Ion (progenitor)
Ion ( Greek Ἴων ) means the ancestor of the Ionians in Greek mythology .
Ion was mentioned as such for the first time in the catalog of women ascribed to Hesiod (frg. 1 (28)) as the grandson of Hellen , son of Xuthos and brother of Achaios . According to Herodotus , Athenians did not call themselves Ionians until the Xuthossohn Ion was their leader.
A different version is told by Euripides in his tragedy Ion : with him, Ion is the son of Apollo and Creusa , who raped Apollo. After his birth, Ion is abandoned by his mother but, at the instigation of his father, is brought by Hermes to Delphi and raised there as a foundling to the temple servant of the oracle . Years later, Kreusa and Xuthos, whom she has since married, come to Delphi to ask the oracle about Kreusa's childlessness. Xuthos is told that the first person he would meet on the way out would be his son. Xuthos meets the Ion and accepts him as a son, assuming he is the result of a fleeting affair in his youth. When Creusa finds out about this, she is hurt and angry and fears that her supposed stepson will push her out of the house. She tries to poison Ion, but fails. After all, she recognizes him from the box in which she left him as her son, who was believed to be dead.
In the pre-Euripidic variant, Ion is the son of Xunthos, an otherwise “completely pale figure”, and thus only the grandson of the light, while Doros and Aiolos , the mythical ancestors of the Dorians and Aiols , are direct sons of the light. Apparently one was in Athens from the 6th century BC. Endeavored to create a competing narrative, which shows that great political importance was attached to this genealogy . So Solon tried to establish a special role for Athens, in which he wrote that Athens belonged to the oldest Ionian country, which also increased the position of Ions compared to the other descendants of the Hellen. The introduction of Apollo as the father of Ion by Euripides fulfilled the purpose of increasing Ions importance through the descent from a god, on the other hand it should eliminate the contradiction (e.g. the statement of Solons) to well-known stories, after Athens only a transit station was for the Ionians and also Xuthos in Athens was just an immigrant.
literature
- Heinrich Wilhelm Stoll : Ion 1) . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 2.1, Leipzig 1894, Col. 290-292 ( digitized version ).
- Christoph Ulf : Deukalion and (not) an empty country. Wanderings of the Ionians and Dorians - Hellenic genealogy, or: The Hellenes come from Hellas. In: Matthias Asche , Ulrich Niggemann (Hrsg.): The empty land. Historical narratives from immigrant societies. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2015, pp. 31–45.