Io (mythology)

“ According to Hellenic mythology, [6] Herakles closed the line of heroes, the earth-born sons of Zeus, whose mission it was to ennoble and elevate the human race. He therefore exhibited the highest result of the fellowship of Zeus with mortals, of which Io was one of the first recipients. Hence the significance of her appearance in the "Prometheus Bound." She, like the Titan, resisted the divine will, and, like him, must suffer the penalty of her rebellion ”

“ The Allegorical theory supposes that all the myths of the ancients were allegorical and symbolical, and contained some moral, religious, or philosophical truth or historical fact, under the form of an allegory, but came in process of time to be understood literally. Thus Saturn, who devours his own children, is the same power whom the Greeks called Cronos (Time) , which may truly be said to destroy whatever it has brought into existence. The story of Io is interpreted in a similar manner. Io is the moon, and Argus the starry sky, which, as it were, keeps sleepless watch over her. ”

“ On returning to Egypt, Io, afterwards identified with Isis, married Telegonus and founded the royal families of Egypt, Phoenicia, Argos and Thebes. The journey to Syria in search of Epaphus was invented to explain the fact that the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who was sometimes represented as horned, was confounded with Io.
Io herself is variously interpreted. She is usually understood to be the moon in the midst of the mighty heaven, studded with stars, represented by Argus. According to others, she is the annual rising of the Nile; the personification of the Ionian race; the mist; the earth. ”

“ Jupiter could do nothing to ease her sufferings by interceding for her to the remorseless queen of heaven; but at last Juno consented to send away the gadfly and to restore Io to her own form if Jupiter would promise never to visit her again. Reluctantly the ruler of the gods agreed to this demand, and Io became once more a beautiful maiden. ”

“ The story of Io probably came from Egypt. Isis was one of the chief divinities of that country, and her worship naturally passed, with their colonies, into foreign countries. Greece received it when Inachus went to settle there, and in lapse of time Isis, under the name of Io, was supposed to have been his daughter, and the fable was invented which is here narrated by Ovid.
The Greek authors, Apollodorus, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Pausanias, say that Io was the daughter of Inachus, the first king of Argos; that Jupiter carried her away to Crete ”

“ Even in those early times the fate of Jocasta and Œdipus was part of an ancient myth. Like the story of Io, remote ancestress of the founder of their city, it is a tale of wrong wrought upon mortals by a god. Perhaps it is not so primitive as the Io legend. There is nothing in it quite so naïve as the idea of the heifer-maiden loved by the supreme god and mercilessly hunted by his jealous queen. The Olympian hierarchy is now established, with its system of greater and lesser gods, and Zeus at their head has grown, in accordance with 168the theory of Æschylus, wiser with age. ”

“ I would give all that I have in the world to hear Oscar laugh again.”
Io was like the fair lily which refuses to sink though the waters encompass it around. It lifts its bright head above them all, and smiles in the face of the sun. It even covers over those dark waters with the verdant leaves of hope; and if some drops, like tears, rest on the spreading leaves, even those tears, like diamonds, glitter in the light. It seemed less impossible to Io than it is to most people to rejoice always, for her trustful, restful spirit had found the secret of peace. ”

“ So Io was represented, we are told, by Greek sculptors (Herod. ii. 41) , as Isis was by those of Egypt. The points of contact between the myth of Io and that of Prometheus, as adopted, or perhaps developed, by Æschylos are— (1) that from her the destined deliverer of the chained Titan is to come; (2) that both were suffering from the cruelty of Zeus; (3) that the wanderings of Io gave scope for the wild tales of far countries on which the imagination of the Athenians fed greedily. But, as the Suppliants may serve to show, the story itself had a strange fascination for him. ”

