Lady in the Water: Ino, Eidothea,
and Their Indo-European Relatives

Emily B. West (The College of St. Catherine)

This paper offers insight into the Odyssey’s helpful aquatic demi-goddesses Ino/Leukothea and Eidothea.  Scholars have heretofore had little to say about the pair.  Wilamowitz (1884:135-6) sniffs at the idea that Leukothea makes any contribution to the epic, and Heubeck (et al. 1998 vol. I: 216) dismisses both goddesses as probable inventions based on Märchen and folk literature.  Benardete (1997:45) reasons that perhaps Leukothea’s role is merely to make sure that Odysseus is naked when he reaches Scheria. 

It is probable that Leukothea and Eidothea arose from a common source at some point; the Eidothea and Leukothea incidents occur in adjacent books and are linked by a number of narrative similarities.  It has even been speculated that Leukothea’s assistance originally occurred after the post-Thrynachia shipwreck, which would align the two goddesses even more closely. But the question remains whether or not the common ancestor of the two figures was adopted/invented during the Homeric period of the epic's development, or whether she stems from Indo-European proto-epic. Two episodes from the Sanskrit Mahābhārata involving similar aquatic helper figures (Ulūpī the Snake-Girl, and Vargā the crocodile/celestial nymph) may shed some light on the origins of the Homeric goddesses.  Recent comparative work on the Homeric epics and the Mahābhārata (including S. Jamison CA 1994: 5, CA 1999: 227; N.J. Allen JIES 2000: 3; M. Meulder JIES 2000: 399; E. West CJ 2005:125) has demonstrated the productivity of comparison between the Homeric and Indic epics.  Following the work of Parry and Lord (1960), episodes from Homer may be seen as strings of themes or motifs that a poet orders and re-orders as storytelling occasions demand.  Comparison may then be made with the components of similar tales from the Indic epics, or from elsewhere. Though there are shared motifs cross-linking all four of the characters discussed here (e.g. their aquatic nature and locus, shape-changing, their propensity to rise out of the sea un-summoned in time of need, and their powerful advice-giving male relatives), their episodes pair off naturally according to the differing focal points of each narrative: a wrestling match (Eidothea and Vargā) and the gift of a life-saving magical token (Ino and Ulūpī). Examination of the four goddesses as a group, and in pairs points to a better understanding of the goddesses’ evolution and their roles in the epic.