Orion

An engraving of Orion from Johann Bayer's Uranometria, 1603 (US Naval Observatory Library)

In Greek mythology, Orion was traditionally a great huntsman, who was set amongst the stars as the constellation called Orion. He is also described as a great hunter in the Odyssey, when Ulysses meets him in the underworld. The bare bones of his story are told by the Hellenistic and Roman collectors of myths, but there is no record of an Orion, comparable to the Argonautica or Euripides' Medea for Jason. The remaining fragments of legend, recorded in different sources, and reflecting local stories from several places, have provided a fertile field for speculation about the prehistory of Greek myth.

Legends

Orion is mentioned in the oldest surviving Greek literature. In the Iliad, Orion is mentioned as a constellation, and Sirius as his dog. In the Odyssey, Ulysses sees him hunting in the Underworld, a great slayer of animals, with a bronze club; but he is also mentioned as a constellation, as the lover of the Goddess Dawn - slain by Artemis; and as the most handsome of the earthborn. In the Works and Days of Hesiod, Orion is also a constellation, one of those by whose rising and setting with the sun the year is reckoned.

The legend of Orion was first told in full in Hesiod's Astronomy. This no longer exists, but a Hellenistic writer on the constellations has given a fairly long summary. According to this, Orion was the son of Poseidon and Euryale, daughter of Minos. He could walk on the waves, and came to Chios, where he got drunk and attacked Merope, daughter of Oenopion, who blinded him and drove him out.

He then came to Lemnos, where Hephaestus told Cedalion, Hephaestus' servant, to guide him to the uttermost East, where Helios healed him; Orion carried Cedalion around on his shoulders. Orion then returned to punish Oenopion, but he hid away underground.

Orion then went to Crete and hunted with Artemis and Leto; he threatened to kill every beast on Earth. Earth objected, and sent a giant scorpion to kill him instead. After his death, Zeus placed Orion (and the Scorpion) among the constellations.

A second (and even shorter) full telling was in a Roman-era collection of myths, dependent largely on Pherecydes of Syros, which describes Orion as earthborn and of enormous stature (although it also mentions Poseidon and Euryale). It adds a first marriage to Side before Merope; Hera threw her into Hades for rivalling herself in beauty. It also has different death story: as in Homer, Eos, the Dawn, fell in love with Orion, and took him to Delos, but Artemis slew him.

A third, three paragraphs, is by a Latin writer on the constellations, Gaius Julius Hyginus. He tells different stories of Orion's birth and death. The gods came to visit a poor man called Hyrieus (from Thebes or Chios) who served them a whole bull, and when they offered him a favor, asked for sons. They took the bull's hide and urinated, or ejaculated, in it, and buried it in the earth - thus explaining why Orion is Earthborn.

Hyginus tells two stories of the death of Orion: Because of his "living joined in too great a friendship" with Oenopion he boasted to Artemis and Leto that he could kill anything which came from Earth. Earth objected and created the Scorpion. In another story, Apollo objected to Artemis's love for Orion, and (seeing Orion swimming with just his head visible) challenged his sister to shoot at that mark, and she hit and killed him.

Hyginus also connects him with several constellations, not just Scorpio. Orion chased Pleione, mother of the Pleiades, for seven years, until Zeus intervened and raised the whole lot to the stars; the story that he chases the Pleiades themselves goes back to the Works and Days. Canis Minor and Canis Major are his dogs; the first, being in front, is called Procyon; they chase Lepus, the hare; although Hyginus says some critics thought this too base a prey for the noble Orion, and have him pursuing Taurus instead.

Variants

There are, as often, numerous variants in other authors; most of these are incidental mentions in poems and scholiasts. Vergil, for instance, shows Orion, as a giant, not walking on the Aegean, but wading through it.

There are several references to Hyrieus as the father of Orion, connecting him to various places in Boeotia, including Hyria; this may well be the original story (although not the first attested), since Hyrieus is presumably the eponym of Hyria. He is also called Oeneus, although he is not the Calydonian Oeneus.

There are a number of variant forms of the story of Orion and Oenopion; one source has Merope the wife of Oenopion, not his daughter; another has Merope the daughter of Minos, not Oenopion. The longest (a page in the Loeb) is from a collection of melodramatic plots drawn up by an Alexandrian poet for the Roman Cornelius Gallus to make into Latin verse. This shows Orion slaying the wild beasts of Chios, and looting the other inhabitants to make a bride-price for Oenopion's daughter, whom this source calls Aëro. Oenopion doesn't want to marry her off to someone like Orion, and eventually Orion, in frustration, breaks into her bedchamber and rapes her; the text implies that Oenopion blinds him on the spot.

