In this episode, Dione seems to be the equivalent of Rhea the Earth Mother, whom Homer also placed in Olympus, and to that extent might be classed as a "mother goddess". Dione's Indo-European name is really less a name than simply a title: the "Goddess", etymologically a female form of Zeus. Roman "Diana" has a similar etymology but is not otherwise connected with Dione.
After the Iliad, Aphrodite herself was sometimes referred to as "Dionaea" and even "Dione", just "the goddess" (Peck 1898). At the very ancient oracle of Zeus at Dodona, Dione rather than Hera, was the goddess resorted to in the company of Zeus, as many surviving votive inscriptions show.
Although Dione is not a Titan in Hesiod, but appears instead in his Theogony among the long list of Oceanids, Apollodorus includes her among the Titans (1.1.3 and 1.3.1) and the Roman mythographer Gaius Julius Hyginus makes her the daughter of the Titan Atlas.
The archaic king Tantalus in Lydia had Dione as a consort: Hyginus says that Dione, daughter of Atlas, was the mother, by Tantalus, of Pelops, Niobe and Broteas. See also Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.172 If a king's consort is "Dione", the logical implication is that he justifies his authority as the earthly, visible consort of "The Goddess" in an archaic model of sacred kingship.
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dione_%28mythology%29
Text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
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