- Leda
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/lee"deuh, lay"-/, n.1. Class. Myth. the mother, by her husband Tyndareus, of Castor and Clytemnestra and, by Zeus in the form of a swan, of Pollux and Helen.2. Astron. a small natural satellite of the planet Jupiter.
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In Greek legend, the daughter of King Thestius of Aetolia and wife of King Tyndareus of Lacedaemon.Visited by Zeus in the form of a swan, she conceived Helen of Troy. Zeus was also sometimes said to be the father of her son Pollux, while Leda's own husband, Tyndareus, was held to be the father of his twin, Castor (see Dioscuri). Tyndareus was also the father of Leda's daughter Clytemnestra, who married Agamemnon.* * *
in Greek legend, usually believed to be the daughter of Thestius, king of Aetolia, and wife of Tyndareus, king of Lacedaemon. Some ancient writers thought she was the mother by Tyndareus of Clytemnestra, wife of King Agamemnon, and of Castor, one of the Heavenly Twins. She was also believed to have been the mother (by Zeus, who had approached and seduced her in the form of a swan) of the other twin, Pollux, and of Helen, both of whom hatched from eggs. Variant legends gave divine parentage to both the twins and possibly also to Clytemnestra, with all three of them having hatched from the eggs of Leda, while yet other legends say that Leda bore the twins to her mortal husband, Tyndareus. Still other variants say that Leda may have hatched out Helen from an egg laid by the goddess Nemesis, who was similarly approached by Zeus in the form of a swan. (The egg was shown to tourists in Sparta in the 2nd century AD, according to the travel writer Pausanias.) The divine swan's encounter with Leda was a subject depicted by both ancient Greek and Italian Renaissance artists; Leonardo da Vinci undertook a painting (now lost) of the theme, and Correggio's Leda (c. 1530s) is a well-known treatment of the subject. William Butler Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" is one of the classic poems of literary modernism.* * *
Universalium. 2010.