IXION, a hero of Thessalian legend, was king of Gyrton. As a punishment for the murder of his father-in-law, Deioneus, madness came upon him, until Zeus purified him of his crime and received him as a guest in Olympus. Aeschylus uses him as the type of a guilt-laden mortal purified and pardoned by divine grace, and the mythical representative of all later penitents (Hum., 441). Ixιon abused his pardon by trying to seduce Hera; but the goddess substituted for herself a cloud, by which he became the father of the Centaurs. Zeus bound him on a fiery wheel, which rolls unceasingly through the air. The wheel is one of the commonest symbols of the sun, and Ixion is clearly the sun-god, and a form of Zeus. His wife Dia is, as her name shows, the consort of Zeus (II., xiv. 317), and her son Pirithous is called son of Zeus as well as of Ixion. Nephele, the cloud, occurs also as wife of Zeus-Athamas, as here of Zeus-Ixion.