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Jacopo Amiconi (1682-1752),
The God Jupiter (Zeus), falling in love with Io.
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In Greek mythology, Inachus (Greek: Ίναχος, Inakhos), was one of the river gods, son of Oceanus and nymph Tethys. As rivers are generally fertile, Inachus had many children, the chief of whom were his two sons, Phoroneus and Aegialeus or Phegeus, and his two daughters Io and Philodice. The mother of these children was variously described in the sources, either the ash-tree nymph Melia.
His beautiful daughter Io became the priestess of goddess Hera in Argos. According to Ovid, one day, Zeus noticed the maiden and lusted after her. As Io tells her own story in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, she rejected his whispered nighttime advances until the oracles caused her own father to drive her out into the fields of Lerna.
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There, Zeus covered her with clouds to hide her from the eyes of his jealous wife, Hera. However, Hera looked down on earth and noticed the small cloud. She knew it was her husband. As soon as Hera arrived, Zeus transformed Io into a beautiful white heifer. Hera was not fooled. She demanded the heifer as a present.
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Correggio (1489-1534),
Zeus and Io.
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 Pieter Lastman (1583-1633), June (Hera) discovering Jupiter (Zeus) with Io. |
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Hermes killing Argos
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Hera tethered Io to the olive-tree in the temenos of her cult-site, the Heraion, and placed her in the charge of many-eyed Argus Panoptes to keep her separated from Zeus. Argus had a hundred eyes and only a few were ever closed at any time.
To free Io, Zeus sent his son Hermes to sing and tell boring stories to make Argus sleep with all his eyes. Hermes told so many stories that finally Argus close all his hundred eyes. Only then did Hermes kill Argus and untie Io who ran home free. |
When Hera discovered what had occurred, she was so furious that she sent a vicious gadfly to sting the cow forever and then forced her to wander over the whole world. Io began her wanderings, coming first to the Ionian sea, which is called after her. Then she journeyed through Illyria, which is the region north of Epirus in the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, and came to Mont Haemus in Thrace, and thence she crossed the Bosphorus, giving the strait its name (boos-foros, which is Greek for cow-ford). Io continued her wanderings through Scythia and Cimmeria (to the north of the Black Sea) and met in Caucasus the bound Prometheus.
Meanwhile, Io who was still prisoner into the shape of a cow could not get rid of the malicious gadfly. Finally, after Zeus vowed to no longer pursue his beloved Io, Hera released Io from her inhuman prison, and Io settled in Egypt, becoming the first queen of Egypt.
After she came to Egypt, Io gave Zeus a son, Epaphus. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, she is the progenitor, thought removed by many generations, of Hercules, greatest of heroes, to whom Prometheus himself would owe his freedom.
Lambert Sustris (1515/1520-1568), Jupiter et Io
The reverse journey of Europe
The journey of Io is the reverse journey of Europe. If Europe, abducted by Zeus as a bull, passed from Asia to the new continent, Io is passing to Asia from Europe into the shape of a cow.
An old Persian legend says that Io was seized together with other women by Phoenician merchants, who sailed away for Egypt with the kidnapped women on board. That explanation would account for Io's disappearance from Greece. The Persians agreed that this abducting of Io by the Phoenicians was a wrong that Asia did against Europe. So when later the Europeans carried off the Phoenician princess Europa, they say, Asia and Europe were then even. An interesting fact is the Persians kept a book concerning the abduction of women and the wrongs that Asia and Europe performed against each other, the Europeans (the Greeks) then, sent the Argonauts to the city of Aea in Colchis, and carried off the Colchian princess Medea. That was the third wrong, they say, and when the Colchians demanded the restitution of Medea the Greeks answered that they had been refused reparation for the abduction of Io.
After that the Trojan seducer Paris decided that he would make a Greek woman his wife and, taking lessons from the past, he abducted Helen of Sparta. And he feared nothing for this had been done before several times.
Betsy Podlach (2006), Jupiter & Io.
See also
Bibliography
External links
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