Daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia at Thebes. She nursed the infant Dionysus, drawing Hera's wrath, which drove her and her husband Athamas mad. Fleeing him, she leaped into the sea with her son and became the sea-goddess Leucothea.1
After Semele's death, Zeus entrusted the infant Dionysus to Hermes, who brought him to Ino and her husband Athamas, persuading them to rear him as a girl. But Hera, indignant that they had taken in the child of her rival, drove them mad.2
In his madness, Athamas hunted his elder son Learchus as a deer and killed him. Ino snatched up her younger son Melicertes and, pursued by her husband, threw herself into the sea. By the will of the gods, both were transformed: she became the sea-goddess Leucothea, and her son the sea-god Palaemon.3
Pausanias ties the sea-leap to the Corinthian Isthmus: from the Molurian rock at Megara Ino cast herself and Melicertes into the sea, and the boy was borne ashore on the Isthmus by a dolphin, where Sisyphus found him, gave him burial, and established the Isthmian games in his honour — while sailors invoke Leucothea and Palaemon as rescuers of the storm-tossed.4
Her one deed in Homer is a rescue. When Poseidon shattered the raft from Ogygia, Ino-Leucothea rose from the deep like a sea-mew, sat upon the wreck, and bade Odysseus strip, swim, and bind her immortal veil beneath his breast — the veil that carried him two days through the surf to Scheria. Safe ashore, he loosed it back into the sea, and she received it into her own hands.5
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story