Athamas

Ino secretly persuaded the women of Boeotia to parch the wheat grain before it was sown. The earth then failed to produce its annual crop. Athamas, who ruled Boeotia, sent envoys to Delphi to ask how the barrenness could end. Ino persuaded them to report that the oracle required Phrixus, Athamas’s son by Nephele, to be sacrificed to Zeus.

The people accepted this answer and compelled Athamas to take Phrixus to the altar. Athamas led him towards the mountain top, weeping as he went. He was about to cut his son’s throat when a rescue came. Nephele seized Phrixus and his sister Helle, and gave them a ram with a golden fleece. She had received the ram from Hermes.

Another account tells the rescue differently. Athamas led Phrixus to the summit of Mount Laphystium and was about to kill him when Heracles, who happened to be nearby, rushed forward and took the sacrificial flint from his hand. Heracles said that Zeus hated human sacrifice. Before Phrixus could be killed, a winged golden ram flew down from Olympus. It called to Phrixus to climb onto its back. Helle begged not to be left behind, so Phrixus pulled her up behind him.

The ram carried the two children eastwards towards Colchis. In another telling, Nephele instructed them to ride to the kingdom of Colchis, where Aecetes, the son of Helius, ruled, and to sacrifice the ram to Ares when they arrived. Phrixus followed these instructions and hung the ram’s golden fleece in a temple of Ares. The accounts agree that the ram intervened before Phrixus was sacrificed, but differ over who brought it and how the rescue began.

After Semele died in the fire of Zeus’s thunderbolt, Zeus rescued their unborn child and sewed him into his thigh. When the time came, he brought Dionysus to birth and handed him to Hermes. Hermes took the infant to Ino, Semele’s sister, and her husband Athamas, king of Orchomenus. He persuaded them to raise the child as a girl in the women’s quarters of their palace.

Hera discovered the deception and punished Athamas and Ino with madness. Athamas seized his bow and shouted that he had seen a white stag. He shot their son Learchus, then tore the child’s body into pieces. Ino took their younger son, Melicertes, and fled. Athamas pursued her, but Dionysus temporarily blinded him. Athamas then mistook a she-goat for Ino and began to beat it.

Ino ran to the Molurian Rock and leaped into the sea, carrying Melicertes. Both were drowned. Zeus remembered her kindness to Dionysus. He therefore made Ino the goddess Leucothea instead of sending her ghost to Tartarus, and made Melicertes the god Palaemon. The Molurian Rock later became known as a place of ill repute because Sciron threw strangers from it.

Another account says that, after Hera’s punishment, Hermes changed Dionysus into a kid or a ram. He took the child to the nymphs Macris, Nysa, Erato, Bromie, and Bacche on Mount Nysa, where they cared for him in a cave and fed him honey. A different version says that Titans seized Dionysus on Hera’s orders, tore him apart despite his transformations, and boiled the pieces. Rhea rescued and restored him before he was entrusted to Persephone and brought to Athamas and Ino.