Nemean Games
Opheltes' story perhaps played an integral part of the lost Greek epic "Thebaid" (c. 8th century BC or early 7th century BC). The earliest surviving reference to the story occurs in a fragment of Simonides (c. 556–468 BC), preserved by Athenaeus, which describes Opheltes (referred to by Athenaeus as "the hero Archemorus") as a "suckling child", mourned as he dies. His mother (unnamed in the lines provided by Athenaeus) seems to have been described by Simonides as "violet-crowned" ("ἰοστεφάνου"). The next earliest mention occurs in a mid-fifth-century BC poem by Bacchylides, which says that the Archive heroes, known as the Seven against Thebes, established the Nemean Games in honor of Archemorus, whom a "fiery-eyed monstrous" serpent killed while he was sleeping, with his death taken as an omen "of the slaughter to come", i.e. the disaster awaiting the Seven at Thebes. Pindar's (c. 518 – 438 BC) "Nemean Odes" contain several allusions to the founding of the Nemean Games, by Adrastus, one of the Seven, but does not say why. Aeschylus (c. 525/524 – c. 456/455 BC) apparently dealt with the story, perhaps in his lost play "Nemea", since Pindaric scholia tell us that Aeschylus attributed the origin of the Nemean Games to the funeral games of Archemorus.