IXION, in Greek legend, son of Phlegyas, king of the Lapithae in Thessaly (or of Ares), and husband of Dia. Having treacher ously murdered his wife's father Defoneus he could find none to purify him until Zeus did so and admitted him as a guest to Olympus. Ixion 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 or (according to the later version) in the underworld (Pindar, Pythia, ii. 21; Ovid, Metam.
iv. 461; Virgil, Aeneid, vi. 6o1). A plausible but by no means certain explanation connects the story with the not uncommon practice of carrying a blazing revolving wheel through fields which needed the heat of the sun, the legend being invented to explain the custom (see Mannhardt, Wald- and Feldkulte, ii. 1905, p. 83).
See Roscher's Lexilon, s.v.