Apotropaei
Ἀποτρόπαιοι
(Group Ἀποτρόπαιοι), certain divinities, by whose assistance the Greeks believed that they were able to avert any threatening danger or calamity. Their statues stood at Sicyon near the tomb of Epopeus. (Paus. 2.11.2.) The Romans likewise worshipped gods of this kind, and called them dii averrunci, derived from averruncare. (Varro, de L. L. 7.102; Gellius, 5.12.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.