[10] According to the tradition followed by Euripides in his lost play Cretan Women (Kressai), Catreus found Aerope in bed with a slave and handed her over to Nauplius to be drowned.

[11] Sophocles, in his play Ajax, may also refer to Aerope's father finding her in bed with a man and handing her over to Nauplius to be drowned.

In his account, Catreus gave Aerope and her sister Clymene to Nauplius to be sold off in foreign lands after an oracle prophesied that he would be killed by one of his children.

[15] Their desire for their father's throne led to the murder of their half-brother Chrysippus, for which they were banished, and sought refuge in Mycenae.

[18] From Byzantine period annotations to Euripides' Orestes, we learn that, in some unspecified Sophocles work, Atreus cast Aerope into the sea in revenge for her adultery and theft of the golden lamb.

[23] Fragmentary lines from the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women seem to make Aerope, (without naming a father) the mother of three sons Agamemnon, Menelaus (and Anaxibios?).

[32] Although she was given to Pleisthenes as his wife, in his Cretan Women, in his plays Orestes, and Helen, Euripides has Agamemnon and Menelaus as the sons of Aerope and Atreus.

[33] Also in his Orestes, he refers to the "treacherous love of Cretan Aerope in her treacherous marriage",[34] while in his Electra, he tells us that Thyestes, "persuaded Atreus' own wife to secret love, and carried off to his house the portent; coming before the assembly he declared that he had in his house the horned sheep with fleece of gold.

As the text stands, the "father" is Aerope's, and the reference is to Catreus giving her to Nauplius to be drowned, as in Euripides’ Cretan Women.

[37] However, a small "correction" to the text would make the father Agamemnon's, and the reference would then be to Atreus finding Aerope in bed with Thyestes.

[39] Byzantine scholia to Euripides' Orestes 812, possibly referring to the passage from the Ajax noted above, say that in some (unnamed) play by Sophocles, Atreus "revenged himself on his wife Aerope (both because of her adultery with Thyestes and because she gave away the lamb) by casting her into the sea".

[41] We are told that in some such play, Alexander of Pherai was moved to tears by the performance of the actor Theodorus as Aerope, suggesting a sympathetic portrayal.

These elements include prophesies of death, daughters' sexual impurity, and punishment by their fathers by either being cast into the sea or given away to be sold overseas.

In response, Acrisius locked her and her son in a wooden chest and cast it into the sea, hoping to kill them without invoking the wrath of the gods.