Ophion

Also Known As: also Ophioneus
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Ophion held sovereignty over the sky in the earliest age of the world and lost it in a wrestling match.
Role in Mythos: He is the first king of heaven, ruling with his consort Eurynome until Cronus and Rhea overthrew the pair and cast them into the stream of Ocean.
Relation to Humans: Ophion has no cult, no worshippers and no dealings with mortals in any surviving source. He reaches people only through poetry, as the deposed king whose fall marks the boundary between the world’s beginning and the age of the Titans.

The Argo lay at anchor, the crew had started quarrelling over nothing, and Orpheus reached for his lyre. The song he chose to cool their tempers was not about a hero. It was about a defeat. Before Cronus held the sky, before Zeus took it from Cronus, someone else sat on the throne of heaven, and he was a serpent.

Apollonius of Rhodes gives him nine lines and then drops him into the sea. Ophion and Eurynome, daughter of Ocean, governed the world from snow-covered Olympus. They were forced out, Ophion by Cronus and Eurynome by Rhea, and both fell into the waters of the Ocean-stream, and the Titans reigned in their place. That is the whole of the story as the Greeks most often told it. A reign, a wrestling match, a fall, a throne changing hands.

The name carries the body. Ophion is built on ophis, snake, and every later poet who touched the figure treated him as something coiled. No surviving Greek writer sat down and described him. There is no account of his length, his colour, the sound he made, whether he had a face a person could look at. What the sources give instead is a shape implied by a word and by the company he keeps, because the primordial serpent who wraps the world is a recurring habit of Orphic cosmology. Phanes coils. Chronos coils with Ananke. Ophion belongs to that set, and the poets seem to have expected their audiences to already know what he looked like.

The older and stranger version comes from Pherecydes of Syros, writing in the sixth century BCE, and it survives only in pieces quoted by other people. In his cosmogony there are three things that never began: Zas, Chronos and Chthonie. There is a winged oak, and a cloth embroidered with earth and sea that is thrown over it as a wedding gift, an image with no parallel anywhere else in Greek writing. And there is a war. Two armies drawn up against each other, Cronus commanding one and Ophioneus the other, with terms agreed before the fighting: whichever side is driven into Ogenos, the primal water, has lost, and the side that does the driving takes possession of the sky. Ophioneus went into the water. He took his children with him.

Picture the reign before that. Snow on the summit, the air thin and still, the whole unfinished world turning below with nobody in it worth watching, and the serpent-king holding a sky that no one had yet contested. It is a curiously empty kind of power. Then the terms are set, the two lines close, and it comes down to grip and weight and leverage, one body against another, until the salt closes over him and the cold takes the last of the heat out of his coils. He is not killed. He is relocated, permanently, to the bottom of everything.

The Greeks could not agree on who he actually was. Callimachus refers to the older gods as the sons of Ophion, which makes him Uranus under another name, the sky-father who was cut down by Cronus. Nonnus, writing his enormous Dionysiaca in the fifth century CE, uses the name three different ways across the same poem: once for the exiled king Zeus mockingly offers to reinstate, once for Ocean sharing a hearth with primeval Tethys, and once for the power whose deeds fill the first of the seven prophetic tablets. Those tablets are the most vivid thing attached to him. Seven plates, one for each wandering star, and on them Ophion has cut the fate of the universe in red vermilion, the oracles of cities not yet founded and inventions not yet made, so that a goddess can walk along a wall and read what is going to happen. The deposed king turns out to have written everything down in advance.

The identifications are not a muddle to be tidied up. They are how the figure worked. Ophion was the name Greek poets reached for when they wanted a ruler older than the Titans, and the older that ruler got, the more he blurred into whatever other ancient thing was standing nearby.

His fall had a long afterlife. The philosopher Celsus, arguing against Christianity in the second century CE, pointed at Pherecydes and said the story of the serpent thrown out of heaven had been told by Greeks first, and that the Christians had simply borrowed it. Origen, answering him, agreed that the two tales resembled each other and insisted that Moses had got there earlier. Two men taking a lost sixth-century poem seriously enough to fight over its ownership, four hundred years after anyone had a complete copy.

One version of Ophion that circulates widely today is not ancient at all. The story of Eurynome rising naked from Chaos, dancing on the waves, catching the north wind and rubbing it between her palms until the serpent Ophion springs from it, then taking the form of a dove and laying the world-egg for him to coil around seven times until it splits, comes from Robert Graves and his book The Greek Myths, published in 1955. Graves presented it as a Pelasgian creation myth recovered from scattered evidence. Classicists have not accepted it. The dove, the egg, the seven coils and the dance are his own construction, and they have escaped into a great many books and websites that do not mention his name.

What Ophion could do is not really recorded, which is itself the point. He held the sky, and holding the sky is the only power any source gives him. In Nonnus he also knows the future well enough to inscribe it. His weakness is easier to name. He could be beaten by a stronger wrestler, and he could be pushed, and the world he ruled contained a substance, the deep water of Ocean, that would hold him once he was in it. Cronus did not have to destroy him. He only had to move him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ophion in Greek mythology?

Ophion is a primordial serpent god who ruled the sky as the first king of heaven, before the Titans. He held the throne alongside his consort Eurynome, daughter of Ocean, until Cronus and Rhea overthrew them both. His name comes from the Greek word ophis, meaning snake.

How was Ophion defeated?

Cronus wrestled Ophion for the throne of heaven and threw him into the stream of Ocean, while Rhea simultaneously overcame Eurynome. In the older version told by Pherecydes of Syros, the two led opposing armies under an agreed rule that whichever side was driven into the primal water would lose the sky. Ophion was driven into the water and fell with his children.

Where does the story of Ophion come from?

The best-known account is a song performed by Orpheus in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, written in the third century BCE. The earliest known version belongs to Pherecydes of Syros in the sixth century BCE, whose work survives only in fragments quoted by later writers. Lycophron, Callimachus and Nonnus all refer to Ophion as well.

Is Ophion the same as Uranus or Oceanus?

Ancient sources use the name inconsistently. Callimachus calls the older gods the sons of Ophion, which identifies him with Uranus, while Nonnus in one passage places Ophion in the house of Tethys, which identifies him with Oceanus. Greek poets appear to have used the name for whichever sky-ruler preceded the Titans rather than for one fixed individual.

Did Eurynome create Ophion from the north wind?

No ancient source says so. That story, in which Eurynome dances on the waves, rubs the north wind between her hands to produce Ophion, and lays a world-egg for him to coil around seven times, was written by Robert Graves in The Greek Myths in 1955 and presented as a reconstructed Pelasgian creation myth. Classical scholars regard it as Graves’ own invention rather than a genuine Greek tradition.