Dione (Greek)

Dione (Greek)

Dione, (Greek: Διώνη) pronounced /daɪˈoʊni/, in Greek mythology is a vague goddess presence who has her most concrete form in Book V of Homer's Iliad as the mother of Aphrodite. Aphrodite journeys to Dione's side after she has been wounded in battle while protecting her favorite son Aeneas. In this episode, Dione seems to be the equivalent of Gaia the Earth Mother, whom Homer also placed in Olympus, and to that extent might be classed as a "mother goddess". Dione's Indo-European name is really less a name than simply a title: the "Goddess", etymologically a female form of Zeus. After the Iliad, Aphrodite herself was sometimes referred to as "Dionaea" and even "Dione", just "the goddess" (Peck 1898).

Roman "Diana" has a similar etymology but is not otherwise connected with Dione.

At the very ancient oracle of Zeus at Dodona, Dione rather than Hera, was the goddess resorted to in the company of Zeus, as many surviving votive inscriptions show. The birds associated with her at Dodona are doves, and her priestesses at Dodona were "doves", peliades.

Although Dione is not a Titan in Hesiod, but appears instead in his Theogony among the long list of Oceanids, Apollodorus includes her among the Titans (1.1.3 and 1.3.1) and the Roman mythographer Gaius Julius Hyginus makes her the daughter of the Titan Atlas. In the sculptural frieze of the Great Altar of Pergamum (2nd century BCE), Dione (inscribed in the cornice directly above with her name) figures in the eastern third of the north frieze, among the Olympian family of Aphrodite; thus she is an exception to the rule, detected by Erika Simon, that the organizational principle according to which the gods on the Great Altar were grouped, was Hesiodic: her company in the grouping of offspring of Uranos and Gaia is Homeric rather than Hesiodic, as is her appearance in the east pediment of the Parthenon but serves perhaps also to show how imperfect the fit in was her inclusion among any purely Olympian schema.

The archaic king Tantalus in Lydia had Dione as a consort: Hyginus says that Dione, daughter of Atlas, was the mother, by Tantalus, of Pelops, Niobe, and Broteas. See also Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.172 If a king's consort is "Dione", the logical implication is that he justifies his authority as the earthly, visible consort of "The Goddess" in an archaic model of sacred kingship.

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Greek goddesses | Oracular goddesses | Oceanids | Divine women of Zeus | Nature goddesses