“ According to the historical view of ancient legends, Io is the daughter of Inachus, a primeval king of Argos; and, from this fact as a root, the extravagant legends about her, sprouting from the ever active inoculation of human fancy, branched out. Interpreted by the principles of early theological allegory, however, she is, according to the witness of Suidas, the Moon, and her wanderings the revolutions of that satellite. In either view, the immense extent of these wanderings is well explained by mythological writers (1) from the influence of Argive colonies at Byzantium and elsewhere ”

“ Io could not have put such ideas into words, but they were working, and tearing her heart as a machine rends and wrenches a human limb entangled amongst its whirling wheels. She could hardly reason, but she keenly suffered. Hard did Io strive so to collect her ideas as to find out whether her new discovery would account for that gloom in her husband which had seemed to her so mysterious. Oscar had received no letter from her at Malta, none by the Channel pilot: had her apparent neglect caused him pain, or perhaps a sense of relief? ”

“ In thus veiling the grosser features of the Io legend, as popularly conceived, while, at the same time, investing it with a more spiritual meaning, Æschylus appears not only as the great creative poet, but also as the true prophet of his generation. The numerous legends of which the story of Io may be regarded as a typical example embodied, in a vulgar form, the idea that it was only through association with the divine principle that man could rise to his true ideal as man. ”

“ Io’s surface, less than ten million years old, is quite young compared to the other Galilean satellites and to other terrestrial bodies, such as Mercury and the Moon. The surface is composed of large amounts of sulfur and sulfur dioxide frost, both of which account for most of the surface color. This picture was taken by Voyager 1. Material deposited by the volcano (see following pictures) can be seen as a white ring near the center of Io. ”

“ From them will spring Hercules, whose arrows will slay the eagle which devours Prometheus, and set him free. So much and no more he will tell.
Immediately his prophecies about lo begin to accomplish themselves. The frenzy which the gadfly's bite inspires seizes on her afresh, and in a wild agony she rushes forth to renew her wanderings through the earth. The music of the Chorus is now heard again, and dancing slowly and sadly round the altar, they chant their reflections on the fate of Io; deprecating for themselves any ill-matched love, such as Io received from Zeus ”

“ In fact, the worship of the moon-goddess under the form of a cow could not have been brought from Egypt to Mycenæ, but necessarily must have been introduced from Mycenæ into Egypt, since Io was distinctly a Pelasgian goddess; she had a celebrated temple at Byzantium, and the legend even attributes the foundation of that city to her daughter Keroessa, also called "she who wears horns." The worship of Io seems to have been brought from Asia by the Pelasgians; at all events they introduced it at a very remote epoch into Argolis. ”

“ Ores. Thou must not die the death thou would'st desire;
I needs must make it bitter. Doom like this
Should fall on all who dare transgress the laws.
The doom of death. Then wickedness no more
Would multiply its strength.
Chor. Ο seed of Atreus, after many woes,
Thou hast come forth, thy freedom hardly won,
By this emprise made perfect!⁠1510
↑ Io, daughter of Inachos, beloved by Zeus, and driven over land and sea by Hera, was one of the special deities of Argos, and the country was sometimes distinguished from other districts bearing the same name by the epithet Inacheian. ”

“ Thus years upon years passed, and ages circled by, until thirteen generations of men had lived and died upon the earth. Then came Heracles, the descendant of Io, to purge the world of vile monsters, and to give freedom to those who were in bonds. And as he wandered from land to land, to do the bidding of his master Eurystheus, he passed through Ethiopia, and came to the region of the Caucasus, close by the eastern Ocean's stream. ”

“ Is tried, perforce, with wanderings over-long."
In answer to her surprised inquiries, the hero tells her his name and the cause of his sufferings; and she asks him, as a prophet, what the end of her own wanderings will be. He would at first conceal from her knowledge which could only give her pain, but he yields at last to her request; yet before he proceeds to the prophecy, Io herself, at the request of the Chorus, narrates the history of her past life. When a girl in her father's home, she was visited by frequent dreams which told her of the love of Zeus. ”

