Thyone (mythology)

Thyone ( Greek  Θυώνη ) is the name under which Semele , the lover of Zeus and mother of Dionysus , is accepted among the gods of Olympus . Some authors tell the Semele myth under the name Thyone, which is why the two characters are difficult to distinguish from one another.

myth

The first evidence of an independent expression of the Thyone myth can be found in Sappho and Pindar .

According to prevailing tradition, Zeus is the father of their child Dionysus, occasionally also Nisos is called, who is probably identical with Dionysus' tutor Nysos .

According to Pausanias , Dionysus descends through the Halcyon Sea near Lerna into the underworld to save his late mother Semele. Since he does not know the exact location of the entrance to the underworld, he asks the guide Polymnus for directions. Hyginus further reports that the leader called Hypolipnus only agrees to do so in return for sexual services. Dionysus swears that should he bring his mother back, he would make the required payment. On his return, however, the believer had died in the meantime, which did not prevent Dionysus from performing the required service with the help of an appropriately shaped fig wood.

Thyone appears occasionally as Dionysus' wet nurse. From Thyone as mother or nurse he was given the nickname Thyonidas or, in Latin authors, Thyoneus .

literature

• Otto Jessen: Semele . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 4, Leipzig 1915, Col. 662-676 ( digitized version ).
• Anneliese Kossatz-Deissmann:  Semele . In: Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC). Volume VII, Zurich / Munich 1994, pp. 718-726.
• Karl Preisendanz : Thyone. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume VI A, 1, Stuttgart 1893ff., Col. 735 f.
• Joh. Schmidt: Thyone . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 5, Leipzig 1924, Col. 926-929 ( digitized version ).

Web links

• Thyone in the Theoi Project (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Diodorus 4, 25, 4.
2. ↑ Libraries of Apollodorus 3, 38.
3. ↑ Sappho , Fragment 17, 10. In: Eva-Maria Voigt : Grammatik zu Sappho and Alkaios Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1957.
4. ↑ Pindar , Pythien 3, 98f.
5. ↑ Cicero , De natura deorum 3, 58.
6. ↑ Pausanias 2:37, 5.
7. ^ Hyginus , De astronomia 2, 5.
8. ↑ z. B. Panyassis , fragment 5.
9. ↑ Hesychios , Θυωνίδας
10. ↑ Horace , Carmina 1:17 , 23.
11. ^ Ovid , Metamorphoses 4, 13.