Eos

Summary

Eos is the dawn among the Greeks and its goddess, and her name in Greek is the word for dawn itself. Hesiod says Theia bore her to Hyperion, a sister to the Sun, Helios, and to the Moon, Selene, and that she "shines upon all that are on earth and upon the deathless gods who live in the wide heaven". She in turn bore to Astraeus the winds, Zephyrus, Boreas and Notus, and then the morning star, which Hesiod calls the "Dawn-bringer", and the gleaming stars of heaven.

Homer describes her every morning in the same words, "rosy-fingered", "early-born": she rises from her couch beside Tithonus to bring light to the immortals and to men, and her chariot is drawn by two horses named Lampus and Phaethon. When Odysseus came home to Penelope, Athena held Eos back at the streams of Ocean and would not let her yoke her horses, so that the couple's night was long.

Her best-known story is that of Tithonus, brother of Priam, king of Troy. Aphrodite tells it in the Homeric Hymn to her, speaking to the Trojan Anchises after she has lain with him. Eos carried off Tithonus for his beauty and went to Zeus to ask that he be deathless and live for ever, and Zeus granted it. It did not occur to her to ask youth for him, and to strip old age from him. So while he was young he lived with her by the streams of Ocean at the ends of the earth. When the first grey hairs showed on his head and chin she kept away from his bed, though she went on feeding him with food and ambrosia and giving him fine clothes. When hateful old age pressed full on him and he could not move his limbs, she laid him in a room and shut the shining doors, and there his voice runs on without end, and he has no strength at all. Aphrodite tells Anchises: I would not have you deathless in that way. Just before, she has told of Ganymede, the other Trojan, whom Zeus took and made deathless and unageing.

To Tithonus she bore Memnon, king of the Ethiopians, who came to help Troy and was killed by Achilles. Ovid says that when Eos saw him fall her rosy colour turned pale, that she knelt at Jupiter's knees to ask some honour for him, and that she weeps for him still and sprinkles her tears as dew on all the world.

The idea her story turns on is that the dawn is renewed every day and does not grow old, and cannot give that to the one she loves. Each morning she rises new from the bed of a man who neither dies nor stops ageing, so the immortality she asked for him has become a voice in a shut room. And the mortals she loves are taken from her: her son Memnon is killed, Orion whom she carried off is killed, and all that is left of her love is the morning dew.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Ἠώς, Ēōs, loses its s in the accusative, Ἠῶ; in the dialect of Athens the word begins with h, ἕως, and in the dialect of Lesbos a w shows in its middle, αὔως. What remains is an h at the start, a w after it, and vowels. The Greek essay reads it as ḍawʾ, "light". The table of correspondences used on this wiki makes Arabic ḍ into Greek s or d, and Greek turns s at the head of a word into h, as ἑπτά, "seven", is septem in Latin. So the ḍ is the h with which the Athenian form begins, w is w, and the final glottal stop drops because Greek does not write it. Lane gives ḍāʾa and aḍāʾa, it gave light, shone, and ḍawʾ, light. On this reading Eos is "the light", which is what the story makes her: the one who carries light every morning to gods and men.

Linguistic Root

Eos and "the light"

Lane: ḍāʾa and aḍāʾa, it gave light, was bright, shone, said of the moon and of fire; ḍawʾ and ḍuʾ are the noun. From the same root comes ḍiyāʾ, radiance.

The sounds: in the Juthoor table of Greek correspondences Arabic ḍ becomes d or s, because Greek has no emphatic consonants. Greek turns s at the head of a word into h: ἑπτά in Greek, saptá in Sanskrit, septem in Latin. If ḍ became s and then h, it is the h of Attic ἕως, and Homer's form has no h. The w of ḍawʾ is the w that Aeolic keeps and the Doric form writes as b. The final glottal stop drops.

The second reading: waḍuʾa

After ḍawʾ the essay gives waḍuʾa, which Lane explains as "he was fair, beautiful, neat, or clean", from which comes waḍāʾa, brightness of face. The two roots have the same three letters, ḍ, w and glottal stop, in two orders. The order of waḍuʾa, w before ḍ, is the order of the word's sisters in Sanskrit and Latin, उषस्, uṣás, and aurōra, where the s follows the w; and in that order this wiki reads the name of Uṣas, the Indian dawn, from waḍaḥ. So the open question is whether the h of ἕως is a letter at the head of the word, giving ḍawʾ, or the trace of the s that Sanskrit and Latin keep after the w, giving waḍuʾa.

The essay mentions a third reading, awwasa, "to take and to give", the dawn taking away the night and giving the day, and it sets the Roman name Aurora beside Hebrew ʾôr, light.

Key Mythic Narratives

The lovers of Eos

The Library ascribed to Apollodorus says Aphrodite made Eos be for ever in love, as a punishment for having lain with Ares. Among her lovers was Orion the hunter, whom she carried off to Delos and whom Artemis killed. In the Odyssey Calypso makes this a witness that the gods begrudge goddesses who take mortal husbands: they begrudged Eos her Orion until Artemis killed him, and Demeter her Iasion, with whom she lay in a thrice-ploughed fallow field, until Zeus struck him with his thunderbolt. Among her lovers too was Cephalus, to whom she bore Phaethon, whom Aphrodite carried off as a boy and made a keeper of her shrine.

Few temples

Ovid has Aurora, the Roman poets' Eos, tell Jupiter as she asks honour for her son that her temples in the world are few, but that she serves him every day when she marks the edge of night.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Greek Myths" sets Eos in its table of cosmic phenomena and reads "rosy-fingered" as a description of the colours of twilight: the rosy fingers are the red streaks of light that spread along the horizon before sunrise.

In the texts themselves the dawn counts out people's days. Homer says "when early-born, rosy-fingered Dawn appeared" at the start of each day of the poem, and people begin their work. The other story carries the counterpart: the dawn that does not grow old sees those she loves grow old and die, and immortality without youth is no blessing. That is what Aphrodite tells Anchises, the mortal man to whom she will bear a son.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The closest name to hers in India is that of Uṣas, the dawn of the Rigveda, and Monier-Williams puts the two words in one family. The hymns say Uṣas is ancient yet born again and again in the same raiment, that she wears away the lives of mortals as a hunter cuts up birds, and that the sun, Sūrya, follows her as a young man follows a maiden. That is what lies in the story of Eos: the dawn that does not age and the mortals who age beneath her, and the Sun her brother in Greece.

In both tongues the morning star is born of the dawn: in Hesiod Eos bears the "Dawn-bringer", and the book of Isaiah calls the fallen king of Babylon hêlēl ben šāḥar, the shining star, son of the dawn. Shahar is the dawn on the tablets of Ugarit, and his story is on the Shahar and Shalim page.

Calypso sets Eos and Orion beside Demeter and Iasion in a thrice-ploughed field, a witness of the sacred marriage: a goddess joins with a mortal man, and the man pays the price, as Dumuzi paid it with Inanna.