Ino- Greek GodDeity"The White Goddess"

Daughter of Cadmus

Ino was a daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia of Thebes. When her sister Semele was destroyed by Zeus's lightning, Zeus rescued the unborn Dionysus and sewed him into his own thigh. After the god was born a second time, Ino and her husband Athamas took the child in, raising him as a girl to hide him from Hera.

The Plot Against Phrixus and Helle

Ino married Athamas as his second wife, after his first wife Nephele departed. Athamas already had two children, Phrixus and Helle, and Ino schemed to destroy them in favor of her own sons, Learchus and Melicertes. She parched the city's seed grain before the sowing season so the crops would fail. When famine struck and Athamas sent to Delphi for guidance, Ino bribed the messengers to report that only the sacrifice of Phrixus would end the blight. As the boy stood at the altar, his mother Nephele sent a golden-fleeced ram to carry both children away. Helle fell into the strait that bears her name, the Hellespont, while Phrixus reached Colchis and hung the fleece in Ares' sacred grove — the prize Jason would later cross the world to claim.

Madness and Deification

Hera never forgave Ino for nursing Dionysus. She sent the Fury Tisiphone to the house of Athamas, and madness took them both. Athamas, mistaking his family for prey, snatched Learchus from Ino's arms and killed him. Ino seized Melicertes and fled to the cliff's edge, where she threw herself and the child into the sea. The waves did not destroy them: Ino became the sea goddess Leucothea, and Melicertes became Palaemon, the marine deity in whose honor the Isthmian Games at Corinth were said to be founded. In the Odyssey, Leucothea found Odysseus clinging to wreckage after Poseidon shattered his raft. She gave him her immortal veil and told him to swim for the shore of Scheria. The woman who had thrown herself into the sea as a mortal now pulled a hero out of it.