Argos (giant)
Argos ( Greek Ἄργος , male , Latin . Argus ), also Panóptes (Greek Πανόπτης , the all- seer ) was a huge monster with a hundred (or numerous) eyes all over its body, so that it could look in all directions, especially since only one pair of eyes at a time slept at a given time.
Argos' story
Echidna , according to Hesiod, was an immortal nymph ; yet she was killed in her sleep by Argos. So Argos knew from personal experience how deadly sleep can be. The cautious Zeus turned his lover Io into a cow. Hera , the jealous wife and sister of Zeus, hired Argos to guard Io, who had been transformed into a cow. Zeus sent Hermes to kill the Argeiphontes (Argostlayer), the Argos and steal Io. Hermes, knowing that nothing escaped Argos' attentive eyes, first put Argos to sleep with his flute, then struck him with a rock and beheaded him. Zeus then succeeded in copulating with Io in the form of a bull and thus fathered Epaphos .
Hera moved Argos a hundred eyes into the peacock's plumage .
Argos had a son named Iasos who became king of the city of Argos . According to other accounts, however, he had the Triopas as his father.
It is not clear whether the dog of Odysseus , Argos , was named after the giant in recognition of his particular vigilance or whether this was a common herding dog name in Homer's time.
saying
Even today, suspicious contemporaries who want to see “everything” look “with hawk eyes ” and forbid those “flute tones” that are supposed to put them to sleep.
Argos in art
Peter Paul Rubens painted the picture Juno and Argus . It shows how Hera (Latin: Juno ) takes the eyes of the slain Argos.
swell
literature
- Richard Engelmann : Argos 2) . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 1.1, Leipzig 1886, Col. 537-539 ( digitized version ).
- Gerhard Keerl: The hundred-eyed Argos in Greek mythology. In: Communications from the Julius Hirschberg Society for the History of Ophthalmology 4, 2002, pp. 149–165.
Web links
- Argos in the Theoi Project (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Burkhardt Wolf: Panoptism . In: Foucault manual: Life - work - effect . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-01378-1 , p. 280 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-476-01378-1_40 ( springer.com [accessed April 22, 2020]).