There seems to be no controversy about this constellation, and almost nothing to say about it. It is there because Zeus considered the lion as the king of beasts. At one time, lions roamed around Greece, but by the time of the Roman Empire it was hunted to extinction. However, recently, scholars have maintained that there is no genuine evidence that lions were present in Greece.

Needless to say, this constellation is also associated with the Nemean lion that Heracles killed on his first labor. Heracles strangled the beast, and then skinned and wore it around him as a trophy. However, this feat is not just killing any little cat. Apollodorus reports that the lion was the progeny of Typhon, the great monster. At first, Heracles attempted to shoot at it with its arrows. But they simply bounced off. So Heracles picked up his club and tracked it down. The lion hid in his cave, and it took Heracles two months to find it and finally choke it to death. He used its own claws to skin it.

Yet this feat by Heracles is also performed in a similar fashion by Gilgamesh or the Sun god. Some say that the association of the lion with the Sun is owing to the coincidence of the lion in the Babylonian zodiac with the summer solstice.

But in conjunction with the story of Virgo, it is important to note that at the tail of Leo, there is a group of seven stars in the shape of a triangle. They are called the lock of Berenice by Callimachus and the mathematician Conon of Samos. When Ptolemy married his sister Berenice, in the customary Egyptian way, he went off to war. Berenice vowed that if Ptolemy would return victorious, she would make a votive offering of a lock of her hair.

After he returned, Berenice did just that at the Temple of Aphrodite Arsinoe Zephyritis. The next day, a fretting Ptolemy searched for the lock, for it had disappeared. However, Conon pointed out that the lock had been placed among the stars, the seven stars representing the lock.


By Kalev Pehme
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