The idea of a ‘crossing’ that is both dangerous and sacralizing is built into the name Hellēs-pontos, which means literally ‘the crossing of Hellē’, and this meaning is embedded in a myth that we see summarized in most of its major details in the Library attributed to Apollodorus (1.9.1). According to this myth, there was once a boy named Phrixos and a girl named Hellē who were children of the hero Athamas and of a goddess called Nephelē, meaning ‘Cloud’; the divine mother of these children saved them from being murdered by their stepmother, named Ino, by sending to them as their helper the Ram with the Golden Fleece, who took the children on his back and flew away with them; as the ram was flying across the Hellespont, Hellē lost her grip and slipped off, plunging into the Hellespont and drowning there; and that is why the name of this dangerous body of water that Hellē was crossing is Hellēs-pontos or ‘crossing of Hellē’. But Phrixos succeeds in crossing the Hellespont safely, and he escapes to the Far East, where he sacrifices the Ram with the Golden Fleece in thanksgiving for his salvation (again, Apollodorus Library 1.9.1). This salvation of Phrixos is explicitly marked by the words pontos, ‘crossing’, and sōzein, ‘save’, in a song of Pindar (Pythian 4.161): τῷ ποτ’ ἐκ πόντου σαώθη, ‘by way of this [= the Golden Fleece] he [= Phrixos] was saved [saō-thē, from sōzein], getting away from the sea [pontos]’.