Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus, was a noble native of Athens. The god Apollo seduced her in a cave; there she gave birth to his son and intended to kill him by exposure. She keeps all this a secret. Many years later she was near the end of child bearing age, and had so far been unable to have a child with her husband Xuthus, a Thessalian and son of Aeolus. So they traveled to Delphi to seek a sign from the oracles.

Ion is an ancient Greek play by Euripides, thought to be written between 414 and 412 BC. It follows the orphan Ion in the discovery of his origins.

Euripides (c. 480–406 BC) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (there has been debate about his authorship of Rhesus, largely on stylistic grounds) and there are also fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly due to mere chance and partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes and Menander.