Son of Xuthus and Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus; from him and his brother Achaeus the Ionians and Achaeans take their names.1
Apollodorus folds Ion into the great pedigree of the Greek peoples. Xuthus, son of Hellen, received the Peloponnese and begat Achaeus and Ion by Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus; and from Achaeus and Ion, the mythographer notes in the same breath, the Achaeans and Ionians derive their names. The eponym of a whole branch of the nation thus enters the record already paired with his brother as a name made flesh.2
Apollodorus' catalogue of Erechtheus' household fixes the marriage that produced him: among the king's daughters, Chthonia was married to Butes, Procris to Cephalus, and Creusa to Xuthus. The Athenian princess and the Hellene exile are joined in a single clause, and from that union the line runs to Ion.3
Pausanias tells how the family came to Athens at all. After Hellen's death the other sons drove Xuthus out of Thessaly, charging him with appropriating ancestral property; he fled to Athens, was deemed worthy to wed the daughter of Erechtheus, and by her had Achaeus and Ion. So Ion is born in Attica, a grandson of Hellen grown Athenian.4
In Pausanias the grown Ion is no mere eponym but a captain. He dwelt among the Athenians and was chosen their commander-in-chief in the war against Eleusis, and it was he who drove Dysaules, the brother of Celeus who had established the mysteries, out of the land; though Pausanias himself doubts that an Eleusinian was conquered and exiled, since the war ended in a treaty before it was fought out. When Ion died he was buried at Potami in Attica, where his grave lay.5
Pausanias also gives Ion a house and a long posterity in the Peloponnese: settling at Aegialus and marrying Helice, he had by her a daughter Bura, who gave her name to a city of Achaea, and from his stock the last pre-Dorian king Pityreus and the colonist Procles were reckoned descendants — the Ionian name carried down the generations and overseas long after the man himself was gone.6
⁂
the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story