Myth Monday - The 3 Families

You may have noticed that the heroes in Greek mythology tend to be related. When a forum poster wrote that Hercules/Heracles was descended from Io and that that may have made the hero of African ethnicity [see What was Hercules' ethnicity?], it reminded me that Hercules is a great-grandson of Perseus, as discussed earlier in Myth Monday - Interconnectedness of the Greek Heroes. Perseus' wife's father was king of Ethiopia, and Perseus' progeny were credited with starting the race of Persians. Of course, I'm using race and ethnicity loosely, and since these are mythological figures, should not be taken as historical facts, anyway. It did, however, set me off on a tangent that led to a page on Carlos Parada's great mythology site.

Parada has put up a page on the 3 ancestral families of Greek mythology. Two of them are Titan-based, and the third, the result of a union of an Olympian and the daughter of a river god. It's the last that leads to Perseus, since the Olympian is Zeus, the river god, Inachus, and his daughter, Io, whose form was changed to a cow to protect her from Hera. The other two families are those descended from Atlas: the line of Pelops, Tantalus, and the House of Atreus, which includes Agamemnon, and those descended from Prometheus' son Deucalion (the Greek Noah).

If you want to see the family tree that relates Io and Hercules, see Timeless Myth's House of Perseus. The generations from Io to Perseus are complicated by gods popping up repeatedly and by close cousins mating. Basically, it goes something like this:

Io -> Enachus -> Libya -> Belus -> Aegyptus -> Lynceus -> Abas -> Acrisius -> Danae -> Perseus -> Electryon -> Alcmene -> Hercules