Cleite (Clite / Κλείτη)

The label Cleite functions as a conventional personal name in Greek mythic repertory rather than a single origin narrative. Multiple distinct women named Cleite appear in different traditional sources: one is the wife of Cyzicus in accounts tied to the Argonauts, who laments and is said to have hanged herself in grief when her husband is accidentally slain by the Argonauts and is associated in some variants with a spring named for her; another Cleite appears among the Danaids in traditions recorded by mythographers (the daughters of Danaus who marry sons of Aegyptus and sometimes kill them); a Cleite is listed among the maenads who accompany Dionysus on his Indian campaign in Nonnus' Dionysiaca; and yet another is named as mother of Meilanion by Erylaus, whose son falls defending Troy (sources and attributions summarized in the collected references). These instances are episodic placements of named mortal women within larger heroic and religious narratives rather than a single cosmogonic or cultic origin.

Surviving summaries and catalogues of the various Cleites provide no consistent physical description or iconography. The sources characterize these women by social and narrative roles—wife, mourner, bride, maenad, mother—and by actions (lamentation, suicide in one account, participation in Dionysian retinues) rather than by bodily detail. Where transformation is attested (a spring named for or deriving from a grieving Cleite), the change is a mythic metamorphosis motif rather than an invariant visual form.

No inherent supernatural powers are attributed to the figures named Cleite in the cited materials. Their attested behaviors are mortal and narrative: intense mourning (one Cleite is said to have hanged herself after Cyzicus' death), participation as a maenad in Dionysian campaigns (a role within Bacchic retinues), involvement in the Danaid wedding-slaying tradition (one Cleite is named among those who killed a husband), and motherhood of a warrior slain at Troy. Only a single tradition links a Cleite to metamorphosis into a spring or the naming of a spring after her; this is presented as an etiological metamorphosis typical of Greek myth rather than an ongoing magical faculty.