Opheltes

[11] The next earliest mention occurs in a mid-fifth-century BC poem by Bacchylides, which says that the Argive heroes, known as the Seven against Thebes, established the Nemean Games in honor of Archemorus, whom a "fiery-eyed monstrous" serpent killed while he was sleeping, with his death taken as an omen "of the slaughter to come", i.e. the disaster awaiting the Seven at Thebes.

[14] The most complete account of Opheltes' story occurs in Euripides' partially preserved play Hypsipyle (c. 411–407 BC).

[16] Here Hypsipyle, the former queen of Lemnos and lover of Jason, has come to be a slave, and nursemaid of the infant Opheltes, who is the son of Lycurgus, the priest of Zeus at Nemea, and his wife Eurydice.

[26] In the Thebaid, Opheltes' father Lycurgus is the priest of Zeus (as in Euripides), and the king of Nemea (as in Hyginus).

[27] As in Euripides, Hypsipyle, the nurse of Lycurgus and Eurydice's son Opheltes, encounters the Seven against Thebes, who are in urgent need of water.

[28] However, in Statius' account, Hypsipyle, does not take Opheltes with her to the spring, instead, in her haste to provide water for the Seven, she leaves the child behind, lying on the ground, "lest she be too slow a guide".

[31] Meanwhile, with Hypsipyle long delayed at the spring telling her story, and "oblivious (so the gods would have it) of her absent charge", Opheltes has fallen asleep in the grass,[32] and though unnoticed, he is killed by an unwitting swish of the tail of the enormous serpent who guards Zeus' sacred grove.

[36] Excavations at Nemea, by the University of California, discovered the likely site of the hero shrine (heroön) of Opheltes in 1979.

The excavations have uncovered an open-air precinct, located some 100 meters southwest of the Temple of Zeus, founded in the Archaic period.