Really exciting post for all 3 of us Acamas fans out there, but look! Athenian Acamas and his Trojan wife Laodice saved baby Scamandrius/Astyanax from Troy! He also installed the kid as a king of a ton of neighboring cities that Acamas helped establish.
This is from the Andromache scholium 10, with the brackets inserted by the Center for Hellenic Studies, who clarify that the source for this, Dionysius of Chalcis, lived in the 4th century BC. This isn't just some Roman/Medieval fix-it-fic or whatever, it is ancient.
Stesichorus attests that he [Astyanax] was killed, and the poet of the Cycle who composed the Iliou Persis attests that he [Astyanax] was thrown off the walls of Troy. And Euripides has followed this tradition. But there are those who say that he [the son of Hector] founded cities and ruled as king over them, and the opinions of these sources are written up by Lysimachus [3rd century BC] in the second book of his Nostoi: “Dionysius of Chalkis [4th century BC] says that Acamas [of Athens], having taken--through his ties with Laodice--Scamandrius the son of Hector and Ascanius the son of Aeneas from Helenus and from Anchises, attempted to fortify with walls Ilion and Dardanus, but, when the Athenians entreated him not to do so, then, having stopped his attempt at controlling the region of Troy, went on to found the cities of Gergis, Perkōtē, Kolōnai, Khrusē, Ophrynion, Sidēnē, Astyra, Scepsis, Polikhnē, and in addition to these, Daskyleion and Iliou Kolōnē and Arisba, designating as founders of these cities Scamandrius and Ascanius.”
Ahhhh I love this so much for so many reasons.
First of all, Aegeidae W + Laodice W kidnapping the kids before they could be killed at Troy (it's, like, not even really kidnapping considering Astyanax is just as much her nephew as he is Helenus')
My headcanon for how this happened is that Acamas claimed to have thrown the kids off the walls of Troy himself, right into a pyre onto which they were already burning. So their bodies "couldn't be recovered." Meanwhile, as Andromache wailed, the children were rushed off by Laodice, Acamas' fiance. He then reunited with them, his brother Demophon, aunt Clymene, grandma Aethra, and son Munitus before all 8 of them rushed off to Thrace. Demophon went back to Athens, but figured his family would be safest in Thrace, as Tzetzes says iirc.
Can also headcanon that Acamas, after tragically losing Munitus and Laodice, reunited Scamandrius with his mother Andromache + Helenus, and invited them back to the Trojan cities he had helped to rebuild.
Elderly ass Aethra has no fucking death myths bc my girl is just That Girl ig. Like she lived from the time of Bellerophon (when she was his fiance) and survived the Trojan war. She is LITERALLY stronger than the troops, I love her. Plus she had a threesome in a goddess' temple, became that goddess' priestess, led songs of lament and supplication for Demeter, and may or may not have caused the Trojan war. What's not to love about the Pittheidae?
