Orion and the Scorpion

Greek writers told several versions of how the hunter Orion died. In the best known, a scorpion killed him, and the two were set on opposite sides of the sky, so that one is always fleeing as the other rises.

As Aratus told it

The poet Aratus, writing in the third century BC, tells the story in his Phaenomena (opens in a new tab). On the island of Chios, while Orion was hunting beasts for King Oenopion, he laid hands on the robe of Artemis. The goddess split the island's hills and sent up a scorpion, which stung and killed him. Aratus ends with the sky: men say that "at the rising of the Scorpion in the East Orion flees at the Western verge" (G. R. Mair's 1921 translation).

Other tellings

The versions disagree, as Ian Ridpath sets out (opens in a new tab). Eratosthenes gives two: in one, Orion attacked Artemis and she sent the scorpion; in the other, the Earth sent it after Orion boasted he could kill any wild beast. Hyginus repeats both. Aratus sets the death on Chios; Eratosthenes and Hyginus put it on Crete. In every version the moral is the same: Orion is punished for his pride.

The sky behind the story

Ridpath suggests (opens in a new tab) the myth may have grown out of the sky itself, because the two constellations really do sit opposite each other. By this site's calculation, Betelgeuse and Antares are about 152° apart on the sky, so when Scorpius is climbing in the east, Orion is sinking in the west, just as Aratus says. The scorpion is older than the Greek story: the Sumerians called these stars GIR-TAB, the scorpion, more than 5,000 years ago.

What kind of record this is

This is a story Greek and Roman writers told and retold, with a moral attached. It is not an account of events, and the ancient authors themselves did not agree on the details.