The Thessalian king who lusted after Hera, lay with the cloud Zeus set in her likeness, and was bound to a wheel whirled forever through the air — while from that union, or from the cloud-mate of later tellers, came the centaur stock.1
Apollodorus tells the crime and its punishment: Ixion fell in love with Hera and tried to force her; when Hera reported it, Zeus fashioned a cloud in her likeness and laid it beside him. Ixion boasted that he had enjoyed the queen of heaven, and Zeus bound him to a wheel on which winds whirl him through the sky to this day. The cloud, impregnated by Ixion, gave birth to Centaurus.2
Homer remembers him from Zeus' own lips: never, the king of gods says, did desire for goddess or mortal so master his heart — not even when he lay with the wife of Ixion, who bore Peirithous, peer of the gods in counsel. The Lapith prince thus hangs from the same Thessalian house, whether as Ixion's son in the genealogies or as Zeus' child on the king's wife.3
Hyginus counts Peirithous son of Ixion, brother of Centaurus, a Thessalian — and names the cloud Nubes when he gives the parentage of centaurs such as Nessus and Eurytion. The wheel in the sky and the shaggy brood on Pelion belong to one impious lineage.4
Sources place his Thessalian kingship at Larissa, but his punishment binds him to the wheel in the sky — a figure of wandering crime and cosmic torment, not civic residence. Residence stays deferred.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