Orion

A giant who walks on the sea

Orion is a giant hunter. The ancient stories disagree about his birth. Some traditions say he was born from the earth. The ancient writer Pherecydes makes him a son of Poseidon, the god of the sea, and of Euryale. In that version Orion has the power to stride across the sea.

His size matters to the story. A body that large can cross the Aegean on foot, so the islands become stages of a single journey. That journey runs from Chios to Lemnos, then east towards the sunrise, and finally to Delos, where he dies. After his death he lives on in two places: among the dead and in the night sky.

The fullest account of the journey comes from Apollodorus, whose book, the Library, retells the Greek myths.

Blinded on Chios

Orion comes to the island of Chios and seeks to marry Merope, the daughter of Oinopion. Oinopion, the king, puts off the marriage. He makes the giant drunk and blinds him while he sleeps. Orion wakes without his sight and is thrown out onto the beach.

The sources tell the violence around this episode in different ways. In Apollodorus’s main account, Orion courts Merope. Other ancient versions say he attacked her, and Oinopion’s punishment follows that assault. The difference changes the reason for the blinding. It does not change what happens next, as Orion travels from the shore of Chios towards the smith god Hephaestus and the rising sun.

A guide on his shoulders

The blind giant reaches the workshop of Hephaestus and lifts a young guide onto his shoulders. Later sources name the guide Cedalion. From that height the smaller figure can point east while the giant does the walking. The rays of the rising sun give Orion back his sight.

The Greek writer Lucian describes the story as it appears in a painting. Orion carries Cedalion, the sun heals him, and Hephaestus stands on Lemnos watching. By naming the island, Lucian sets the healing on the smith god’s own ground in the Aegean, instead of in some unnamed home of the gods.

Orion goes back to Chios to take revenge on Oinopion, but he cannot find him. Poseidon has given the king a house under the earth, built by Hephaestus. Orion has his sight again, yet his revenge is blocked by another work of the same god whose helper led him to the cure.

Eos brings him to Delos

Eos, the goddess of dawn, falls in love with Orion and carries him to the island of Delos, in the Cyclades. Apollodorus explains her desire as a punishment. Eos had slept with the god Ares, and the goddess Aphrodite punished her for it. By now the hunter has travelled from Chios, through Lemnos and the east, before a goddess moves him to the island where he dies.

The goddess Artemis kills him, but the reason varies. In one account, Orion challenges her to a contest at quoits, a throwing game. In another, he attacks Opis, a maiden from the land of the Hyperboreans. Apollodorus keeps both versions and does not reduce the death to one moral lesson.

The Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem about the voyage home of Odysseus, gives a shorter version. Eos takes Orion, and Artemis kills him at a place called Ortygia, because the gods resent goddesses who choose mortal lovers. Ortygia cannot simply be read as Delos. Ancient texts also use the name for a place separate from Delos, the island of the god Apollo. The link to Delos rests on Apollodorus, who names it directly.

The hunter after death

When Odysseus visits the world of the dead, he sees Orion there. The giant drives together the wild animals he once killed on lonely mountains, and he carries a club of bronze that cannot be broken. Death has not ended the activity that defines him. The hunter goes on with his chase across the meadow of asphodel in the underworld.

The sky gives him a second life after death. Sailing away from the island of the goddess Calypso, Odysseus follows her instructions and keeps several star groups in view: the Pleiades, Boötes, the Bear and Orion. Here Orion has become one of the fixed patterns by which another traveller keeps his course.

The stars that keep the farming year

The early Greek poet Hesiod turns the constellation into a calendar. When Orion first appears, it is time to winnow the grain. When Orion and the star Sirius reach the middle of the sky, the grapes should be cut. When Orion, the Pleiades and the Hyades begin to set, ploughing starts and the dangerous sailing season ends.

These signs do not settle the contradictions in the hunter’s stories. They put his huge body to another use. Every year, the stars of the giant blinded on Chios and killed on Delos tell people when to thresh, harvest and plough, and when to pull their ships out of the water.