The Tale of the Wanderings of Io

At a Glance

Central figures: Io, a priestess of Hera and mortal beloved of Zeus; Zeus, king of the gods; Hera, his jealous wife; Argus, the hundred-eyed giant set to guard Io; and Hermes, the messenger god who killed Argus.
Setting: Ancient Greece and the wider ancient world - Olympus, the regions of the Bosporus, and Egypt. Drawn from the Greek mythological tradition recorded by Aeschylus and Ovid, among others.
The turn: Zeus transforms Io into a white cow to hide her from Hera, but Hera sees through the disguise, demands the cow as a gift, and sets the hundred-eyed Argus to watch her.
The outcome: Hermes kills Argus on Zeus’s orders, but Hera retaliates by sending a gadfly to drive Io across the earth in unending torment until Zeus finally frees her in Egypt, where she is restored to human form and bears his son Epaphus.
The legacy: The Bosporus - the strait connecting Europe and Asia - takes its name from Io’s crossing, the word meaning “Cow’s Passage” in Greek.

Io was a priestess of Hera. She served the goddess whose temple she attended, and she was beautiful, and Zeus noticed her. What followed was the pattern Zeus had worn smooth across a hundred such affairs: desire, concealment, discovery, and the suffering of the one least responsible for any of it.

When Hera’s suspicion sharpened into certainty, Zeus moved fast. He transformed Io into a white cow - a sleek, gleaming animal, innocent-eyed - and stood beside it in a field as Hera arrived. Hera said nothing of what she knew. She admired the cow. What a fine gift, she said, for a devoted wife. Zeus could not refuse her without confessing everything. He handed over the cow.

Argus of the Hundred Eyes

Hera took no chances. She gave Io into the keeping of Argus, the giant, who had a hundred eyes distributed across his body and never needed to sleep fully - when some of his eyes drooped, others stayed open, scanning the dark. He was the perfect jailer. He led Io by a rope and watched her from every angle at once, and Io - unable to speak, unable to write her name in the dust and have anyone understand who she was - could only low and wander in the circle he permitted her.

She met her father once. Inachus, the river god, came to the field where Argus kept her, and he stroked the white cow without knowing her. She pressed her head against his hand. She tried to speak. What came out was a bellow, and Inachus flinched back, and she scratched her name in the dirt with her hoof - I, O - and he understood then. He wept, and Argus watched, and there was nothing either of them could do.

Zeus watched too, from Olympus, and the guilt of it wore at him. He called Hermes.

The Sleep of Argus

Hermes came down to earth in the guise of a goatherd, a young man carrying a reed pipe, and he fell in with Argus easily enough, as if by chance. Argus was a creature of routine - watchful, yes, but also bored by his endless vigil. He was glad of company. He invited Hermes to sit.

Hermes played the pipe first. The music was slow and formless, not a song so much as sound - the kind that loosens the grip of attention without the listener quite noticing. He talked while he played, telling Argus the story of the syrinx, the nymph who fled Pan and was transformed into the very reeds from which the pipe was cut. It was a long story, told with digressions and doubled back on itself, and Argus’s eyes - one by one, in pairs, in dozens - began to close. The heads of a man with a hundred eyes are heavy when all those eyes are shut. Argus slept.

Hermes drew his blade and cut off the giant’s head. All hundred eyes went dark at once.

The Gadfly

Hera found Argus where he had fallen and she grieved him. She gathered his eyes and set them in the tail of the peacock, where they remain, but Io she would not forgive. She sent a gadfly, a stinging, frenzied insect, to pursue the white cow across every country it wandered into. The gadfly was tireless. It drove its sting into Io’s flank and drove her forward - always forward, never resting, never reaching any field green enough to graze in peace.

Io ran. There was nothing else to do. She plunged into the sea between Europe and Asia, the narrow strait the Greeks would afterward call the Bosporus - the Cow’s Passage - and she swam it and emerged on the other side still running, the gadfly at her heels. She crossed Scythia. She crossed Thrace. The names of the places fell away behind her and the gadfly did not tire and she did not stop.

The Far Shore of Egypt

Egypt was where the running ended. Io crossed its border exhausted, her flanks caved in with wandering, and there on the banks of the Nile she collapsed. Aeschylus gives her a voice at this point, raving with the sting and the anguish of it, crying out what had been done to her. But Zeus came to her there. He laid his hand on her - and this touch, unlike the earlier ones, carried no disguise and no desire - only the intention to undo what had been done. He asked Hera for her release.

Hera relented. Whether she was satisfied by the punishment Io had endured or merely tired of the contest, she agreed. Zeus restored Io to her human form. She stood upright again, on the bank of the Nile, herself again after all the wandering.

Epaphus and What Remained

In Egypt, Io bore Zeus a son: Epaphus, whose name carries in it the touch by which Zeus restored his mother. Epaphus grew to become a king of Egypt, and from his line descended Danaus and Cadmus and, generations deeper, Heracles himself. The family Io founded in exile turned out to be one of the great generative houses of the mythological world - her suffering the root of a dynasty.

The Bosporus kept its name. Anyone crossing from Europe into Asia was crossing where the white cow crossed, driven by something she could not outrun. The peacock kept its eyes - Argus’s eyes, distributed in the tail-feathers, still watching. And Io stood in Egypt in her own body, finally still, the gadfly gone, the long road behind her.