IXION
The King of the Lapiths of Thessaly, Ixion was a cheat and
a deceiver. He abducted Dia, the daughter of Eioneus, in
order to marry her, and agreed to pay the dowry to the girl’s
father when he came to the wedding. However, he did not
want to part with a large sum of money, so on the day of
the wedding, the king set a cruel trap for Eioneus. He dug
a pit near his palace and filled it with burning coal, and
when his unsuspecting father-in-law arrived, Ixion pushed
him to his death. Following this outrage, Ixion was ostracized
by all mortals for killing a kinsman, but for some reason Zeus took
pity on him and invited him to a banquet on Mount Olympus. Even
among the gods, he overstepped the bounds of propriety and tried
to seduce Hera, Zeus’s wife. Zeus punished Ixion for attempting to
outrage his wife’s modesty by binding him to a burning wheel,
which would turn forever in the Underworld.CLASSICAL EUROPEThe myths of ancient Greece are full of
people – usually mortals but often powerful
figures such as kings or princes – who broke
the rules of normal conduct. They did this
by cheating their fellow mortals, by abusinggifts or hospitality, or by insulting the gods.
These antiheroes often ended up with dire
punishments, as a warning to others tempted
to break the social or cult rules that normally
made social or religious life run smoothly.Classical Antiheroes
The killing of Eioneus
By pushing Eioneus to his death,
Ixion was violating the ideal of
hospitality, one of the most
important values of the Greeks.Ixion’s punishment
Some myths describe Ixion’s
wheel as the disc of the sun;
according to others it was a wheel
that turned in the Underworld.Ixion seducing Hera
When Zeus discovered Ixion’s intentions, he tricked him
into sleeping with a cloud shaped like Hera. The offspring
of this union was Centaurus, the ancestor of the Centaurs.50