Alcyone
2. A daughter of Aeolus and Enarete or Aegiale. She was married to Ceÿx, and lived so happy with him, that they were presumptuous enough to call each other Zeus and Hera, for which Zeus metamorphosed them into birds, ἀλκυών and κήυξ. (Apollod. 1.7.3, &c.; Hyg. Fab. 65.) Hyginus relates that Ceÿx perished in a shipwreck, that Alcyone for grief threw herself into the sea, and that the gods, out of compassion, changed the two into birds. It was fabled, that during the seven days before, and as many after, the shortest day of the year, while the bird ἀλκυών was breeding, there always prevailed calms at sea. An embellished form of the same story is given by Ovid. (Met. 11.410, &c.; comp. Verg. G. 1.399.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.