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[edit] Europa's family

A commemorative Italian euro coin depicts Europa holding a pen over the text of the Constitution of Europe.
A commemorative Italian euro coin depicts Europa holding a pen over the text of the Constitution of Europe.

Sources differ in details regarding Europa's family, but agree that she is Phoenician, and from a lineage that descended from Io, the mythical nymph beloved of Zeus, who was transformed into a heifer. She is said to be the daughter of Agenor, the Phoenician King of Tyre, and Queen Telephassa ("far-shining") or of Argiope ("white-faced")[1]. Other sources, such as the Iliad, claim that she is the daughter of Agenor's son, the "sun-red" Phoenix. It is generally agreed that she had two brothers, Cadmus, who brought the alphabet to mainland Greece, and Cilix who gave his name to Cilicia in Asia Minor, with Apollodorus including Phoenix as a third.

There were two competing myths[2] relating how Europa came into the Hellenic world, but they agreed that she came to Crete, where the sacred bull was paramount. In the more familiar telling she was seduced by the god Zeus in the form of a bull, who breathed from his mouth a saffron crocus[3] and swam her away to Crete on his back; to be welcomed by Asterion [4], but according to a more literal, euhemerist version in Herodotus, she was kidnapped by Minoans, who likewise were said to have taken her to Crete. The mythical Europa cannot be separated from the mythology of the sacred bull, which had been worshipped in the Levant.

After arriving in Crete, Europa had three sons: Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Sarpedon, the three of whom became the three judges of the Underworld when they died. According to Roman mythology, her children were fathered by Jupiter (counterpart of Zeus). This was said to be the time of the reign of Pandion I, king of Athens. Some sources say she married Asterion (also rendered as Asterius) after Jupiter raped her and some even identify Asterius, king of Crete, with Jupiter of Crete.[5]

The Abduction of Europa by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1632. The princess Europa is carried away from her companions and across the sea to the distant land that would bear her name by the god Jupiter (in the guise of a white bull).
The Abduction of Europa by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1632. The princess Europa is carried away from her companions and across the sea to the distant land that would bear her name by the god Jupiter (in the guise of a white bull).

Europa does not seem to have been venerated directly in cult anywhere in Classical Greece, but at Lebadaea in Boeotia, Pausanias noted in the second century CE that Europa was the epithet of Demeter— "Demeter whom they surname Europa and say was the nurse of Trophonios"— among the Olympians who were addressed by seekers at the cave sanctuary of Trophonios of Orchomenos, to whom a chthonic cult and oracle were dedicated: "the grove of Trophonios by the river Herkyna. ...there is also a sanctuary of Demeter Europa... the nurse of Trophonios."[6]


  1. ^ Kerenyi points out that these names are attributes of the moon, as is Europa's broad countenance.
  2. ^ Bibliotheke 3.1.1.
  3. ^ Hesiodic fragment 19, a scholium on Iliad XII.292 (which does not mention Europa)
  4. ^ According to the scholium on Iliad XII.292, noted in Karl Kerenyi, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life p105. Pausanias rendered the name Asterion (2.31.1); in Bibliotheke (3.1.4) it is Asterion.
  5. ^ Virginia Brown's translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Famous Women, pp. 23-24; Harvard University Press 2001; ISBN 0-674-01130-9
  6. ^ Pausanias, Guide to Greece 9.39.2-5.