Asteria

Asteria is a second-generation Titaness, daughter of Coeus and Phoebe and sister of Leto, and her Greek name means of the stars, she is associated with falling stars, with the oracles read in dreams, and with the night. Her chief myth is one of flight and transformation. Pursued by the desire of Zeus, Asteria refused him and, to escape, turned herself into a quail and plunged into the sea, where she became a floating island. That island, known as Ortygia (the quail island) and later as Delos, was where her sister Leto, also fleeing Zeus's jealous wife Hera, at last found a place to give birth to Apollo and Artemis, so that the island Asteria became was the birthplace of her own nephew and niece. By an earlier union with the Titan Perses, Asteria is also the mother of Hecate, the goddess of the crossroads and of magic. Her story is a good example of the Greek habit of explaining a sacred place through the metamorphosis of a divine being.

Asteria's transformation, fleeing Zeus, into a quail and then into the floating island first called Ortygia gave Greek geography a small but persistent puzzle, because more than one place in the Greek world carried the same evocative name and the same claim to sacred significance. Delos itself was known by the alternate name Ortygia in connection with Asteria's myth, but a separate and rival tradition located the birth of Artemis, rather than her twin Apollo, at a different Ortygia near Ephesus in Asia Minor, a sacred grove associated with the great temple of Artemis there, so two significant sanctuaries, geographically far apart, both claimed the quail-island name and, with it, a share of the divine birth story the myth of Asteria was ultimately used to explain. A third location, the small island in the harbor of Syracuse in Sicily, also bore the name Ortygia and its own local foundation legends, unconnected to the Titaness but drawing on the same root word for quail, illustrating how an evocative name and its associated myth could be exported and reattached to new places by Greek colonists far from the Aegean.

Ancient sources themselves show no anxiety about resolving which Ortygia was the real one, treating the name as available to more than one sacred landscape rather than as a single, unrepeatable place name, a habit of religious geography that modern readers, used to expecting one canonical location for a mythic event, sometimes find harder to accept than the ancient Greeks evidently did. Asteria's own myth, in other words, did not just explain one island's origin but supplied a template, a Titaness fleeing into the sea and becoming sacred ground, that different Greek communities could each claim for their own local geography.