The Myth of Ixion

At a Glance

• Central figures: Ixion, king of the Lapiths in Thessaly - a mortal who murdered his father-in-law and was nonetheless taken in by Zeus; Hera, queen of the gods; and Nephele, the cloud double Zeus fashioned in Hera’s likeness.
• Setting: Thessaly and Mount Olympus, in the mythic age of Greek heroes; the story belongs to the broader Greek tradition concerning the punishments of Tartarus.
• The turn: Zeus, having purified Ixion of kin-slaying and welcomed him to Olympus, learns that Ixion has attempted to seduce Hera - and tests him with a cloud shaped like her to confirm it.
• The outcome: Ixion is cast from Olympus and bound to a spinning, fiery wheel in Tartarus, condemned to turn on it forever; his union with the cloud Nephele produces the first Centaurs.
• The legacy: Ixion’s wheel became one of the most enduring images of eternal punishment in Greek myth, and the Centaurs - the half-man, half-horse race born of his delusion - went on to play violent roles across many subsequent stories.

Ixion was king of the Lapiths, a tribe of Thessaly ancient even by the gods’ reckoning, and he began his story with one of the ugliest acts a man could commit. He had promised a bride-price to his father-in-law, Eioneus, and when the day came to pay it, he invited Eioneus to collect - and threw him into a pit of burning coals. The murder of a guest, the murder of a kinsman by marriage: it was the sort of pollution that made other kings turn Ixion away from their doors, unwilling to perform the purification rites that might have cleansed him. No one wanted his company. He wandered Thessaly with the blood still on him, shunned by mortals and gods alike.

And then Zeus, for reasons the Greeks never quite agreed on, took pity on him.

The King at Olympus

Zeus brought Ixion to Olympus, purified him of the kin-slaying, and gave him a seat at the divine table. This was extraordinary - mortals did not eat with gods, did not breathe the rarefied air of Olympus or drink the nectar passed between Athena and Apollo and Hera. Ixion drank it anyway. He reclined at feasts he had no right to attend. He was shown mercy of a kind the gods rarely offered anyone, let alone a murderer.

What Ixion did with this mercy was watch Hera.

Not discreetly. Not with the suppressed awe a guest owes his host’s wife. He watched her the way a man watches something he intends to take. Hera noticed - Hera always noticed - and went to Zeus. The king of the gods did not move immediately. He was a god who liked to be certain.

Nephele

Zeus took cloud and shaped it into a woman who wore Hera’s face, Hera’s form, Hera’s bearing. He called her Nephele - cloud - and placed her where Ixion would find her. The test was simple. A man of any decency, any gratitude at all, would have pulled back the moment he recognized what he thought he saw. He would have remembered where he was, whose table he ate at, who had dragged him from his exile and washed the blood from his hands.

Ixion did not pull back.

He went to the cloud believing it was Hera, and he consummated his desire with it, there on Olympus, in the house of the god who had saved him.

Zeus watched. He had wanted confirmation, and now he had it - not just of the attempted seduction, but of everything Ixion was. The man had not been corrupted by Olympus. He had arrived already corrupted, and the feast and the nectar and the divine company had only convinced him that he deserved more of it, that there was no ceiling on what he might claim. From the union of Ixion and the cloud, Nephele conceived. What she bore was the Centaurs - creatures half man, half horse, wild and ungovernable, shaped by the madness of their father’s appetites. They would appear in other stories: at the wedding of Pirithous, tearing at the bride; in the hills of Thessaly, teaching Achilles the lyre and the hunt; in forests where they drank and raged. The chaos Ixion had generated continued to generate chaos long after Ixion himself was gone.

The Wheel

Zeus’s punishment was swift and without ceremony. Ixion was driven from Olympus, handed to Hermes, and taken down into Tartarus - not the ordinary realm of the dead, but the deepest and most deliberately horrible of its regions, where the worst offenders were given punishments calibrated to last forever.

His punishment was a wheel. Specifically, it was a wheel of fire, and Ixion was bound to it - wrists, ankles, the full span of his body stretched across the spokes - and the wheel was set spinning. It did not stop. It has not stopped. Pindar knew the wheel; so did Virgil; so did every poet who catalogued the torments of the great sinners beneath the earth. Tantalus stood in his pool reaching for fruit he could never touch. Sisyphus shoved his boulder up a hill that always defeated him. Ixion spun.

The wheel was not random as a punishment. It suited him. He had been given something extraordinary - purification, Olympus, the table of the gods - and had immediately begun reaching for more, spinning outward from what he had been given toward what he wanted, unable to stop, unable to be satisfied. Now the reaching was all there was. The spin, the fire, and no arrival.

What Nephele Left Behind

The Centaurs did not carry their father’s memory, but they carried something of his nature. They were not evil - some of them, Chiron in particular, were wise and gentle and became tutors to heroes - but the line as a whole ran toward excess. At the wedding of Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, the Centaurs were given wine, and wine undid them. They seized the women. The Lapiths fought back. The battle between Lapiths and Centaurs, the Centauromachy, was carved onto the metopes of the Parthenon, painted on hundreds of pots, celebrated in Athenian art as a victory of civilization over the wild. The Lapiths were Ixion’s own people. The Centaurs were Ixion’s own children. He had set them against each other before he was even dead.

Nephele herself was dispersed back into the sky, a cloud again, formless and cold. She had been a test, and the test was over. Whatever she had been - goddess, construct, victim of the deception Zeus used to expose another man’s deception - the myths do not dwell on it. She bore the Centaurs and disappeared.

Down in Tartarus, the wheel keeps turning. The fire does not cool. Ixion had been the only mortal ever welcomed to Olympus, pardoned for kin-slaying, given the chance to sit among the gods, and he had squandered all of it in an afternoon. The wheel spins, and the spin is the answer to the question of who he was.