PLEIADES  , in

Greek mythology, the seven daughters of Atlas and Plelone, and sisters of the Hyades . Owing to their grief at the death of their sisters or at the sufferings of their father, they were changed into stars . In another account, the Pleiades and their mother met the hunter Orion in Boeotia, and the sight of them inflamed his passion . For five years he pursued them through the woods, until Zeus translated them all—Plelone and her daughters, Orion, and his dog—to the sky . The Pleiades rose in the middle of May and set at the end of October, and their connexion with spring and autumn explains the legend . As bringers of the fertilizing rains of spring, which have their origin in the west, they are the daughters of Atlas; as the forerunners of the storms of autumn, they are represented as being driven onward by Orion .in pursuit . The word is probably connected with 1rXEiwv, either in the sense of " many in number," since the stars formed a close group, resembling a bunch of grapes (hence sometimes called 06rpvs), or as " more in number " than their sisters . Others derive the name from srXEiv (to sail), because navigation began at the time of their rising . They are probably alluded to in Homer (Odyssey, xii . 62) as the doves (reAeiabes) who brought ambrosia from the west to Zeus . One of these doves was always lost during the passage of the Planctae . (wandering rocks), referring to the fact that one of the seven Pleiades was always invisible .

This was

Merope, who hid her light from shame at having had intercourse with a mortal, Sisyphus . All the Pleiades became the ancestresses of divine or heroic families . They were called Vergiliae (probably connected with ver, spring) by the Romans . See Hesiod, Works and Days, 383; Apollodorus iii . 10; Diod . Sic. iii . 6o; Theocritus xiii . 25; Hyginus, Astronom. ii . 21; Ovid, Fasti, iv . 169; V . 599 .