Botres

Botres is presented in the ancient tradition as a Theban youth, the son of Eumelus and grandson of Eugnotus. The account preserved in later summaries relates that Eumelus "venerated the god Apollo devotedly and honored him with generous offerings." One day, while Eumelus "was sacrificing a ram to the god," Botres — described in the sources in the phrasing "who was helping around" — "tasted the victim's brain before the ritual was completed." Enraged at this breach of sacrificial protocol, "Eumelus... hit Botres on the head with a brand and inflicted a fatal injury on him." Moved by pity for the family, Apollo intervened and "changed Botres into a bird called Aeropus (bee-eater)." The tale is cited in summaries of mythographic material and is noted as appearing briefly in Ovid's Metamorphoses and in the collection of Antoninus Liberalis.

As presented in the primary summaries, Botres as a human is only described genealogically (son of Eumelus, grandson of Eugnotus) with no detailed physical portrait in the cited materials. After the fatal wound, the divine intervention changes him "into a bird called Aeropus (bee-eater)." The supplied sources give the name of the bird form but do not furnish further description of plumage, size, or other morphological details; the identification with Aeropus (bee-eater) is explicit in the mythographic summaries.

The sources record no supernatural powers or ongoing miraculous behaviors attributed to Botres after his transformation beyond the fact of metamorphosis itself. In the narrative his notable human action is that he "tasted the victim's brain before the ritual was completed," which precipitates the incident; thereafter the only described outcome is Apollo's transformation of the now-mortally wounded youth into a bird. No additional abilities, songs, or portents tied to the bird-form are recorded in the provided materials.