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Eos is the Ancient Greek goddess of the Dawn. She has close correlations to the Germanic deity ‘Ostara’ and the Celtic ‘Eostre’, both fertility goddesses from which Easter derived and are associated with a new beginning. In the Roman pantheon, Aurora is the Roman equivalent for the goddess of the dawn.
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Whilst Eos is the personification of light and the start of a new day, she is also a tragic figure in myth. Fundamentally she represents all that is new and fresh. When she rose from bed every day, she dipped her rosy fingers in a cup filled with dew and sprinkled the drops on the flowers and trees, thus awakening all of nature. Her fingers would run across the sky to create the rustic hue of a new day. It is for this reason that the Greek poet Homer uses the recurring line “When Dawn rose, fresh rosy fingered...” within his epics when he talks of a new morning.
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Eos has a distinct juxtaposition....her life was one of a tragedy as well as one that personified something new and hopeful. She fell in love with a mortal young prince called Tithonus but worried that his mortality would deprive them of eternal happiness, she begged Zeus to grant him eternal life. They were happy for many years but Eos had not asked Zeus for eternal youth for her handsome prince and over the years, Tithonus gradually grew older and more frail. He slowly began to shrink and shrivel with old age until he was nothing but a wizened old man. In her despair, Eos taking pity upon her husband and transformed him into a cicada, an insect not unlike a grasshopper.
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In Ovid’s version, as told in his metamorphoses, Eos is a jealous goddess who falls in love with Cephalus an Aeolian prince whom she kidnaps from his wife Procis and makes him her lover. Cephalus though pines for Procis and Eos sends him back to her after placing seeds of doubt in his mind about her faithfulness towards him. Cephalus decides to test his wife to see if she is truly faithful and disguised as another man he attempts to seduce Procris. She falls for the seduction. When it is revealed that the man was Cephalus in disguise, she runs away in shame to join the goddess Artemis in the woods. She finally returns to reconcile with her husband and brings a gift of a spear that never misses. One day Cephalus is out hunting and Procris hears gossip that her husband is having another affair. She follows him and spies on him from a bush. Cephalus hearing rustling from within the foliage, hurls the spear believing it is an animal but has accidentally impaled his wife. Her dying words remind him of the jealousy and trickery of Eos and that he must never marry her.
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Despite the tragedy and negativity surrounding Eos, she was a deity that was well loved by the Greeks and Romans for her ability to provide them with a new day and new start.
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The image shows Eos and Tithonus, this was originally an Attic red figure kylix, Attributed to the Telephos Painter, 470-460 BC
The other image is the Roman equivalent, Aurora, goddess of the Dawn who was often represented using a chariot to usher in the sun and a new day.
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