specific god, it is one connected with earthly fertility, like Dionysus the son of
Zeus and Semele, or Persephone the daugher of Zeus and Demeter.
If Earth is not the mother of Dawn and the Twins, who is? The answer is
that there need not be one. This is mythology, not biology. In Hesiodic myth
Chaos, Gaia, and Hera all achieve parthenogenesis, and Zeus fathers Athena
by himself, out of his cranium. The birth of Dawn is a natural daily event: she
appears in or out of the sky. It is impertinent even to ask how Dyeus fathered
the Twins. It is enough that they are his children. There need not have been
any story about their births.
G. E. Dunkel, in an elegant but tenuous argument expounded in an
inaugural lecture, has sought to identify the missing mother as Diwo ̄na ̄.^90
This would be a spouse-goddess of a type discussed in the last chapter, with
a name formed from her husband’s by suffixation. Dunkel suggests that she
survives in Dione, Zeus’ consort at Dodona, and in myth the mother of an
Aphrodite who might have usurped the place of the Dawn-goddess. In Vedic
one might expect the remodelled form Diva ̄nı ̄ ́. It does not occur, but Dunkel
thinks that, as Indra has become the chief god, Diva ̄nı ̄’s personality has been
taken over by Indra’s wife Indra ̄n
̇
ı ̄. In RV 10. 86, a humorous dialogue poem,
Indra ̄n
̇
̄ displays (under provocation) something of a jealous and quarrelsomeı
disposition, reminiscent of Hera’s in Homer. Dunkel hypothesizes that this
was a traditional feature of Diwo ̄na ̄, transferred from Diva ̄nı ̄ to Indra ̄n
̇
̄ inı
India and from Dione to Hera in Greece.
Evidence for Diwo ̄na ̄ does not extend further, for as Dunkel acknow-
ledges, the Roman goddesses Iu ̄no ̄ and Dı ̄a ̄na are not relevant. In Greek,
however, besides Dione, there are traces of another consort of Zeus with a
name formed from his, in the Mycenaean di-u-ja,di-wi-ja, Pamphylian
∆ιfια. A goddess Dia (∆4α < Díw-ya), identified with Hebe, was wor-
shipped in classical times in Phleious and Sicyon (Strabo 8. 6. 24). There was
also a Dia, represented as a mortal, to whom Zeus made love in the form of a
horse, resulting in the birth of Peirithoos.^91 Dia then married Ixion, whom
Zeus befriended and received in heaven. There Ixion was overcome with a
desire for Hera. He was deluded with a phantom Hera made from cloud, and
from their union the first Centaur was born, half horse, half man.
This strange story shows beguiling similarities with the Indian myth of
Saran
̇
yu ̄. Her father, the god Tvas
̇t
̇r
̇, offered her in marriage. She was given
to the mortal Vivasvat, but after becoming pregnant with the As ́vins she
assumed the form of a mare and ran away, leaving Vivasvat with a facsimile of
herself. Or according to a later version she was not yet pregnant, and Vivasvat
(^90) ‘Vater Himmels Gattin’,Die Sprache 34 (1988–90), 1–26.
(^91) Sch. Oxy. 421 and D on Il. 1. 263; Nonn. Dion. 7. 125; Eust. in Hom. 101. 1.
192 4. Sky and Earth