Orion (
Greek: Ὠρίων
[1] or Ωαρίων,
Latin:
Orion[2]) was a giant
huntsman in
Greek mythology whom
Zeus placed among the stars as the
constellation of Orion.
Ancient sources tell several different stories about Orion. There are two major versions of his birth and several versions of his death. The most important recorded episodes are his birth somewhere in
Boeotia, his visit to
Chios where he met
Merope and was blinded by her father,
Oenopion, the recovery of his sight at
Lemnos, his hunting with
Artemis on
Crete, his death by the bow of Artemis or the sting of the giant scorpion which became
Scorpio, and his elevation to the heavens. Most ancient sources omit some of these episodes and several tell only one. These various incidents may originally have been independent, unrelated stories and it is impossible to tell whether omissions are simple brevity or represent a real disagreement.
In Greek literature he first appears as a great hunter in
Homer's epic the
Odyssey, where
Odysseus sees his shade in the
underworld. The bare bones of his story are told by the
Hellenistic and Roman collectors of myths, but there is no extant literary version of his adventures comparable, for example, to that of
Jason in
Apollonius of Rhodes'
Argonautica or
Euripides'
Medea; the entry in
Ovid's
Fasti for
May 11 is a poem on the birth of Orion, but that is one version of a single story. The surviving fragments of legend have provided a fertile field for speculation about Greek prehistory and myth.
Orion served several roles in
ancient Greek culture. The story of the adventures of Orion, the hunter, is the one on which we have the most evidence (and even on that not very much); he is also the personification of the constellation of the same name; he was venerated as a
hero, in the Greek sense, in the region of Boeotia; and there is one
etiological passage which says that Orion was responsible for the present shape of the Straits of
Sicily.