Leucothea

## Ino

* {Phrixus} (Son)
* {Leucon} (Son)
* {Macistus} (Son)
* {Schoeneus} (Son)
* {Helle} (Daughter)

**Ino**, also known as **Leucothea** or the **White Goddess**, is the Goddess of Sea Foam from Greco-Roman mythology. She is a daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, the sister of Semele, and one of the divine nurses of Dionysus.

## Overview

In Greek mythology, **Leucothea** ("white goddess") was one of the aspects under which an ancient sea goddess was recognized, in this case as a transformed nymph.

In the more familiar variant, Ino, the daughter of Cadmus, sister of Semele became a goddess after Hera drove her insane as a punishment for caring for the newborn Dionysus. She leapt into the sea with her son Melicertes in her arms, and out of pity, the gods turned them both into sea-gods, transforming Melicertes into Palaemon, the patron of the Isthmian Games, and Ino into Leucothea.

In the Odyssey, Leucothea makes a dramatic appearance and tells the shipwrecked Odysseus to discard his cloak and raft, and offers him a veil to wind round himself, to save his life and reach land. Homer makes Leucothea the transfiguration of Ino.

## Appearance

Ino is described as a beautiful middle-aged woman with fair skin and a voluptuous figure. She has long auburn hair styled in an Ancient Greek style and striking forest-green eyes. She wears revealing white robes that leave little to the imagination, a white veil covering her head, and carrying with her is a *thyrsus* made of gold and seastone.

## Personality

Ino is a cold, unkind, and vindictive person whose vengeance is feared by many, thus explaining her infamous reputation even among the crazed maenads serving Dionysus. Unlike them, however, her madness didn't come from the orgiastic rituals performed in the name of their god, but instead the result of a curse from Hera, which resulted in her unadulterated hatred toward the God-Queen.

She is an ambitious person and isn't afraid of harming others in order to elevate her status within society. The most infamous example of her ambition is with her stepchildren, Phrixus and Helle, whose death she planned to ensure the throne of Boeotia for her trueborn children by threatening the lives of hundreds of innocents and falsifying a prophecy from the oracle.

Her cruel and vindictive ways did mellow out after her *apotheosis*, as shown with how she became the patron of sailors and fishermen or with how she rescued Odysseus after he had a shipwreck in the Odyssey. However, according to Melicertes, this was nothing more than her PR strategies.

Like many other minor gods, she was angered by the disrespect the Twelve Olympians gave to them despite their centuries-long service toward the Olympian dynasty, which originally led them to siding with Kronos and the Tytanos Faction during the Second Titan War.

## History

### Early Life

Ino was born the third princess of Thebes, a daughter of the hero Cadmus and the goddess Harmonia, and the sister of Agave, Autonoë, Semele, and Polydorus. When she grew up, she married the Minyan king Athamas and became Queen of Boeotia.

### Phrixus and Helle

Soon after her wedding with Athamas, Ino schemed to assassinate Phrixus and Helle, Athamas' first children with the nymph Nephele, in order to ensure her future children's future as the kings of Boeotia.

To do so, she secretly roasted all the crop seeds collected from the annual harvest festival so they wouldn't grow. The local farmers, frightened of famine, ask a nearby oracle for assistance, though she had already bribed the men sent to lie and tell others that the oracle required the blood sacrifice of Phrixus and Helle, which Athamas reluctantly agreed.

Before they were killed, though, they were rescued by a flying golden ram sent by their natural mother and flew away. Helle soon fall down into the sea which would later be named the Hellespont after her, but Phrixus managed to survive all the way to Colchis, where King Aeëtes welcomed him into his household and wedded him to his daughter Chalchiope.

### Fostering Dionysus

After Semele died delivering Dionysus, he was taken in by Ino and raised as a princess among her two sons, Learchus and Melicertes. However, this didn't go unnoticed by Hera, who had already developed a hatred toward her for planning to harm the children of Nephele, who is one of her favorite handmaidens.

Because of this, Hera cursed her and her husband with madness. First, Athamas killed their son Learchus after he mistook him for a wild stag, while she boiled Melicertes to death while believing him to be a killed pig. After realizing what she had done, she grabbed his corpse and jumped down the sea. However, Zeus felt sympathy for them and instead of letting them die, he transformed them into the gods **Leucothea** and **Palaemon** and placed them in his brother Poseidon's court.

### The Odyssey

Centuries later, no soon after he left Calypso and the island of Ogygia, Odysseus' raft was wrecked by Poseidon, but before he was drowned, he was saved by Ino (now known by **Leucothea**) who was nearby. She gave him her veil which she had imbued her blessings into and instructed him how to swim to Scheria (modern Corfu) where the Phaeacians lived.

## Equipment

**Thyrsus** (テュルソス, *Te~yurusosu*): Ino wielded a seastone thyrsus as her main weapon of choice. It is about a head higher than her while resting aside her body, tipped with a Celestial Bronze spear tip that is dipped in deadly poison, and wrapped around by living grape vines which would lash out and capture whoever touches the staff that isn't her.

## Trivia

* The name, Leucothea, literally means "the white goddess".
* She's often called "Queen of the Sea" (θαλασσομέδουσα), which makes her a doublet of Amphitrite.
* 173 Ino, a large asteroid and the parent body of the Ino family, is named after her.
	+ The asteroid 35 Leukothea is named after her.
* She has a sanctuary in Laconia, where she answers people's questions about dreams.
* In Ancient Greece, a sisterhood of maenads of Thebes in the service of Dionysus traced their descent in the female line from her.
* Some historians believe that she didn't roast the corn seeds, but instead, introduced the traditions of roasting corn to the Boeotian people.
* Many believed that the tragedy that befallen her was the result of the cursed Necklace of Harmonia gifted to her mother by Hephaestus.
* In one version, she is a nymph called **Halia** (Ἁλία, "the briney") who was the daughter of Pontus and Thalassa, and a lover of Poseidon, with whom she sired the goddess Rhodos and six sons. She was later raped by her sons as a result of a curse placed on them by Aphrodite after they had offended her, and Poseidon then imprisoned them in sea-caverns underneath Rhodes.
* In Marcel Proust's "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower", she becomes a metaphor for the mist that covers a young man's gaze when looking on the beauty of young women: "…a cloud that had re-formed a few days later, once I had met them, muting the glow of their loveliness, often passing between them and my eyes, which saw them now dimmed, as through a gentle haze, reminiscent of Virgil's Leucothea."