Ormenion () — a Homeric kingdom of the Odyssey, c. 1200 BC

Ormenion — Forty black ships from below Pelion — the spear that ran through Priam's son Axion, and the arrow-wound that stayed Patroklos on the road to his doom.

The Thessalian realm below Pelion, led by Eurypylos son of Euaimon, who brought forty ships to Troy, rose among the nine to face Hektor, was wounded by Paris, and slew a son of Priam at the sack. His is one of the few untroubled homecomings — though a darker tradition sends the god's chest and madness with him instead.

Leader at Troy: Eurypylos.

Ruler in the Odyssey's present: Eurypylos.

Role in the Trojan War: Achaean. Forty ships from the Thessalian uplands under Eurypylos son of Euaimon — a front-rank spearman who rose among the nine to face Hektor, fell wounded by Paris' arrow, was tended by Patroklos, and cut down Priam's son Axion at the fall of Troy.

The homecoming: Returned safely — one of the few whose homecoming Homer leaves untroubled.

Below wooded Pelion, where the Hyperean spring rises and the white crags of Titanos gleam over the Thessalian uplands, lay the realm of Ormenion. Homer names its towns in one bright breath in the Catalogue of Ships — "them that possessed Ormenios and the fountain of Hypereia, and possessed Asterion and the white crests of Titanos" — and gives them a single lord: Eurypylos, Euaimon's glorious son, who led forty black ships to Troy. Forty is a middling levy, larger than Philoktetes' seven or the Rhodian squadrons, and its captain fought like a man commanding far more. Eurypylos was no minor spearman waiting in the line. When Hektor strode into the plain and hurled his challenge to single combat, and old Nestor shamed the silent kings, nine champions rose to answer — Agamemnon of MYC first, then Diomedes, the two Aiantes, Idomeneus and Meriones of CRE, and after them Eurypylos, before Thoas and Odysseus stood up. To be counted seventh among the nine bravest of the whole host is the measure of the man. In the black days of the Wrath, when Achilles kept to his ships, Eurypylos held the front with the rest — until Paris, the archer who felled better men than himself, loosed a shaft that struck him on the thigh. Bleeding, he limped from the fray, and it was Eurypylos, groaning in his hut, whom Patroklos of the MYR paused to tend with a bitter root pressed into the wound — a mercy that delayed Menoitios' son on the very errand that would carry him into his own death in Achilles' armour. So the lord of Ormenion's blood is threaded, however faintly, into the great doom of the war. When Patroklos told over the wounded to Achilles — "smitten is the son of Tydeus, wounded is Odysseus and Agamemnon; and smitten is Eurypylos on the thigh with an arrow" — his name stood in the roll of the Achaeans' broken best. He healed, and he was there at the end. The Little Iliad remembered by Pausanias sets his spear through Axion, a son of Priam, in the sack; and when the spoils were shared out, Eurypylos drew the fateful chest that held the hidden image of Dionysus. The nostos of Ormenion is, in Homer, a quiet one — Eurypylos came home, one of the fortunate few whose return the poet leaves untroubled by axe or shipwreck, so that at the present hour of the wanderings he rules his Thessalian towns in peace. Yet a darker Achaean tradition (Pausanias) says the god's chest drove him mad the moment he opened it, so that he never sailed to Thessaly at all but was carried by the winds to Aroe in Achaea, founded there the cult of Dionysos Aisymnetes at Patrae, and was honoured for ever after as a hero — a homecoming that became an exile, and an exile that became a shrine. One shadow doubles his name across the battle-line. A second Eurypylos — son of Telephos, king of the MYS — came late to Troy as one of her mightiest defenders, "the comeliest man I ever saw, next to goodly Memnon," and slew many Argives before Neoptolemos of the MYR cut him down, as Odysseus himself told the ghost of Achilles in the house of Hades. Two Eurypyloi, then, one Achaean and one for Troy, mirror-images at the wall: the lord of Ormenion who wounded a son of Priam and lived, and the son of Telephos who fell to Achilles' son. Their names crossing is one of the small dark symmetries the war delighted to leave behind. His neighbours in the Catalogue bind him to TRI, the realm of Trikke: the healer-princes Podaleirios and Machaon, sons of Asklepios, lead the contingent listed immediately before Ormenion — and it was Machaon, struck by that same archer Paris, whose wounding first drew Patroklos out to Nestor's hut and so to Eurypylos himself. Thus the physicians' realm, the arrow of Troy (TRO), and the spear of Ormenion all knot together in the eleventh book, in the hour before Patroklos went to his death.

“And of them that possessed Ormenios and the fountain of Hypereia, and possessed Asterion and the white crests of Titanos, of these was Eurypylos leader, Euaimon's glorious son; and with him, forty black ships followed.” — Iliad 2.734-737