In the more familiar variant,
Ino, the daughter of
Cadmus, sister of
Semele, and queen of
Athamas, became a goddess after
Hera drove her insane as a punishment for caring for the newborn
Dionysus. She leapt into the sea with her son
Melicertes in her arms, and out of pity, the Hellenes asserted, the Olympian gods turned them both into sea-gods, transforming Melicertes into
Palaemon, the patron of the
Isthmian Games, and Ino into Leucothea.
She has a sanctuary in Laconia, where she answers people's questions about dreams, her form of oracle.
In the version sited at
Rhodes, a much earlier mythic level is reflected in the genealogy: There, a nymph or goddess named
Halia ("salty")
[a] plunged into the sea and became Leucothea. Her parents were the
titans Thalassa and
Pontus (or
Uranus). She was a local
nymph and one of the aboriginal
Telchines of the island. Halia became
Poseidon's wife and bore him
Rhodos and six sons; their sons were maddened by
Aphrodite in retaliation for an impious affront, assaulted their sister Rhodos, and were confined in caves beneath
the island by their father Poseidon. The people of Rhodes traced their mythic descent from the nymph Rhodos and the
Sun god Helios.
[1][2]
In the
Odyssey,
[3] Leucothea makes a dramatic appearance and tells the shipwrecked Odysseus to discard his cloak and raft, and offers him a veil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucothea#cite_note-5 to wind round himself, to save his life and reach land. Homer makes Leucothea the transfiguration of Ino.
and the king over all pride..is Leviathan...
