Achelous- Greek GodDeity"River God"

The Monstrous Suitor

Achelous was the god of Greece's largest river, flowing from the Pindus mountains to the Ionian Sea, and the eldest of the three thousand Potamoi — his name a byword for fresh water itself. When he sought to marry Deianira, princess of Calydon, her father could not refuse a god. But Deianira was terrified of her suitor, who appeared as a bull, a serpent, or a man with a bull's head, water streaming from his beard. She preferred death, she later said, to marriage with such a creature.

When Heracles arrived and also sought Deianira's hand, the two clashed. Achelous coiled around Heracles as a serpent, but the hero laughed — he had strangled serpents in his cradle and did not fear the shape. The god became a great bull and charged, but Heracles seized him by the horns, bore him to the ground, and wrenched one horn from his head. Defeated and diminished, Achelous surrendered his bride. In Sophocles's Trachiniae, Deianira remembers the terror of watching the fight — sitting in the dust, not knowing which of the two would claim her.

The Horn of Plenty

The broken horn became the Cornucopia, the Horn of Plenty. In Ovid's telling, the Naiads found the horn and filled it with fruit and fragrant flowers, then consecrated it. In another tradition, Achelous traded Heracles the horn of Amalthea — the goat who nursed infant Zeus — to recover his own.

Father of the Sirens

Achelous fathered the Sirens by one of the Muses — Melpomene according to Apollodorus, Terpsichore in other traditions. From their father they drew elemental power, from their mother the perfection of song. They settled on a flowering island where the bones of sailors piled white on the shore, and no ship that heard their voices passed without turning toward the rocks.