Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Endymion was a beautiful youth—king of Elis in Peloponnesian tradition, son of Aethlius (and through him of Zeus), or in Asiatic strands a Carian shepherd on Mount Latmus. Selene, the Moon, loved him. In the common classical outline, Zeus granted Endymion a wish; he chose to sleep forever, immortal and ageless, in a cave. There Selene visits him by night and, in many tellings, bears him fifty daughters (the Menoenai or months—handbook genealogy from Apollodorus’s Elian line). Apollodorus places Endymion in the Aetolian–Elian royal stemma: he led Aeolians from Thessaly into Elis, fathered Aetolus and others by a mortal wife, and separately is the sleeper beloved of Selene. Pausanias records Elian cult memory of Endymion and races instituted in his honor. The myth etiologicalizes the moon’s nightly path and the stillness of eternal youth; it is not a metamorphosis tale but a suspended life between mortality and godhead.