Ixion

• 1. Introduction

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  Ixion, king of the Lapiths, ruled the most ancient tribe of Thessaly. In Greek mythology he became a byword for punishment without end. His ruin did not begin with a war or a curse. It began with a promise to a father-in-law that he never kept. From there the story turns stranger. A killer is invited to dine with the gods. A queen of heaven is nearly dishonored. A cloud takes on a human shape. Why would Zeus show mercy to a man already stained by blood? What did that man try to take in return? And why did the best-known poets of ancient Greece keep returning to his name?

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• 2. The Unpaid Bride Price

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  Ixion married Dia, the daughter of a man named Deioneus, and he promised his new father-in-law a valuable gift. The gift never arrived. Deioneus answered the broken promise by stealing some of Ixion's horses.

  Ixion hid his anger. He sent Deioneus an invitation to a feast at Larissa, and the old man came. Beneath the guest's path lay a bed of burning coals and wood, hidden under more wood and a layer of ash. Ixion pushed his father-in-law into it.

  The myth treats the unpaid debt and the stolen horses as minor details. What matters is the nature of the crime. Ixion murdered a relative, and he did it to a man who had come to his table as a guest.

  Not every ancient source tells it this way. A collection of inscriptions from a temple at Cyzicus, preserved in the Greek Anthology, describes Ixion killing two men named Phorbas and Polymelus. Those men had murdered his mother, Megara, after she refused to marry one of them.

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• 3. An Outlaw With No Cure

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  Blood guilt drove Ixion mad. In Greek belief a killer needed ritual cleansing before he could rejoin society. The neighboring princes were appalled by the treachery and by the violation of the duty owed to a guest, so they refused to perform those rites.

  Without cleansing, Ixion lived as an outlaw. People shunned him. The myth marks him as the first man guilty of killing a kinsman, which makes his case a founding example rather than one more murder.

  A man in that condition should have vanished from the stories. Instead, the myth carries him upward, to a place no outlaw should have reached.

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• 4. Uncertain Fathers

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  Ixion's mother was Perimele, but the sources cannot agree on who his father was. Some name the war god Ares. Others name Leonteus or Antion. One tradition names Phlegyas, a notorious evildoer whose name suggests the word fiery.

  Ixion also had a son, Pirithous. Even that relationship is open to doubt. In the fourteenth book of the Iliad, Zeus himself tells Hera that he is the father of Pirithous. If Zeus spoke truthfully, Pirithous was Ixion's stepson.

  That tangled claim places Zeus and Hera in the middle of Ixion's family story. It is a fitting prelude, because Hera was soon to become the center of his downfall.

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• 5. A Seat at the Table of the Gods

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  Zeus took pity on the outcast. He carried Ixion to Olympus and seated him at the table of the gods. The gesture was an enormous favor to a man whom every human community had rejected.

  Ixion repaid it with desire. He began to lust after Hera, the wife of Zeus. That was a second betrayal of the bond between host and guest, and an act of arrogance aimed at the ruler of the gods.

  Zeus learned of the plan. He answered with a trick rather than an immediate blow. He shaped a cloud into the likeness of Hera, and the cloud came to be called Nephele, from the Greek word for cloud.

  Ixion mistook the cloud for the goddess and embraced it. The deception worked, and it left behind something far more lasting than embarrassment.

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• 6. The Cloud's Children

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  From the union of Ixion and the false Hera came a child named Imbros or Centauros, depending on the telling. According to Pindar, this child mated with the Magnesian mares on Mount Pelion.

  That pairing produced the race of Centaurs, creatures joining human and horse. Because of their descent, the Centaurs bear the name Ixionidae.

  There is a quiet irony in the family tree. A man whose crime began with a theft of horses became the ancestor of a people who were half horse.

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• 7. The Burning Wheel

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  Expelled from Olympus, Ixion met a thunderbolt. Zeus then ordered the messenger god Hermes to bind him to a winged wheel that burned and never stopped turning.

  In the earliest form of the tale, the wheel was a solar wheel, and it carried Ixion across the heavens. Later versions moved the torment to Tartarus, the deepest region of the underworld. Some tellers instead place him in Hades after his death.

  The wheel did stop once. When Orpheus went down to the Underworld to rescue Eurydice, his lyre playing was enough to halt it for a while.

  That pause was brief. The questions about why the story exists at all lasted far longer, and scholars are still working at them.

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• 8. A Warning That Endured

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  The classical scholar Robert L. Fowler finds the myth awkward. He writes that the details are very odd, and that the narrative motivation creaks at every juncture. He adds that it smacks of aetiology, meaning a story invented to explain something.

  Fowler points to a suggestion by Martin Nilsson that the myth grew out of rain-making magic. He agrees, and reads it as a warning about how magic must be practiced. In his view, Ixion is the first officiant, and his blasphemous, dangerous conduct teaches later practitioners what to avoid.

  The ancient poets had their own uses for him. In the fifth century, Pindar's Second Pythian Ode, dated to roughly 476-468 BC, expands on Ixion as a lesson for Hiero I of Syracuse, the tyrant whom the poet praises. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Timasitheos each wrote a tragedy called Ixion. None of those plays survives.

  The image also traveled beyond Greece. An Etruscan mirror dated to about 460-450 BC carries an engraving on its back of Ixion bound to an eight-spoked, winged wheel. It is now in the British Museum.

  No one knows whether the Etruscans shared the figure with the Greeks from early times or adopted it later. The wheel, at least, had already crossed the sea.

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