Ophion (giant)

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Ophion ( Greek  Ὀφίων ), also Ophioneus ( Greek  Ὀφιονεύς ), is a giant of Greek mythology .

In a scholion to Homer's Iliad , Ophion took part in the battle of the giants against the god Zeus in Tartessus . Zeus defeated Ophion by killing him with a mountain named after him Ophionion. The mountain could refer to the island of Formentera off the Iberian coast , which the ancient writer Strabo called Ophiussa in his work on the geography of the Mediterranean .

Occasionally the giant Ophion is treated as identical to the first world ruler Ophion . It is also unclear whether he is identical with a third Ophion , the father of the centaur Amykos , who is nicknamed Ophionides by Ovid .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. Schol. ad Hom. II. 8, 479.
  2. a b John Pairman Brown: Cosmological Myth and the Tuna of Gibraltar . In: Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association . tape 99 , 1968, pp. 53 .
  3. ^ Strabo , Geographika , 3, 5, 1.
  4. ^ Ovid , Metamorphoses 12, 245.
  5. Otto Höfer : Ophion 3 . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 3.1, Leipzig 1902, column 925 ( digitized version ).