Orion (mythology)
These various incidents may originally have been independent, unrelated stories, and it is impossible to tell whether the omissions are simple brevity or represent a real disagreement.
The bare bones of Orion's story are told by the Hellenistic and Roman collectors of myths, but there is no extant literary version of his adventures comparable, for example, to that of Jason in Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica or Euripides' Medea; the entry in Ovid's Fasti for May 11 is a poem on the birth of Orion, but that is one version of a single story.
Gaia (Apollo in some versions, disapproving of his sister's relationship with a male) objected and sent a giant scorpion to kill Orion.
[7] Although Orion has a few lines in both Homeric poems and in the Works and Days, most of the stories about him are recorded in incidental allusions and in fairly obscure later writings.
The margin of the Empress Eudocia's copy of the Iliad has a note summarizing a Hellenistic poet[9] who tells a different story of Orion's birth.
[13] A second full telling (even shorter than the summary of the Astronomia) is in a Roman-era collection of myths; the account of Orion is based largely on the mythologist and poet Pherecydes of Athens.
[15] It begins with the oxhide story of Orion's birth, which this source ascribes to Callimachus and Aristomachus, and sets the location at Thebes or Chios.
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, the bull, instead.
[22] A Renaissance mythographer adds other names for Orion's dogs: Leucomelaena, Maera, Dromis, Cisseta, Lampuris, Lycoctonus, Ptoophagus, Arctophonus.
The Roman poet Virgil shows Orion as a giant wading through the Aegean Sea with the waves breaking against his shoulders; rather than, as the mythographers have it, walking on the water.
[33] The longest version (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.
[34] It describes Orion as slaying the wild beasts of Chios and looting the other inhabitants to make a bride-price for Oenopion's daughter, who is called Aëro or Leiro.
[39] Giovanni Boccaccio cites a lost Latin writer for the story that Orion and Candiope were son and daughter of Oenopion, king of Sicily.
[51] Another mythographer, Liberalis, tells of Menippe and Metioche, daughters of Orion, who sacrificed themselves for their country's good and were transformed into comets.
In the 14th century, Boccaccio interpreted the oxhide story as representing human conception; the hide is the womb, Neptune the moisture of semen, Jupiter its heat, and Mercury the female coldness; he also explained Orion's death at the hands of the moon-goddess as the Moon producing winter storms.
[63] The 16th-century Italian mythographer Natalis Comes interpreted the whole story of Orion as an allegory of the evolution of a storm cloud: Begotten by air (Zeus), water (Poseidon), and the sun (Apollo), a storm cloud is diffused (Chios, which Comes derives from χέω, "pour out"), rises though the upper air (Aërope, as Comes spells Merope), chills (is blinded), and is turned into rain by the moon (Artemis).
"[64] Similarly, Orion's conception made him a symbol of the philosophical child, an allegory of philosophy springing from multiple sources, in the Renaissance as in alchemical works, with some variations.
[72] The 19th-century German classical scholar Erwin Rohde viewed Orion as an example of the Greeks erasing the line between the gods and mankind.
Kerényi derives Hyrieus (and Hyria) from the Cretan dialect word ὕρον hyron, meaning "beehive", which survives only in ancient dictionaries.
Fontenrose also sees Eastern parallels in the figures of Aqhat, Attis, Dumuzi, Gilgamesh, Dushyanta, and Prajapati (as pursuer of Ushas).
[76] The ancient Greek and Roman sources which tell more about Orion than his being a gigantic huntsman are mostly both dry and obscure, but poets do write of him: The brief passages in Aratus and Virgil are mentioned above.
"[81] Statius mentions Orion four times in his Thebaïd; twice as the constellation, a personification of storm, but twice as the ancestor of Dryas of Tanagra, one of the defenders of Thebes.
[82] The very late Greek epic poet Nonnus mentions the oxhide story in brief, while listing the Hyrians in his Catalogue of the Boeotian army of Dionysius.
[86] The Austrian Daniel Seiter (active in Turin, Italy), painted Diane auprès du cadavre d'Orion (c. 1685) ("Diana next to Orion's corpse"), pictured above.
In Endymion (1818), John Keats includes the line "Or blind Orion hungry for the morn", thought to be inspired by Poussin.
[87] Richard Henry Horne, writing in the generation after Keats and Hazlitt, penned the three volume epic poem Orion in 1843.
[89] Science fiction author Ben Bova re-invented Orion as a time-traveling servant of various gods in a series of five novels.
In The Blood of Olympus, the final volume of a series, Rick Riordan depicts Orion as one of the giant sons of the earth goddess Gaea.
Orion, sung by a castrato, is in love with Candiope, the daughter of Oenopion, King of Arcadia but his arrogance has offended Diana.
Marion Perret argues that Orion is a silent link in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), connecting the lustful Actaeon/Sweeney to the blind Teiresias and, through Sirius, to the Dog "that's friend to men".
