=Alcithoe=, a Theban woman, who ridiculed the orgies of Bacchus. She was changed into a bat, and the spindle and yarn with which she worked, into a vine and ivy. _Ovid_, _Metamorphoses_, bk. 4, fable 1. =Alcmæon=, was son of the prophet Amphiaraus and Eriphyle. His father going to the Theban war, where, according to an oracle, he was to perish, charged him to revenge his death upon Eriphyle, who had betrayed him. _See:_ Eriphyle. As soon as he heard of his father’s death, he murdered his mother, for which crime the Furies persecuted him till Phlegeus purified him and gave him his daughter Alphesibœa in marriage. Alcmæon gave her the fatal collar which his mother had received to betray his father, and afterwards divorced her, and married Callirhoe the daughter of Achelous, to whom he promised the necklace which he had given to Alphesibœa. When he attempted to recover it, Alphesibœa’s brothers murdered him on account of the treatment which he had shown their sister, and left his body a prey to dogs and wild beasts. Alcmæon’s children by Callirhoe revenged their father’s death by killing his murderers. _See:_ Alphesibœa, Amphiaraus. _Pausanias_, bk. 5, ch. 17; bk. 6, ch. 18; bk. 8, ch. 24. ――_Plutarch_, _de Exilio_.――_Apollodorus_, bk. 3, ch. 7.――_Hyginus_, fables 73 & 245.――_Statius_, _Thebiad_, bks. 2 & 4.――_Ovid_, _Fasti_, bk. 2, li. 44; _Metamorphoses_, bk. 9, fable 10.――――A son of Ægyptus, the husband of Hippomedusa. _Apollodorus._――――A philosopher, disciple to Pythagoras, born in Crotona. He wrote on physic, and he was the first who dissected animals to examine into the structure of the human frame. _Cicero_, _de Natura Deorum_, bk. 6, ch. 27.――――A son of the poet Æschylus, the 13th archon of Athens.――――A son of Syllus, driven from Messenia with the rest of Nestor’s family, by the Heraclidæ. He came to Athens, and from him the Alcmæonidæ were descended. _Pausanias_, bk. 1, ch. 18. =Alcmæŏnĭdæ=, a noble family of Athens, descended from Alcmæon. They undertook for 300 talents to rebuild the temple of Delphi, which had been burnt, and they finished the work in a more splendid manner than was required, in consequence of which they gained popularity, and by their influence the Pythia prevailed upon the Lacedæmonians to deliver their country from the tyranny of the Pisistratidæ. _Herodotus_, bks. 5 & 6.――_Thucydides_, bk. 6, ch. 59.――_Plutarch_, _Solon_. =Alcman=, a very ancient lyric poet, born in Sardinia, and not at Lacedæmon, as some suppose. He wrote in the Doric dialect six books of verses, besides a play called Colymbosas. He flourished B.C. 670, and died of the lousy disease. Some of his verses are preserved by Athenæus and others. _Pliny_, bk. 11, ch. 33.――_Pausanias_, bk. 1, ch. 41; bk. 3, ch. 15.――_Aristotle_, _History of Animals_, bk. 5, ch. 31.