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Throughout his career Euripides shows a tendency to explore what A. M. Dale has called "the by-ways of myth" — tales not often examined on the tragic stage, or curious variants of familiar tales. We have seen evidence of this tendency in Medea and Heracles; in Ion, however, Euripides goes to new extremes, presenting a plot that is almost totally free invention on his part.
The audience that sat down to watch Euripides' play in c. 410 B.C. probably knew Ion as little more than a mere name in a genealogical chart, the eponymous forefather of the Ionian race. According to the standard myth, the eldest son of Deucalion and Pyrrha (the Greek Noah and his wife) was Hellen, who married the nymph Orseïs and fathered three sons: Dorus (eponymous forefather of the Dorians), Aeolus (eponymous forefather of the Aeolians), and Xuthus. Xuthus married the Athenian princess Creusa, but died in exile in Aegialus, in the northern Peloponnese. One of his sons, Achaeus, returned to his father's homeland, Thessaly, and became the eponymous forefather of the Achaeans; the other, Ion, was recalled to Athens, where he died leading Athens in its war against Eleusis. (Ion's people are later driven from the Peloponnese and come to Athens; many later move eastward to found the Ionian sites in Asia Minor and the islands of the Aegean.)
Euripides' version of the myth is quite different. Here the Thessalian Xuthus is a son of Aeolus, summoned to Athens to aid the Athenians in a war against Chalcis (on the island of Euboea) and given the hand of Creusa as his reward. Xuthus and Creusa produce the sons Dorus and Achaeus; Ion, however, is the son of Creusa and Apollo. (Note how Euripides' version inflates the importance of Athens: here the Dorians and Achaeans are a side-branch, as it were, of an essentially Athenian/Ionian genealogy, while the Athenians and Ionians can boast Apollo as their direct "ancestor.")
The story of Creusa's rape and the exposure and eventual rediscovery of Ion is invented by Euripides, but not quite out of whole cloth. In developing his plot, the poet follows various models, two of them general and one quite specific. Thus the audience watching the play would have a certain presentiment of how the story would develop and could appreciate the artistry with which the poet contrives his fiction.
1) The general story pattern is a familiar one: the royal infant who is exposed at birth, grows up abroad, but eventually comes to be recognized and reclaims his rightful throne. This is the story of Oedipus, Cyrus (in the first book of Herodotus' Histories), Romulus and Remus, and several other figures of Greek and Roman myth. (See the Course Notes on Herodotus' Histories.)2) The development of the plot follows a pattern that we find again and again in Euripides' later plays. These plays (Electra, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Helen, as well as Ion and several plays now lost) are built around two central motifs: the recognition (anagnorisis) and the clever plot or scheme (mechanêma). Generally, these plays involve long lost siblings, a mother and child, or (in the case of Helen) a husband and wife who meet one another, after a separation of many years, in a foreign land and/or amid dangerous circumstances. At first they fail to recognize each other, but once the recognition (anagnorisis) is effected the two unite to form a plot (mechanêma) to take revenge on those who threaten them and/or escape to safety. In Ion the pattern is varied somewhat: the mechanêma precedes the anagnorisis and is aimed by Creusa at the as yet unrecognized Ion.
3) The story of Creusa's rape and the fate of the infant Ion is cast by Euripides in a mold that recalls several of the founding myths of Athens. The relevant myths are outlined below.
Cecrops: first king of Athens; born of the earth and so a true son of Attica. (The Greek term to describe such indigenous peoples is autochthonus — "born of the very earth.") He had a human torso but the tail of a snake. He judged the contest between Athena and Poseidon regarding who would become the patron deity of Athens. (Poseidon made a salt spring rise out of the ground by smiting the earth with his trident; Athena won when she produced the olive tree. This scene is a popular one in Athenian art: it appeared, e.g., on the west pediment of the Parthenon.) Cecrops had three daughters: Herse (Dew), Aglaurus (Bright), and Pandrosus (All-Dewey).
Erichthonius: son of Hephaestus and Ge (Earth). Hephaestus attempted to rape Athena. She struck him with her spear and, in his excitement, he ejaculated prematurely: his semen fell on the earth and she gave birth to the young Erichthonius. Athena put the infant into a chest and gave it to the daughters of Cecrops to guard, with strict instructions not to look inside. Aglaurus and Herse peeked and, driven insane by what they saw (either a snake or a child with a snake's tail), jumped to their deaths from the walls of the Acropolis. Athena (or her priestess) then raised the boy in her temple on the Acropolis. When he grew up, Erichthonius drove out the usurper Amphictyon and became king of Athens. He is credited with instituting the Panathenaic festival (a mid-summer new year's festival celebrating Athena's birth) and with dedicating the ancient wooden statue of Athena Polias, originally kept in the old temple of Athena on the Acropolis but later transferred to the Erechtheum. Erichthonius went on to marry the nymph Praxithea, by whom he had a son, Pandion.
The story of Erichthonius is clearly related to the mysterious rite of the Arrhephoria. This rite is described by Pausanias (1.27.3): two girls of noble birth would live on the Acropolis near the Erechtheum as Athena's servants. On the night of the festival they would accept chests, the contents of which was a mystery, from the priestess of Athena. These they would carry on their heads down a passageway to the shrine of Aphrodite in the Gardens (near the caves of Apollo and Pan) at the northern base of the Acropolis. There they would leave the contents of the chests in a cave and would bring back something else (unknown) and deposit it in Athena's temple. The site of this rite is thus the very place where Creusa is raped by Apollo in Euripides' play and where she later exposes the infant Ion in a chest. (For views of this area of the Acropolis, visit Kevin Glowacki's and Nancy Klein's The City of Athens: North Slope of the Acropolis page.)
Erechtheus: son of Pandion (although in Ion he is presented as the son of Erichthonius) and father of Creusa; to some degree a mere duplicate of Erichthonius. (The stories regarding these two often become confused with one another.) He too is often said to have been born of the earth. His most famous exploit involved the conquest of Eleusis: Erechtheus won the war against Eleusis and killed the opposing king Eumolpus, but only at the cost of sacrificing one of his daughters. Erechtheus was closely identified with Poseidon.
The Erechtheum on the Acropolis is one of the most ornate and unusual temples in Greece. It was begun in 421 B.C. (to replace the old temple of Athena, destroyed by the Persians) but was not completed until 406. (Thus it would have been nearing completion at the time Ion was originally produced.) The Erechtheum is often compared to a jewel box or a reliquary: it has an unusual shape due, mainly, to the various cult sites and shrines that it was built to enfold. It contained, among other things, the wooden statue of Athena Polias, the olive tree planted by Athena, the marks of Poseidon's trident and the salt spring, the tombs of Cecrops and Erechtheus, and the shrine of Pandrosus. The famous maiden porch is intended to recall the daughters of Cecrops and, perhaps, the girls celebrating the Arrhephoria. (See the Perseus WWW site, s.v. "Erechtheion".)
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