Ixion

Also Known As: Greek Ἰξίων, Ixiōn; Latin Ixion; king of the Lapiths of Thessaly, son of Phlegyas in most accounts and of Antion in Diodorus Siculus
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: The first mortal to shed the blood of his own kin, and the first to be washed clean of it by Zeus, who then found a punishment with no end to it.
Role in Mythos: He is the man whose two crimes gave Greece its rule about guests and its race of centaurs.
Relation to Humans: Greek writers used him as the standing example of what happens to a man who repays kindness with theft, and Pindar has him circling the sky repeating that lesson aloud to everyone below. Painters put him on drinking cups where the wine was poured, which is a pointed place to put a host who murdered his guest.

The pit was dug into the floor of the hall and filled with charcoal, then covered over until nothing showed but ordinary packed earth, the kind a guest crosses on his way to the table. Ixion had sent word that the bride-gifts were ready at last. His father-in-law came to collect them, walked where he was meant to walk, and went down into the heat. What the Lapiths of Thessaly remembered afterwards was not the shouting. It was that the thing had happened indoors, under a roof, at the invitation of the man who owned it.

Ixion was their king, and his origins are the part of his story the sources cannot settle. Most give him Phlegyas for a father. Diodorus Siculus makes him the son of Antion by Perimela, working him into a Thessalian genealogy that also produces Lapithes and a separate Centaurus. Later compilers offer names that read like copying errors. What everyone agrees on is the marriage: he wanted Dia, daughter of Deioneus, and he promised her father a bride-price extravagant enough to be worth repeating in company. Then he declined to hand any of it over. Deioneus did what a wronged father-in-law was entitled to do and seized some of Ixion’s mares as security. That was the whole quarrel. It was a debt dispute over horses, and it produced the first murder within a family that Greek memory recorded.

Pindar puts it flatly in the second Pythian ode: Ixion was the first among mortals to bring kindred blood upon men, and he did not do it without guile. The guile is the pit. The kinship is the marriage. Both matter, because both were things the gods were understood to punish, and neither had been done before in quite this shape. There was no rite for it. Nobody knew how to make a man clean of a crime that had not yet needed a cure, so nobody would try, and Ixion went from house to house across Thessaly and was turned away at every door.

Zeus took pity on him. That is the strangest sentence in the myth and no source explains it. Aeschylus has Apollo cite the case in open court, arguing that when the first man-killer came to Zeus as a suppliant Zeus was right to cleanse him; Orestes in the same play clings to a goddess’s image and is told he is doing what Ixion did long ago. So the murderer was purified, and then invited to eat at the table on Olympus, and the gods watched him do it.

He spent the meal looking at Hera. Pindar says he assailed her in the deep and secret places of her own bridal chamber, and that a man does well to measure each act against his own size. Hera told her husband. Zeus, wanting proof rather than a report, gathered a cloud and shaped it into her likeness and laid it down beside Ixion in the dark. The phantom had her face and none of her substance. Ixion took it for the queen of the gods and, in the only detail that makes him almost sympathetic, believed he had got away with it. He went back among mortals and told people.

The wheel came next. Hermes was set to whip him until he would say the words as though he meant them: honour your benefactors. Then Zeus bound him to a wheel and let it go. In Pindar it has four spokes and turns on its own wings, and the message travels with it, Ixion calling down to the whole world to repay a benefactor with gentle kindnesses. Apollodorus says the winds drive it through the air. Later writers moved it underground into Tartarus alongside Sisyphus and Tantalus, and put fire on it, and there it has stayed. He cannot fall off. He cannot stop turning, and he cannot stop talking, which for a man whose ruin was a boast is the neater half of the sentence.

The cloud, meanwhile, was pregnant. In Pindar she bears one child on the slopes of Pelion, a son with no honour among men and none in the laws of heaven, and names him Kentauros. He grows up and goes to the Magnesian mares on the mountain ridges, and out of that comes the race that has a horse’s body below and a man’s above. Apollodorus, Diodorus, Hyginus and Cicero shorten it: the cloud bore the Centaurs, and that was that. Either way, the wild half-horse tribe that would one day wreck a wedding feast in Thessaly began with a man in bed with weather.

There is a final turn of the knife in Homer. In the Iliad, Zeus lists the women he has loved, and among them is the wife of Ixion, who bore him Peirithous. So the king on the wheel had been cuckolded by the god who put him there, and his wife’s son by that god became the next king of the Lapiths and the host at the wedding the centaurs ruined.

He has no powers at all. That is worth saying plainly, because his neighbours in the underworld tend to have some trick to them, and Ixion has nothing but appetite and a talent for being first. What he does have is precedent: he is the case that fixed the rules, the reason a Greek could say that a host who murders his guest and a guest who reaches for his host’s wife are the same sort of creature. His weaknesses are equally simple and equally fatal, and they are all one weakness wearing different clothes. He wanted more than he had paid for. He could not keep a secret. Given a second chance by the one power capable of granting it, he spent that chance immediately, on the wife of the man who had granted it.

Painters could not leave him alone. He turns up on red-figure cups seized by the Furies, and on a kantharos of around 450 BC held fast by Hermes and Ares while Hera decides what to do and Athena stands behind with the wheel ready. On a cup of about 500 BC now in Geneva he is lashed to the rim not with rope but with snakes. An Etruscan scarab of the early fifth century BC carries the scene, and a Roman sarcophagus of the 160s AD sets him beside Sisyphus and Tantalus, the three of them working through their separate impossible tasks for the benefit of whoever was being buried.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Ixion in Greek mythology?

Ixion was a king of the Lapiths, a tribe of Thessaly in northern Greece. He is best known for two crimes: murdering his father-in-law Deioneus over an unpaid bride-price, and later attempting to seduce Hera after Zeus had purified him and welcomed him to Olympus. His punishment was to be bound to a turning wheel for eternity.

Why was Ixion tied to a wheel?

Zeus bound Ixion to the wheel because he tried to force himself on Hera and then boasted that he had succeeded. Zeus had tested the claim by shaping a cloud into Hera’s likeness, which Ixion mistook for the goddess herself. In Pindar’s version the wheel has four spokes and turns through the air on its own wings, carrying Ixion’s cry that benefactors should be repaid with kindness.

Did Ixion father the centaurs?

Yes, through the cloud phantom that Zeus made in Hera’s shape. Pindar says the cloud bore a single son, Kentauros, who mated with the Magnesian mares on the slopes of Mount Pelion and produced the half-horse race. Apollodorus, Diodorus Siculus, Hyginus and Cicero compress this and say the cloud gave birth to the Centaurs directly.

What was Ixion’s first crime?

Ixion promised lavish bride-gifts for Dia, the daughter of Deioneus, then refused to pay. When Deioneus seized some of his mares as security, Ixion invited him to a banquet, concealed a pit of burning charcoal in the floor and let him fall into it. Pindar calls this the first shedding of kindred blood among mortals.

How is Ixion connected to Sisyphus and Tantalus?

All three are figures given unending punishments and are frequently grouped together in later Greek and Roman treatments of the underworld. A Roman sarcophagus of the 160s AD in the Vatican Museums shows the three of them side by side, Ixion on his wheel, Sisyphus with his boulder and Tantalus reaching for what he cannot have.