leaders who set out against Thebes, it remained for him to find an occasion to introduce the third from the history of that race, with which she was joined by a double bond of affinity. If anyone, too concerned with chronology, should prefer to establish this order of chapters as LXXXII–VIII, LXXVII–LXXXI, in my judgment, he would not have grasped the intent of Hyginus. For, intending to pass from here to the Pelopids, starting from Leda, daughter of Thestius and the most recent descendant of the Aeolids, he skillfully instituted the matter such that he first teaches us that her daughters Helen and Clytemnestra were married to Menelaus and Agamemnon, and then submits that they were among the descendants of Tantalus, born of their father Atreus.

If I interpret Plutarch's Parallela Minora XXX (Vol. VIII, p. 431, Hutt. ed.) correctly, whatever was added to Chapter LXXXII due to the similarity of the argument once formed a single body distinguished by the name of the Pelopids. For the things which Plutarch testifies he transcribed from Dositheus in the Pelopids do not differ from Chapter LXXXV of Hyginus, which is the very next one, and which is itself entitled PELOPIDAE. Now, since the Trojan matters cannot be torn away from the fable of the Atridae, it could not happen that the author would not also turn his mind to the ancestors of Priam, sampling just enough of the Trojan histories to be sufficient for recognizing the seeds of the most noble war. He satisfied this duty in chapters LXXXVIIII through LXXXXII, increased by an appendix of two chapters. Following these, from chapter LXXXXV to CV, are the "pre-Homeric" topics; CVI are "Homeric"; CVII through CXV are the so-called "post-Homeric," or as you might more conveniently say, first excerpts from the Cypria, then a very brief argument of the Iliad *) Observe, if you will, that Chapters LXXXVIIII–CV and CVII–CXXIII form the same number., and finally, Lesches' Little Iliad and Arctinus' Aethiopis compressed into the limits of a compendium. From the Nostoi Returns, only the most important are placed in chapters CXVI–VIII. Finally, the writer, in chapters CXIX–CXXXIII, after narrating the crime of Clytemnestra, sets forth the various falls and changes of fortune of the offspring of Agamemnon and the children of Aegisthus and Menelaus. Thus, the history of the kings of the Achaeans, whose series he repeats in chapter CXXIV, is brought down from Phoroneus to Orestes, son of Agamemnon.