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Dione (/daɪˈoʊni/; Greek: Διώνη, Diōnē) was an ancient Greek goddess, an oracular Titaness primarily known from Book V of Homer's Iliad, where she tends to the wounds suffered by her daughter Aphrodite. One source describes her as an ancient wife of Zeus.
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Name
Her name is essentially the feminine of the genitive form of Greek Zeus, that is, "Dios", "of Zeus". Other goddesses were called by this name (see Dione). Due to her being a daughter of Dione, Aphrodite was sometimes called Dionaea and even Dioné.
Following the deciphering of Linear B by Ventris and Chadwick in the 1950s, a goddess named Di-u-ja was found in the tablets. This was considered to be a female counterpart of Zeus and identified with Dione by some scholars.
Worship
By the time of Strabo, Dione was worshiped at a sacred grove near Lepreon on the west coast of the Peloponnesus. She was also worshiped as a consort at the temples of Zeus, particularly his oracle at Dodona. (perhaps the original, Indo-European consort of Zeus.) Herodotus called this the oldest oracle in Greece and recorded two related accounts of its founding: the priests at Thebes in Egypt told him that two priestesses had been taken by Phoenician pirates, one to Libya and the other to Dodona, and continued their earlier rites; the priestesses of Dodona claimed that two black doves had flown to Libya and Dodona and commanded the creation of oracles to Zeus. Homer and Herodotus both make Zeus the principal deity of the site, but some scholars propose Dodona originally served as a cult center of an Earth Goddess.
In the 2nd-century BC sculptural frieze of the Great Altar of Pergamum, Dione is inscribed in the cornice directly above her name and figures in the eastern third of the north frieze, among the Olympian family of Aphrodite. This placement – making her the offspring of Uranus and Gaia – is Homeric and contradicts the theory put forth by Erika Simon that the altar's organization was Hesiodic. Dione's possible appearance in the east pediment of the Parthenon would likewise place her among the children of Uranus and Gaia.