In the more familiar variant, Ino, the sister of Semele and queen of Athamas, became a goddess after Hera drove her insane as a punishment for caring for the new-born Dionysus. Ino/Leucothea leapt into the sea, with her son Melicertes in her arms. Out of pity, the Hellenes asserted, the Olympian gods turned them both into sea-gods, transforming Melicertes into Palaemon, the patron of the Isthmian games that were held in his honour. See Ino for more details.

In the version sited at Rhodes, a much earlier mythic level can be detected. There, the woman who plunged into the sea and became Leucothea was Halia ("of the sea"; personification of the saltiness of the sea) whose parents were Thalassa and Pontus or Uranus. She was a local nymph and one of the aboriginal Telchines of the island. Halia became Poseidon's wife and bore him Rhodos/Rhode and six sons; the sons were maddened by Aphrodite in retaliation for an impious affront, assaulted their sister and were confined beneath the Earth by Poseidon. Thus the Rhodians traced their mythic descent from Rhode and the titan Helios. (Graves 1955)

In the Odyssey Leucothea makes a dramatic appearance as a sea-mew who offers the shipwrecked Odysseus a veil to wind round himself to save his life in the sea. Homer makes her the transfiguration of Ino. In Laconia, she has a sanctuary, where she answers people's questions about dreams. This is her form of the oracle. Leucothea is The White Goddess of Robert Graves. The Etruscan Losna may well be comparable.

*Dyke (mythology)


In ancient Greek culture, Dike (Greek: ????, English translation: "justice") was the spirit of moral order and fair judgement based on immemorial custom. The sculptures of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia have as their unifying iconographical conception the dike of Zeus,[1] and in poetry she is often the attendant (paredros) of Zeus.[2] In the philosophical climate of late fifth century Athens, dike could be anthropomorphised[3] as a goddess of moral justice.[4] She was one of the three second-generation Horae, along with Eunomia ("order") and Eirene ("peace"):

"Eunomia and that unsullied fountain Dike, her sister, sure support of cities; and Eirene of the same kin, who are the stewards of wealth for mankind — three glorious daughters of wise-counselled Themis."[5]

She ruled over human justice, while her mother Themis ruled over divine justice. Her opposite was adikia ("injustice"): in reliefs on the archaic Chest of Cypselus preserved at Olympia,[6] a comely Dike throttled an ugly Adikia and beat her with a stick.

The later art of rhetoric treated the personification of abstract concepts as an artistic device, which devolved into the allegorizing that Late Antiquity bequeathed to patristic literature. In a further euhemerist interpretation, Dike was born a mortal and Zeus placed her on Earth to keep mankind just. He quickly learned this was impossible and placed her next to him on Mount Olympus.