ORION, the name of a constellation which has been the centre of many legends in Greece. It bears the form of a warrior carrying a club, and wearing a girdle which is composed of three very beautiful stars. Its disappearance in the autumn is the prelude to storms and rain. The legendary hero Orion, or, as Pindar calls him, Oarion, was according to Homer a giant, fairer and taller than the Aloides. Eos, the dawn-goddess, loved him, but the gods were angry; Artemis slew him in Ortygia with kindly shaft. A doubtful passage in the Odyssey calls him a mighty hunter. The later poets give various discrepant accounts of his parentage. They usually connect him with some deed of violence to a maid, either the daughter of Oenopion in Chios, or the nymph Upis in Delos, or even Artemis herself. Others say that Artemis loved him, and was induced, by an artifice of the angry Apollo, to shoot him unwittingly. The Old Testament name of the constellation appears to be kesil, the fool or impious (Amos v. 5; Job ix. 9, xxxviii. 31). In Arabic and Semitic it is called the giant. Late writers (Cedrenus and the Paschal Chronicle') speak of a Persian identification of Orion with Nimrod.