Eos

The account

Eos is the most frequently mentioned figure in Homer and one of the least examined. Rosy-fingered dawn appears when the poem needs a day to start, sometimes several times in a hundred lines. Her own story is a pattern rather than an episode: she takes mortal men. Kleitos, Orion, Kephalos, and above all Tithonos, whom she carried off and for whom she asked Zeus for immortality — and forgot to ask for youth. He aged without limit until he could not move and only his voice was left, and she shut him in a room, and later tellings turn him into a cicada. Hesiod pairs her with Astraeus, and they produce the winds — Zephyros, Boreas, Notos — and the morning star and all the stars in the sky. One tradition explains her constant desire as a curse from Aphrodite, punishment for having slept with Ares. It reads as an attempt to give a reason to something the poets had simply always said about her.