Cecrops I

"Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum".

Cécrope and his Dandrous daughter on the west side of the Parthenon.

In Greek mythology, Cecrops (in ancient Greek Κέκρωψ, Kékrops, 'tailed face') was the first king to have the city-state of Athens. According to Pausanias and Herodotus, he was also known as Erechtheus. It is said that he was born directly from Gaia, so he is counted as one of the autochthonous Greeks. His supernatural birth was the cause of his lower body being shaped like a snake.

Cécrops had a long reign that lasted 49 or 50 years, throughout which he lavished good teachings on his people who had recently arrived in Attica. He also taught them to build with wood, to cultivate the vineyard, to bury the dead, the institution of marriage, and he is even credited with the invention of the census. The political division of Attica into twelve communities is also due to him. Cecrops instituted the cult of Supreme Zeus, prohibited human sacrifices from being offered to him and replaced them with offerings of barley cakes.

The region called Cecropia was named after this king. It had previously been called Acte, in memory of the land-born king Actaeus, the third king of Attica and ancestor of Cecrops. He inherited the throne of Actaeus by marrying his daughter Agraulus, with whom he had Eresicton (who predeceased his father), Aglauros (Athena's first priestess), Herse, and Pandrosus. He was the first man to acknowledge paternity and tried to encourage monogamy.

In some epic versions of his life, Cecrops appears as an arbitrator or judge in the fight between Athena and Poseidon for the lands of Attica. Both gods wanted to be the main divinities of the city of Athens, so they entered into a contest in which Poseidon opened a source of salt water on the Acropolis with his trident (late versions say that he made a horse emerge), to which Athena He responded by planting an olive tree. As Cecrops was present while the goddess planted the tree, and moreover no one could prove that Poseidon opened the fountain, the city was then awarded to Athena. Cecrops favored Athena and was the first to have a statue dedicated (of wood) to this goddess. The cecropius was the tomb of this mythological king and was located next to the portico of the caryatids, in the Erechtheion enclosure, on the Acropolis of Athens.

The name of Cecrops is collected in other parts of Greece as the founder of cities such as Athenae and Eleusis in Boeotia or the Athenae of Euboea, although this could be due to the existence of several characters with the same name (see Cécrops II) or that the inhabitants of these regions imported the myth of Cécrops, thus becoming a representative of the race pelasgic. This would also be the explanation of the other genealogies that are attributed to him, and that make him a native of Sais (in Egypt), or son of Pandion I or of Erechtheus and Praxitea.

Cecrops received the epithet Diphyes (biform) due to his hybrid character between man and snake, which could also represent his legislation on marriage (which united two different beings) or the fact that he governed both the Egyptian and the Athenian colonists, and spoke the language of both.

Worship

The Athenians, to honor him for all the gifts he had given them, erected an altar to him on the Acropolis of Athens and depicted him on one of the Parthenon pediments.