Calais, Zetes and Chione

Last night, in LotRO, my Lore-master character earned her pet eagle. I am allowed to name these pets pretty much whatever I want, but naming pets can be difficult. I like short, easy to pronounce names, and my one attempt at naming a pet with Sindarin nomenclature (befitting Middle-Earth) fell flat, and I ended up renaming that pet. In LotRO, there are also special amulets that change the appearance of your pet, in effect giving you another pet (cosmetically). Each appearance of a pet can be named individually, and it turns out that I had access to two amulets that change my eagle's appearance, so I had to think of 3 names for my new pet(s). Traditionally, my pets that share a species also share the first letter of their names (because I'm dorky that way), but for my eagle, I wanted to do something a little different. I ended up naming them after figures from classical Greek mythology. My eagles' names are Calais, Zetes and Chione.

Calais and Zetes were twin brothers who travelled with Jason and the Argonauts. They rescued Phineas from the harpies and were rewarded with wings. When these brothers met an untimely death, they were transformed into birds. I thought these would be cool names to give my eagles. Then I found out I could make myself another amulet, so I had to think of a third eagle name. After some digging around, I found out Calais and Zetes had two sisters: Cleopatra and Chione. Cleopatra is a name that has been done to death, so I read up on Chione, and it turns out she has a bird-related story also. Chione was beautiful - so beautiful, in fact, that two gods came and, er, canoodled with her in the same night. She ended up giving birth to twins as a result. Anyways, she preferred her beauty to that of the goddess Artemis, and was summarily put to death, at which point she was transformed into a hawk, which, while not an eagle, is still a pretty cool bird.

These stories - especially Chione's story - really make me wonder about the ancient Greeks. On one hand, their civilization was a time of huge breakthroughs in rational thought, but on the other hand, people were making up stories like this and other people were believing them. I sometimes wonder if there were some secret society that had some kind of contest going with prizes for the most ludicrous story that people actually believed.