In the more familiar variant,
Ino, the daughter of
Cadmus, sister of
Semele, and queen of
Athamas, became a goddess after
Hera drove her insane as a punishment for caring for the newborn
Dionysus. She leapt into the sea with her son
Melicertes in her arms, and out of
pity, the Hellenes asserted, the Olympian gods turned them both into sea-gods, transforming Melicertes into
Palaemon, the patron of the
Isthmian Games, and Ino into Leucothea.
She has a sanctuary in Laconia, where she answers people's questions about dreams, her form of oracle.
In the version sited at
Rhodes, a much earlier mythic level is reflected in the genealogy: There, a nymph or goddess named
Halia ("salty")[a] plunged into the sea and became Leucothea. Her parents were the
titansThalassa and
Pontus (or
Uranus). She was a local
nymph and one of the aboriginal
Telchines of the island. Halia became
Poseidon's wife and bore him
Rhodos and six sons; their sons were maddened by
Aphrodite in retaliation for an inhospitable affront, assaulted their own mother Halia, and were confined in caves beneath
the island by their father Poseidon; Halia cast herself into the sea, and became Leucothea. The people of Rhodes traced their mythic descent from the nymph Rhodos and the
Sun godHelios.[1][2][3]
In the Odyssey,[4] Leucothea makes a dramatic appearance and tells the shipwrecked Odysseus to discard his cloak and raft, and offers him a veil[b] to wind round himself, to save his life and reach land.
Homer makes Leucothea the transfiguration of
Ino.
It is possible that Leucothea is the "Leucothoe" that
Hyginus makes the mother of
Thersanon by Helios, although he could be referring to
another woman by the same name.[5]
Cultural allusions
Leucothea is mentioned by
John Milton in the Paradise Lost scene where archangel Michael descends to Adam and Eve to declare that they must no longer abide in Paradise (second edition, 1674, book XI, lines 133–135):
Meanwhile, To re-salute the world with sacred light, Leucothea waked;…[6]
In
Ezra Pound's
Cantos, she is one of the goddess figures who comes to the poet's aid in Section: Rock-Drill (Cantos 85–95). She is introduced in Canto 91 as "Cadmus's daughter":
As the sea-gull Κάδμου θυγάτηρ said to Odysseus KADMOU THUGATER "get rid of parap[h]ernalia"
She returns in Cantos 93 ("Κάδμου θυγάτηρ") and 95 ("Κάδμου θυγάτηρ/ bringing light per diafana/ λευκὁς Λευκόθοε/ white foam, a sea-gull… 'My bikini is worth yr/ raft'. Said Leucothae… Then Leucothea had pity,/'mortal once/ Who now is a sea-god…'"), and reappears at the beginning of Canto 96, the first of the Thrones section ("Κρήδεμνον…/ κρήδεμνον…/ and the wave concealed her,/ dark mass of great water.").
Leucothea appears twice in Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò) by
Cesare Pavese.
Leucothea becomes a metaphor, in
Marcel Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, for the mist that covers a young man's gaze when looking on the beauty of young women: "…a cloud that had re-formed a few days later, once I had met them, muting the glow of their loveliness, often passing between them and my eyes, which saw them now dimmed, as through a gentle haze, reminiscent of Virgil's Leucothea."[7]