Īōn

1. Eponymous ancestor of the Ionian Greeks (Gk. Iōnes or Iāŏnes). According to Greek myth (as preserved by Euripides; see below), Crğūsa, daughter of Erechtheus, king of Athens, was loved by the god Apollo and bore him a son Ion, whom for fear of her father's anger she left in a cave under the Acropolis. Hermes carried the child to Delphi, where he was reared as a servant of the temple. Creusa afterwards married Xuthus (see HELLEN), but as they remained childless they went to Delphi to ask for offspring. At the order of Apollo, Xuthus accepted as his son the first person he met on coming out of the shrine, and this was Ion. Creusa, angered at the adoption of one whom she supposed to be a bastard son of her husband, attempted to kill the boy, but being detected, and in danger of death, took refuge at the altar of Apollo. By the intervention of the priestess, who produced the swaddling clothes in which the infant Ion had been wrapped, Creusa recognized her child, and the goddess Athena revealed what had happened. Ion returned to Athens with Xuthus and Creusa to become, according to Athena's prophecy, the ancestor of the Ionian race.

2. Of Chios (b. c.490 BC, d. before 421), Greek poet famed chiefly for his tragedies, which were studied and admired by the Alexandrian scholars and by Longinus on the Sublime. None of them has survived. It is possible that he wrote a comedy as well, thus being the exception to the rule that no Greek wrote both (see COMEDY, GREEK 2). Interesting anecdotes link Ion with many of the famous names of the fifth century: he heard Cimon speak in the assembly, met Aeschylus at the Isthmian games and Sophocles when he was strategos in 441/40, and was defeated in the tragic contests at the Great Dionysia of 428 when Euripides won with Hippolytus. A long quotation by Athenaeus (Deipnosophistai 603), from Ion's prose work Epidemiai (‘visits’), in which he vividly describes an evening spent with Sophocles, gives cause for regret at the loss of his writings.