Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Melicertes.
The gallery
Ino and Melicertes (Ino frappée de folie se jetant dans la mer avec son fils Mélicerte)
Pierre Granier, 1686–1691
A near three-metre marble group carved for Louis XIV's gardens by the sculptor Pierre Granier, standing in the demi-lune beside the Apollo Basin in the Park of Versailles. It captures the climactic instant of the myth: Ino, driven mad by Juno (Hera), plunging from the cliff into the sea clutching her infant son Melicertes. Conceived as part of the grand iconographic programme of Versailles, it is among the most monumental surviving depictions of the child whose drowning transformed him into the sea-god Palaemon, honoured ever after at the Isthmus of Corinth.
The Insane Athamas Killing Learchus, While Ino and Melicertes Jump into the Sea
Antonio Tempesta (engraved), published by Wilhelm Janson, c. 1606
An etching from Antonio Tempesta's celebrated series illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses, published in Amsterdam by Wilhelm Janson and now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In a single dense composition it stages the destruction of Athamas's house: the king, raving in Hera-sent madness, dashes his elder son Learchus to death, while at the right his wife Ino leaps from the rocks into the sea carrying the infant Melicertes. The print fixes the precise moment of Melicertes's death and apotheosis, the leap by which mother and child became the marine deities Leucothea and Palaemon.
Silver plate with Ino, Melicertes and an ichthyocentaur
Unknown (Byzantine, Egypt), c. 590–650 AD
A late-antique partially gilded silver plate from Egypt, decorated in low relief and now in the Benaki Museum, Athens. It shows Ino with the child Melicertes riding upon the back of a marine ichthyocentaur (fish-tailed centaur), a maritime image that evokes the pair's rescue and transformation into sea-gods. The dish is rare material evidence that the myth of Melicertes-Palaemon remained a living subject for luxury silverware in the Eastern Mediterranean centuries after antiquity's classical heyday.
Athamas Tearing Apart His Children (Illustrations to the Metamorphoses of Ovid)
Godfried Maes, c. 1700
A drawing from the Flemish painter Godfried Maes's series of designs illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses. It depicts the frenzy in the palace of Athamas: the maddened king attacking his children while Ino recoils with her son Melicertes, on the brink of the flight that ends in their plunge from the cliff. The sheet belongs to the tradition of Ovidian illustration that kept the tragic episode of Melicertes and his mother before European audiences, immediately preceding the boy's deification as the sea-god Palaemon.