Asterion

In Argive tradition Asterion is presented as the eponymous river-god of the Asterion river. He is treated within the broader Greek cosmological pattern of river-deities that are typically counted among the descendants of Oceanus and Tethys (sources present this parentage as the standard generational placement rather than an independently attested pedigree for every named potamos). In local myth Asterion is father to three daughters — Euboea, Prosymna, and Acraea — who are named as the nurses of Hera in the Argive accounts linking landscape, lineage, and the foundation of Hera’s cult at the Heraion of the Argolid (Pausanias; summarized in modern reference).

Primary sources do not preserve a specific, individual iconography or physical description for Asterion. He is referred to as a river-god (potamos), a class of divine personifications conventionally imagined in Greek literature as male river-persons; however, no unique attributes, dress, or anthropomorphic details for Asterion are recorded in the cited texts. The absence of a specialized description in surviving accounts leaves only the general category (male river-personification) as the attested appearance.

The sources attribute to Asterion mythic and cultic roles rather than discrete 'magical' powers. Mythically he served as one of three river-gods (with Inachus and Cephisus) who adjudged or awarded the territory of Argolis to Hera rather than to Poseidon; in that narrative Poseidon's anger produces an etiological consequence whereby the waters of these rivers cease to flow except after rain and are dry in summer. Cultically, the river and its banks provide a plant called asterion (identified in the herbal tradition with Silene linifolia) that is offered to Hera and used to weave her garlands; Nonnus also links the river with a rite in which young men dedicate locks of hair. These functions show Asterion as an agent in territorial myth, an explanation for local hydrology, and a supplier of materia for Hera's worship rather than as a source of hostile or combative supernatural acts in the surviving records.