Eos

## Rosy-Fingered Dawn

Eos is the dawn made divine. Hesiod names her with Helios and Selene as a child of Hyperion and Theia, and he also makes her mother of the winds and the stars by the Titan Astraeus. In Homer she is chiefly a time-marker: the formula of 'early-born, rosy-fingered Dawn' opens new days again and again in the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*.

### Tithonus

Eos is famous for carrying off beautiful young men. The most poignant story, told in the *Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite*, concerns the Trojan prince Tithonus: Eos asked Zeus to make him immortal but forgot to ask that he stay young. He aged endlessly, until she shut him away in a room where he still babbles on. Their son was Memnon, king of the Ethiopians, whom Achilles killed at Troy in the lost epic *Aethiopis*.

### An Indo-European Dawn

Eos's name is one of the clearest inherited divine names in Greek. It is cognate with the Vedic dawn goddess Uṣas and the Latin Aurora, all from a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European *h₂éwsōs. The shared imagery of a young goddess who opens the doors of the sky, reddens the east, and returns eternally young is a long-standing topic of comparative study.