Homer says little of children and the only child to appear directly in the action of the Iliad is the infant son of Hector and Andromache. “When Andromache meets Hector as he is hurrying to the field of battle, the nurse accompanying her carries in her arms the merry-hearted child, whom Hector called Scamandrius, but the rest called him Astyanax (Defender of the City), for Hector alone defended Ilium.’”[279] It is true that there is no example of exposure in Homer, though Hephaistos says his mother Hera desired to conceal him because he was lame.[280] But why one should expect a tenderness contrary to the history of the race is difficult to imagine, especially in view of the picture Achilles offers, as he drags the slain Hector about the walls of Troy to the lamentations of the dead man’s father and mother. Wherever there was a Greek colony we have a story of the exposure of some god or hero. Greek mythology might also be said to have had, as one of its foundations, the right of the parent to reject its offspring. The Dorians of Crete pictured even mighty Jove as a victim of this practice, and as being suckled by a goat. He was taken as soon as he was born, to Lystus first, the most ancient city of Crete, and then: “Hid in a deep cave, ’neath the recesses of the divine earth in the dense and wooded Ægean mount.”[281] Among the Mantineians it was said that when Rhea brought forth Poseidon she delivered him “in a sheep cote to be brought up among the lambs.”[282] Among the Lemnians, Hephaistos was supposed to have been exposed,[283] as was the Dionysus of the Etolians and the Thracians. In Epidaurus it is said that Coronis, when she gave birth to Æsculapius, “exposed the infant on that mountain which at present they call Titthion, but which was before denominated Myrtion; the name of the mountain being changed, because the infant was suckled by one of those goats which fed upon the mountain.”[284] In Argos, when Crotopos reigned, a grandson was born to him, but the infant’s mother, fearing the wrath of her father, “exposed the child to perish. In consequence of this, it happened that the infant was torn to pieces by the dogs that guarded the royal cattle.”[285] In Arcadia, Auge, when she was delivered of Telephus, “concealed him in the mountain Parthenion, and he was there suckled by a hind.”[286] In his disappointment at not having a son born to him, Jasus had the Arcadian Atalanta exposed on the Parthenian hill[287]; the ancestor of all the Athenians, Ion, and the founders of Thebes, Amphion, and Zethus, were exposed on the same Mount Citharion where Œdipus was exposed. Amphion afterward married Niobe and their twelve children, six boys and six girls, were killed by Apollo.[288]