Argus Panoptes

Argus or Argos Panoptes (, "All-seeing Argos") is a many-eyed giant in Greek mythology. Mythology Argus Panoptes was the guardian of the heifer-nymph Io and the son of Arestor. According to Asclepiades, Argus Panoptes was a son of Inachus, and according to Cercops he was a son of Argus and Ismene, daughter of Asopus. Acusilaus says that he was earth-born (authochthon), born from Gaia. Probably Mycene (in another version the son of Gaia) was a primordial giant whose epithet Panoptes, "all-seeing", led to his being described with multiple, often one hundred eyes. The epithet Panoptes was applied to the god of the Sun, Helios, and was taken up as an epithet by Zeus, Zeus Panoptes. "In a way," Walter Burkert observes, "the power and order of Argos the city are embodied in Argos the neatherd, lord of the herd and lord of the land, whose name itself is the name of the land."The epithet Panoptes, reflecting his mythic role, set by Hera as a very effective watchman of Io, was described in a fragment of a lost poem Aigimios, attributed to Hesiod: In the 5th century and later, Argus' wakeful alertness was explained for an increasingly literal culture as his having so many eyes that only a few of the eyes would sleep at a time: there were always eyes still awake. In the 2nd century AD Pausanias noted at Argos, in the temple of Zeus Larissaios, an archaic image of Zeus with a third eye in the center of his forehead, allegedly Priam's Zeus Herkeios purloined from Troy.