Night
Asteria
ἈστερίαRoman: Asteria
Threw herself into the sea to escape Zeus and became the island her sister gave birth on.
- 1
- epithet
- 1
- cult site
- 1
- offspring
- 0
- unions
- 1
- recorded birth
Vitals
- Kind
- Titan
- Generation
- 2
- Domains
- the falling star, night oracles and dreams
- Accent
- Night — darkness, the moon, sleep, the crossroads
- Sacred symbols
- the falling star, the quail, the island of Delos
- Principal cult sites
- Delos
What they were called
Ἀστερία
of the stars
Lineage
See in the tree
Offspring in this roster
Notable myths
The Quail and the Rock
Zeus pursued Asteria; she changed into a quail and dropped into the sea rather than be caught. She became a wandering rock, and stayed unrooted until Leto — also pregnant by Zeus, also fleeing — came to her and gave birth, at which point the island fixed itself in place and was called Delos, the visible one.
Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.4.1
The account
Asteria is Leto's sister, and where Leto submits to Zeus, Asteria does not. Pursued by him, she turned herself into a quail and threw herself into the sea, and became a rock — Asteria, later called Delos, the island that floated unfixed until Leto came to it. That makes the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis a Titaness who escaped their father. Later writers found the pairing too neat to leave alone and repeated it with variations. Callimachus builds his Hymn to Delos entirely on it: the island speaks, remembers being a woman, and takes Leto in precisely because it knows what Hera's anger is worth and has already accepted the cost. Asteria's other line runs through Perses, by whom she bore Hekate, the goddess Zeus honours above all others in Hesiod. So her descendants and her sister's descendants between them account for four of the most-worshipped divine figures in Greece, and she is barely a page of text.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 404-410
- Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.4.1
Where a line reference is not given, the work is cited without one rather than guessed at.
Image credit
No classical portrait of this figure survives, so the mark on this page is generated from their Greek initial and their domain accent rather than taken from an artwork.