![]() ![]() Their role as horsemen and boxers also led to them being regarded as the patrons of athletes and athletic contests. ![]() ![]() The Dioscuri were regarded as helpers of humankind and held to be patrons of travellers and of sailors in particular, who invoked them to seek favourable winds. Their death and shared immortality offered by Zeus was material of the lost Cypria in the Epic cycle. The narrator remarks that they are both already dead and buried back in their homeland of Lacedaemon, thus suggesting that at least in some early traditions, both were mortal. In Homer's Iliad, Helen looks down from the walls of Troy and wonders why she does not see her brothers among the Achaeans. One consistent point is that if only one of them is immortal, it is Pollux. Their other sisters were Timandra, Phoebe, and Philonoe.Ĭastor and Pollux are sometimes both mortal, sometimes both divine. The figure of Tyndareus may have entered their tradition to explain their archaic name Tindaridai in Spartan inscriptions, or Tyndaridai in literature, in turn occasioning incompatible accounts of their parentage. This explains why they were granted an alternate immortality. The conventional account (attested first in Pindar, Nemean 10) combined these paternities so that only Pollux was fathered by Zeus, while Leda and her husband Tyndareus conceived Castor. In the Homeric Odyssey (11.298–304), they are the sons of Tyndareus alone, but they were sons of Zeus in the Hesiodic Catalogue (fr. There is much contradictory information regarding the parentage of the Dioscuri. 460–450 BC, holding a horse's reins and spears and wearing a pilos-style helmet They were also associated with horsemanship, in keeping with their origin as the Indo-European horse twins.Ĭastor depicted on a calyx krater of c. The pair were regarded as the patrons of sailors, to whom they appeared as St. Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his own immortality with his twin to keep them together, and they were transformed into the constellation Gemini. In Latin the twins are also known as the Gemini (literally "twins") or Castores, as well as the Tyndaridae or Tyndarids. Though accounts of their birth are varied, they are sometimes said to have been born from an egg, along with their twin sisters Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. The pair are thus an example of heteropaternal superfecundation. Their mother was Leda, but they had different fathers Castor was the mortal son of Tyndareus, the king of Sparta, while Pollux was the divine son of Zeus, who seduced Leda in the guise of a swan. Castor and Pollux (or Polydeukes) are twin half-brothers in Greek and Roman mythology, known together as the Dioscuri. ![]()
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