Argus Panoptes

The guard before Io

Argus Panoptes is a guard from Greek myth whose body is covered in eyes. His second name, Panoptes, means “all-seeing”. The fullest account of him comes from Apollodorus, an ancient writer whose book, the Library, retells the Greek myths. Apollodorus gives Argus eyes over his whole body and great strength.

Apollodorus also gives Argus a life before his best-known task. A bull was ravaging the region of Arcadia. Argus killed it and wore its hide. He then killed a satyr, a wild spirit of the countryside, who attacked the people of Arcadia and robbed them. Last, he found the creature Echidna asleep and killed her.

These deeds show that Argus is more than a body full of eyes. He has already beaten dangerous enemies by force. That is the kind of guard the goddess Hera chooses.

Io becomes a cow

The god Zeus has a love affair with Io, a woman. He tries to hide it from Hera. In the version told by Apollodorus, Zeus turns Io into a cow to keep the secret. Hera then asks for the cow. Zeus cannot refuse without giving himself away, so he hands Io over.

Hera puts Argus in charge of her. He ties Io to an olive tree in the grove of the Mycenaeans. The change has turned a woman into an animal owned by a goddess. The guard’s task is to stop Zeus, or anyone acting for him, from taking her away. Protecting Io from harm is no part of it.

The playwright Aeschylus tells the start differently, in his play Suppliant Women. There Io keeps the keys of Hera’s temple at Argos. Hera suspects that Zeus desires Io and changes her into a cow herself, then sets the all-seeing Argus over her. Both versions make Argus the guard of Hera. Both place Io’s captivity in the Argolid, the region around Argos. They differ over who turns Io into a cow.

How Hermes frees Io

Zeus sends the god Hermes to bring Io back. Apollodorus says Hermes is first told to steal the cow. The plan fails because of what Argus is: with every eye on watch, he cannot be robbed in secret. So Hermes changes his method. He throws a stone and kills Argus.

Apollodorus tells this in a few words. He gives no music on pipes, no story told to send the guard to sleep and no slow closing of his eyes. Those details come from other tellings. In this Greek account, close watching stops a theft but cannot stop open violence. Hermes frees Io only by killing the guard Hera placed over her.

Io’s troubles do not end there. Hera sends a gadfly, a biting fly, after the cow. It drives Io first towards the Ionian Gulf and then much further across the world. Argus stays fixed at the start of that journey, in the grove of the Mycenaeans. His part of the story is the captivity from which her long, forced wandering begins.

How many eyes, and whose son

Neither Greek writer counts the eyes. Aeschylus calls Argus all-seeing and leaves it there. Apollodorus says his eyes cover his whole body, again without a number. The familiar picture of exactly 100 eyes is not found in either source, so it cannot be used to make their accounts more exact than they are.

His parents are even less certain. Aeschylus calls him earth-born, meaning born from the Earth itself. Apollodorus first names Agenor as his father. He then lists three other versions: Arestor, Inachus or Gaia, the Earth. A single family line could only be given by hiding this disagreement. That is why this entry gives Argus none.

The name his killer carried

Apollodorus says that Hermes gained a new title from the killing: Argiphontes, understood as “Argus-slayer”. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes, one of a set of early Greek poems in praise of a god, uses this title many times. It never explains the title through the story of Io’s guard. Its audience could know the name without hearing the whole encounter again.

So Argus lives on in two forms in the Greek texts. One is the all-seeing guard, whose body and parents change from writer to writer. The other is a title attached to Hermes. Apollodorus ends the encounter with the thrown stone. The Homeric Hymn keeps its result each time it names the god who killed him.