Selene

The account

Selene drives a two-horse chariot where her brother drives four, and wears the crescent above her forehead. The Homeric Hymn describes the light coming off her immortal head and washing round the earth, and says that when she has bathed in Ocean and put on her far-gleaming robes she yokes her horses and drives at the full, when her circle is largest and brightest. Her one enduring story is Endymion, a young man of extraordinary beauty whom she saw asleep on Mount Latmos. Accounts differ on what she asked for — that he sleep forever, or that Zeus grant him a wish and he chose eternal sleep with unfading youth — but they agree on the result: she comes down to him every night, he never wakes, and they are said to have had fifty daughters. It is one of the few Greek love stories with no violence in it and no consent in it either. Later cult folded her into Artemis and into Hekate, and the three are often impossible to separate.