Latin sources add that Oenopion was the son of Dionysus, and Dionysus sent satyrs to send Orion into a deep sleep so he could be blinded; one tells the same story, but converts Oenopion into Minos of Crete. They add that an oracle told Orion that his sight could be restored by walking eastward, and he found his way by hearing the Cyclops' hammer; and placed a Cyclops as a guide on his shoulder. (They do not mention Cabeiri, or Lemnos; but this is presumably the story of Cedalion recast. Both Hephaestus and the Cyclopes were said to make thunderbolts, and they are combined in other sources.)

Lucian described a picture with Orion simply walking into the rising sun close by Lemnos, with Cedalion on his shoulder. He recovers his sight there, with Hephaestus still watching in the background. Other mythographers have Orion healed by Aesculapius on Naxos, with no mention of Lemnos at all.

Several sources tell different stories of how Artemis killed Orion, either with her arrows, or by producing the Scorpion. She is given various motives: that he boasted of his beast-killing, that he challenged her to a contest (with the discus), or that he assaulted either Artemis herself, or else the Hyperborean maiden Opis in her band of huntresses.

Relationships

The mythographers connect Orion genealogically with other stories. Hyginus makes Hylas's mother Menodice, daughter of Orion. Another mythographer, Liberalis, tells of Menippe and Metioche, daughters of Orion, who had themselves (literally) sacrificed for their country's good, and were transformed into comets.

Modern interpretations

The story of Side may well be another astronomical myth; Greek side means pomegranate, which bears fruit while Orion, the constellation, is in the night sky.

Karl Kerényi, in Gods of the Greeks, portrays Orion as a giant of Titanic vigor and criminality; born outside his mother like Tityos or Dionysus. He lays great stress on the variant in which Merope was the wife of Oenopion, and sees it as the remnant of a lost form of the myth in which Merope was Orion's mother (converted by later generations to his stepmother, and then to the present forms); Orion's blinding is therefore parallel to that of Aegypius and Oedipus.

In Dionysus, Kerényi portrays Orion as a shamanic hunting hero, surviving from Minoan times (hence his association with Crete). Kerényi derives Hyrieus (and Hyria) from a Cretan dialect word hyron, which survives only in ancient dictionaries, meaning "beehive"; from this he makes Orion a representative of the old mead-drinking cultures, overcome by the wine-masters Oenopion and Oeneus. (The Greek for "wine" is oinos.) Fontenrose cites an assertion that Oenopion taught the Chians how to make wine before anybody else knew how.

Joseph Fontenrose wrote Orion : the Myth of the Hunter and the Huntress to show Orion as the type specimen of a variety of grotesque hero, like Cúchulainn; stronger, larger, and more potent than ordinary men, and violent lover of the Divine Huntress. Other instances include Actaeon; Leucippus, son of Oenomaus; Cephalus; Teiresias; and Zeus himself, as the lover of Callisto. He also sees Eastern parallels, Aqhat, Attis, Dumuzi, Gilgamesh, Dushyanta, and Prajapati (as pursuer of Ushas).

Robert Graves sees Oenopion as his perennial Year-King, at the stage where the king pretends to die at the end of his term and appoints a substitute, in this case Orion, who actually dies in his place. His blindness is iconotropy from a picture of Ulysses blinding the Cyclops, mixed with a purely Hellenic solar legend: the Sun-hero is captured and blinded by his enemies at dusk, but escapes and regains his sight at dawn, when all beasts flee him.

Graves sees the rest of the myth as a syncretism of diverse stories: Gilgamesh and the Scorpion-Men; Set becoming a scorpion to kill Horus; the story of Aqhat and Yatpan from Ras Shamra; and a conjectural story of how priestesses of Artemis Opis killed a visitor to their island of Ortygia. Orion's birth from the hide he compares to a West African rainmaking charm, and claims that the son of Poseidon should be a rainmaker.

Literary culture

In addition to the references above, Orion is used by Horace, who tells his death at the hands of Diana/Artemis, and by Ovid, in his Fasti for May 11 Poussin painted a Landscape with Orion, after Lucian's description of the picture of Orion recovering his sight.

See also

• Orion (constellation)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Joseph Fontenrose Orion: The Myth of the Hunter and the Huntress 1981
• E. H. Gombrich: "The Subject of Poussin's Orion" The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 84, No. 491. (Feb., 1944), pp. 37-41. JSTOR link.
• Robert Graves, The Greek Myths 1955.
• Karl Kerényi, Gods of the Greeks 1951.
• Karl Kerényi, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life 1976.
• Roger Pack, "A Romantic Narrative in Eunapius"; Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 83. (1952), pp. 198-204. JSTOR link. A practicing classicist retells Orion in passing.

External links

• Theoi.com: Orion Excerpts from translations from Greek and Roman texts (often older ones, in the public domain, but not always), including the sources for many of the statements in this article. The only translation of Antoninus Liberalis into English is under copyright; most of the scholia (even Servius) have not been translated at all.

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