42. Io

Io was an Argive princess and priestess of Hera. After Zeus pursued and raped Io, he transformed her into a white heifer—i.e., a young cow—to hide her from his wife (although in at least one early version of the myth it was Hera who transformed Io). Hera, however, saw through the deceit and asked Zeus for a cow as a gift. When Zeus handed Io over to Hera, she placed the young cow under the watch of Argus, a giant with one hundred eyes. In response, Zeus sent Hermes to rescue her. The messenger god lulled Argus to sleep and killed him, freeing Io. Hera then sent a gadfly to torment Io (who was still a cow at this point), which chased her across the Ionian Sea to Egypt, where she transformed back into a human woman and gave birth to Epaphus.

For a fuller version of the story that Palaephatus is responding to, see Aeschylus, Suppliants 291–317, 538–79; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 561–886; Bacchylides 19; Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.568–746; Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.1.3.

1

φασὶν τὴν Ἰὼ ὡς: note that Io’s name is in the accusative. This construction is called prolepsis (πρόληψις “taking before”), in which the nominative subject of a subordinate clause is pulled forwards in the sentence to become the direct object of the main verb (S. 2182): “People say of Io, that she.” A famous example of prolepsis in English is, “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.” The effect is to place extra emphasis on Io’s name.

2

ὅπερ: the suffix –περ gives the relative clause a sense of exclusivity.

τὸ*** μένειν: articular infinitive, “the idea that [she could] remain.” The asterisks indicate that some words are missing from the text, and the presence of καὶ after the definite article suggests that there was at least one other infinitive in addition to μένειν in the list of details that P. found unbelievable about the traditional Io myth.

5

οἱ ἀπὸ τῆς πόλεως: “the people from the city.”

7

κατὰ ζήτησιν: adverbial, “on a search,” “in pursuit.”

ὅπου ἀνεῦρον: past general relative clause: “wherever they found [her].” We print Westerman’s emendation ἀνεῦρον (noted in Festa's apparatus, p. 63) in preference to Festa’s δἂν εὗρον, since ἂν does not belong here.

συλλαμβάνοντες ἐν δεσμοῖς εἶχον: Stern suggests moving the earlier ἂν next to εἶχον in order to best convey the past counterfactual condition here. However, the word ἄν is sometimes omitted when the sense of unreality of the apodosis is otherwise sufficiently clear (S. 2320 see notes on 3.2 and 30.7 above).

8

οὖν: the particle marks a change of topic. Here, it is from what happened to what was said about what happened, i.e., from deeds to words. The asterisks indicate that there is a chunk of text missing.

9

ἱκετεύει ἐξάγειν: “she begged [them] to convey [her].”