Together with her two sisters, Agave and Autonoë, they were the surrogates and divine nurses of Dionysus: Ino was the second wife of the Minyan king Athamas, mother of Learchus and Melicertes and stepmother of Phrixus and Helle.

In the back-story to the heroic tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Phrixus and Helle, twin children of Athamas and Nephele, were hated by their stepmother, Ino.

Ino, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, had an end just as tragic as her siblings: Semele died while pregnant with Zeus' child, killed by her own pride and lack of trust in her divine lover; Agave killed her own son, King Pentheus, while struck with Dionysian madness, and Actaeon, son of Autonoe, the third sibling, was torn apart by his own hunting dogs.

Euripides took up the tale in The Bacchae, explaining their madness in Dionysiac terms, as a result of their having initially resisted belief in the god's divinity.

Transformed into the goddess Leucothea, Ino also represents one of the many sources of divine aid to Odysseus in the Odyssey (5:333 ff), her earliest appearance in literature.

Homer calls her She provides Odysseus with a veil and tells him to discard his cloak and raft, then instructs him how he can entrust himself to the waves and succeed in reaching land, and eventually the island of Scheria (Corcyra), home of the Phaeaceans.

In historical times, a sisterhood of maenads of Thebes in the service of Dionysus, traced their descent in the female line from Ino.