“ Io is explained as the horned moon, in its various changes and wanderings. Argus is the heaven with its myriad stars, some of them shut, some blinking, some always agleam. The wand of Hermes and his music may be the morning breeze, at the coming of which the eyes of heaven close (Cox, 2, 138; Preller 2, 40) . The explanation would, however, be just as probable if Mercury (Hermes) were a cloud-driving wind. Pan and the Syrinx: naturally the wind playing through the reeds, if (with Müller and Cox) we take Pan to be the all-purifying, but yet gentle, wind. ”

“ Jupiter called Mercury close to his throne and spoke to him.
"I, myself, have lost a cow," he told Mercury. "In fact she is not really a cow at all, but a beautiful maiden named Io, in disguise, and I understand that she lives upon the earth guarded by a watchman named Argus who has a hundred eyes. I should like to rescue the lovely Io and restore her to her proper form, but Argus never closes all of his eyes at once. He sleeps with as many as fifty of them open. ”

“ Careful examination of all the Voyager images of Io, some of which have resolutions as good as 1 kilometer, has failed to reveal a single impact crater. Yet the flux of crater-producing impacts at Io must be even greater than for the other Galilean satellites, because of the focusing effect of Jupiter’s gravity. The absence of craters alone would indicate that Io has an extremely young and dynamic planetary surface, even without the observation of active volcanoes. ”

“ Here the white Io wandered in exile and unresting, forever scourged on by the sting in her flesh, as a man by the genius in him.
Here the glad god whom all the woodlands love played in the moonlight, on his reeds, to the young stags that couched at his feet in golden beds of daffodils and asphodel.
Here in a darkened land the great Demeter moved, bereaved and childless, bidding the vine be barren, and the fig-trees fruitless, and the seed of the sown furrows strengthless to multiply and fill the sickles with ripe increase. ”

“ Thud sauntered along beside his sister.
“I shall like to hear the chaplain preach,” observed Io.
“I don’t expect much from that pale little man, though I daresay he’s a good sort of fellow,” said Thud in a patronizing way. “I don’t think he’ll give us anything new.”
“In religion the old things are best,” remarked Io. “So in nature what we have had longest we value most; indeed, speaking of such things, ‘old’ is not the right word. ”

“ Other charged particles can occasionally escape outward and be detected as far away as Earth.
Io is unquestionably a remarkable world. The only planetary body known to be geologically more active than the Earth, it provides many extreme examples to test the theories of geoscientists. Its intimate interconnections with the Jovian magnetosphere and the planet itself provide a unifying theme to the complex processes taking place in the inner parts of the Jovian system. ”

“ There thou shalt rest, and thy maiden form with all its comeliness shall be thine again. In Canobus, a fair city by the sea, shall a home be made for thee; and there shall Epaphos thy son be born, from whom in after-times shall spring great Heracles, who shall break my bonds and set me free from these hated fetters.'
"Then Io, with a sigh of mingled hope and despair, went on her weary way, and left Prometheus alone again in the everlasting solitudes. And the wild eagles swooped down from their high-built nests, and circled with threatening screams about him ”

“ A direct course is followed by sane reason, a zigzag course by insane impulse.
Note 48 (p. 204) .
“. . . Epaphus, whose name shall tell
The wonder of his birth.”
As Io was identified with Isis, so Epaphus seems merely a Greek term for the famous bull-god Apis.— (Herod. III. 27, and Müller’s Prolegom. myth.) The etymology, like many others given by the ancients, is ridiculous enough; ἐπαφή, touch. This derivation is often alluded to in the next play, The Suppliants. With regard to the idea of a virgin mother so prominent in this legend of Io, Prow. ”

“ Io would have entreated to be allowed to share the cell, but Oscar forbade her making any such application. A quiet home was found for the poor young wife in a missionary’s dwelling, situated not very far from the prison; and every morning a palanquin might be seen going from that house in the direction of the gloomy building which held all that Io loved best upon earth; every day a slight form, dressed in deep mourning, passed through its stern archway. ”