Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Phaon was an elderly ferryman of Lesbos. Aphrodite, coming in the guise of an old woman, asked passage; he carried her without fee. In return she gave him an alabaster box of unguent (or a magical herb). Anointed, he became young and surpassingly beautiful; the women of Lesbos desired him. Later literary tradition—especially comedy and Roman poetry—attaches Sappho’s legendary leap from the Leucadian rock to unrequited love for this Phaon. Catalogue the goddess’s ferry-reward and the youth-gift as the classical core; treat the Sappho leap as a secondary poetic attachment, not Homeric or Hesiodic myth.