Io and the Gadfly

Io was a priestess of Hera at Argos and the daughter of the river Inachus, and Zeus noticed her walking home from her father's stream. He drew a cloud over the whole valley in the middle of the afternoon to hide what he was doing. A cloud arriving out of nowhere at midday is not subtle, and Hera, looking down and finding one patch of Argos gone dark for no reason, came to see.

Zeus heard her coming and turned Io into a white heifer before his wife arrived, then stood beside the animal and praised its coat. Hera admired it too. She asked, pleasantly, whose it was and where it had come from and whether she might have it. Every answer he could give was either a lie she would catch or a confession, so he gave her the heifer.

She handed it to Argus, who had a hundred eyes and slept with only a few of them closed at a time, so that the animal was watched without pause, day and night. Io grazed on leaves and bitter grass. When she came to her father's riverbank and tried to tell him who she was, no words came, and in the end she scratched her name in the mud with one hoof. Inachus read it and understood that he could do nothing at all.

Zeus sent Hermes, who came down dressed as a herdsman with a set of reed pipes and sat with Argus through a long afternoon, playing and telling him the longest story he knew. One by one the hundred eyes went out. When the last of them closed, Hermes killed him, and Hera took the eyes and set them in the tail of her peacock, where they are still.

She was not finished. She sent a gadfly, and it drove Io out of Argos and kept driving her: across the sea that took her name at the Bosporus, the ford of the cow, through Asia, through Scythia, past the rock where Prometheus hung, and at last to the Nile. There she knelt at the water and lifted her face, and Zeus swore to Hera that he would never touch the girl again. Hera let it go. Io stood up as herself, and the Egyptians made her a goddess, and generations later her descendants sailed back to Greece.