Io

Daughter of the river-god Inachus of Argos and priestess of Hera at the great Argive sanctuary. Loved by Zeus, who transformed her into a white heifer to hide her from his wife; Hera, unconvinced, demanded the heifer as a gift and set the hundred-eyed Argus Panoptes to guard her (Apollod. *Bib.* 2.1.3). Hermes lulled Argus to sleep and killed him; Hera set his eyes into the peacock's tail and sent a gadfly to drive Io across the world. The canonical geographic spine is in Aeschylus *Prometheus Bound* 561–886, where the chained Titan spells out her route past the Bosphorus, across the Scythian steppe, through the land of the Chalybes, into the Caucasus and finally south to the Nile. At the mouth of the Nile Zeus restored her form with a touch; she bore Epaphus, 'he who was born by touch' (Aesch. *Prom.* 848–852 + *Supplices* 291–324). Io's descendants through Epaphus — Libya, Belus, Danaus, Aegyptus — generate half of the Greek eastern-migration legends; Herodotus 1.1–5 opens his *Histories* with a rationalising variant in which the whole episode is a Phoenician slave-raid.

Associated Places