In Greek mythology, Cassiopeia is best known for being a queen who boasted that either she herself or her daughter Andromeda was more beautiful than the Nereids, the powerful sea-nymphs who counted among their number Thetis (later mother of the hero Achilles) and Amphitrite (the Queen of the Sea).
As a punishment for this presumption, Poseidon, the King of the Sea, commanded that Andromeda be sacrificed to a sea-monster that he had sent to ravage the countryside of Cassiopeia's (apparently coastal) domain. This is the setup for the quintessential damsel-in-distress, hero-gets-the-girl story when Poseidon's nephew Perseus, having recently killed the Gorgon Medusa, came flying by, fell instantly in love with Andromeda, and saved her by destroying Poseidon's monster.
All the mortal characters in this part of the story eventually ended up in the stars as constellations named after them, viz. Cassiopeia and her husband Cepheus, together with Andromeda, Perseus, and (the sea-monster) Cetus. (Courtesy of a 19th-century French astronomer, the Gorgon much later on becomes an asteroid called 149 Medusa.)
There seem to be a few different versions of Cassiopeia, including the fact that sometimes her name is spelled Κασσιέπεια (Kassiépeia, "Cassiepeia") instead. The most popular or "main-stream" version of her seems to be one where, by virtue of her marriage to Cepheus, she is the queen of Æthiopia, but her own parentage is not supplied.
Strabo's Geography mentions a variant in which the whole drama, with the daughter who must be sacrificed but is then rescued, is set in the port city of Joppa (now Jaffa, in the neighbourhood of Tel Aviv). According to Pliny the Elder's Natural History, the ædile Marcus Scaurus brought the humongous skeleton of the sea-monster from Joppa to display in Rome, among other foreign curiosities. Stephanus of Byzantium explains the connection by stating that the city's name, Iope, as he calls it, derives from
Iope, the daughter of Aeolus, and wife of Cepheus, who had founded the town and ruled as king... After him the Æthiopians are called Kephenes ["Cephenians"]. There is also another Iope in Thessaly. The... first city... is also called Iopía... perhaps derived from the name Aïthiopía.
This version of Cepheus's queen would thus be the sister of such other famous characters as Sisyphus and Athamas.
From fragments by other writers, including Hesiod's Catalogues of Women, and Pherecydes, we learn of a different version of this character, Cassiepeia, who is the daughter of Arabus (the eponym of Arabia), who in turn is the son of Hermes by Thronia daughter of Belus. After marrying a relative, Phoenix, she bears him three sons as well as a daughter named Carme, but she also has a couple of sons by Zeus; and the king of the gods sires a child (Britomartis) upon her daughter Carme as well.
Cassiepeia's great-grandfather Belus typically occurs as the son of Libya, daughter of the Egyptian king Epaphus. A Naiad of the Nile River named Memphis is usually said to be Epaphus' wife and Libya's mother. In Hyginus' Fabulæ, however, a certain Cassiope is the wife of Epaphus and mother of Libya. If we are meant to understand this as an alternate rendition of the same queen, then she obviously couldn't be a descendant of her own daughter. Either way, Hyginus says nothing about where this Cassiope is supposed to have come from.
That seems to account for all that ancient literature has to say regarding the parentage of any Cassiope(ia) / Cassiepeia. However, I recently stumbled upon the Brickthology blog article entitled "Cassiopeia", in which the following is presented:
At least a dozen different websites, if not more, contain some variation of this claim, often mixed in with the readily attested ancient sources. The oldest of these that I can find with a clear date-stamp on it is a blog-post from Fandom's Riordan Wiki, published "3/9/2019" as "Word of the Week series ( LIV) Cassiopeia".
That is: except for Wikipædia, the Scots-language edition of the Free Encyclopedia, which has contained this Coronus—Zeuxo parentage for the character in question since as far back as February 2017 (if I'm reading its revision history correctly).
Where are they getting this from? Is there possibly some ancient or mediaeval source that says anything like this?
Regarding Zeuxo, I've always thought what the [English-language] Wikipedia says about her, that "Her name appears in Hesiod's catalogue of Oceanid names; no other literary mention of her survives."
As for Coronus, there are a handful to choose from in the mythology. The one who would make the most sense chronologically speaking is the son of Apollo and Chysorthe. Although he comes from the same Argive side of the family as Epaphus (ancestor of Cassiepeia, Cepheus and Phoenix as we have them in the ancient mythographers), he would still be about seven generations too late to be Cepheus' father-in-law. So perhaps he would simply be yet another mythical personage named Coronus to add to the pile.
Do we have here a clever 21st-century genealogy born maybe entirely on the interwebs, or is there support for this in older text?
