The conventional account (attested first in Pindar, Nemean 10) combined these paternities so that only Pollux was fathered by Zeus, while Leda and her husband Tyndareus conceived Castor. In the Homeric Odyssey (11.298–304), they are the sons of Tyndareus alone, but they were sons of Zeus in the Hesiodic Catalogue (fr. There is much contradictory information regarding the parentage of the Dioscuri.

460–450 BC, holding a horse's reins and spears and wearing a pilos-style helmet

They were also associated with horsemanship, in keeping with their origin as the Indo-European horse twins.īirth Castor depicted on a calyx krater of c. The pair were regarded as the patrons of sailors, to whom they appeared as St. Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his own immortality with his twin to keep them together, and they were transformed into the constellation Gemini. In Latin the twins are also known as the Gemini (literally 'twins') or Castores, as well as the Tyndaridae or Tyndarids. Though accounts of their birth are varied, they are sometimes said to have been born from an egg, along with their twin sisters Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. The pair are thus an example of heteropaternal superfecundation.

Their mother was Leda, but they had different fathers Castor was the mortal son of Tyndareus, the king of Sparta, while Pollux was the divine son of Zeus, who raped Leda in the guise of a swan. Castor and Pollux (or Polydeuces) are twin half-brothers in Greek and Roman mythology, known together as the Dioscuri.

Son of zeus brother of hercules