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| - Ladon was given several parentages, each of which placed him at an archaic level in Greek myth: the offspring of "Ceto, joined in heated passion with Phorcys" or of Typhon, who was himself serpent-like from the waist down, and Echidna or of Gaia herself, or in her Olympian manifestation, Hera: "The Dragon which guarded the golden apples was the brother of the Nemean lion" asserted Ptolemy Hephaestion. In one version, Heracles did not kill Ladon. Ladon might be given multiple heads, a hundred in Aristophanes' The Frogs (a passing remark in line 475), which might speak with different voices.
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| abstract
| - Ladon was given several parentages, each of which placed him at an archaic level in Greek myth: the offspring of "Ceto, joined in heated passion with Phorcys" or of Typhon, who was himself serpent-like from the waist down, and Echidna or of Gaia herself, or in her Olympian manifestation, Hera: "The Dragon which guarded the golden apples was the brother of the Nemean lion" asserted Ptolemy Hephaestion. In one version, Heracles did not kill Ladon. The image of the dragon coiled round the tree, originally adopted by the Hellenes from Near Eastern and Minoan sources, is familiar from surviving Greek vase-painting. In the 2nd century CE, Pausanias saw among the treasuries at Olympia an archaic cult image in cedar-wood of Heracles and the apple-tree of the Hesperides with the dragon coiled around it. Ladon might be given multiple heads, a hundred in Aristophanes' The Frogs (a passing remark in line 475), which might speak with different voices. Diodorus Siculus gives an euhemerist interpretation of Ladon, as a human shepherd guarding a flock of golden-fleeced sheep, adding "But with regards to such matters it will be every man’s privilege to form such opinions as accord with his own belief". Ladon is the constellation Draco, according to Hyginus' Astronomy. Ladon is the Greek version of the West Semitic serpent Lotan, or the Hurrian serpent Illuyanka.
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