Hera's many-eyed watchman ended up as the pattern on a peacock's tail
Argus Panoptes, the all-seeing giant of Greek myth, never let every eye close at once, which made him the ideal guard for Io, a priestess Zeus had turned into a heifer. Hermes lulled him to sleep and killed him, and Hera set his eyes into the peacock's tail.
Ancient writers could not agree on his family. Many made him a son of Gaia, born from the earth, as Acusilaus put it; others named Arestor as his father, Asclepiades chose Inachus, and Cercops gave him Argus and Ismene, daughter of Asopus, as parents. The eye count shifted too. A fragment of the lost poem Aigimios, credited to Hesiod, gives him four eyes that look in every direction, while Ovid settled on a hundred. From the 5th century onward, as audiences read myths more literally, his sleeplessness was explained by having so many eyes that a few could rest while the others stayed open.
Before the Io episode he was a useful servant to the Olympians. He killed the serpent-legged monster Echidna while she slept in her cave, and according to the mythographer Apollodorus he slew a bull that was ravaging Arcadia and wore its hide. The historian of religion Walter Burkert saw him as a herdsman who embodied the power of the city of Argos, since his name is also the name of the land.
Hera, knowing that the white heifer was really Io and that Zeus desired her, had her tethered to a sacred olive tree and posted Argus as sentry. Zeus sent Hermes to free her. Disguised as a shepherd, the messenger god charmed every eye shut with spoken spells and then killed the giant, by some accounts with his wand and by others with a thrown stone. The deed counted as the first bloodshed among the younger generation of gods and earned Hermes the title Argeiphontes, the Argus-slayer. Io wandered on, stung by a gadfly Hera sent after her, reached the sea later named Ionian after her, and in some versions swam to Egypt and bore Zeus a child.
Hera honoured her loyal guard by fixing his hundred eyes in the peacock's tail, or, in another telling, by turning him into the bird entirely. Biologists kept the joke going: at least eight eye-spotted animals carry his name, among them the Argus monitor lizard, Varanus panoptes, and the great argus pheasant, Argusianus argus.
Source: Argus Panoptes
