Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Eos (Dawn), like Aphrodite in the Hymn’s warning parade of goddesses who took mortal lovers, carried off Tithonus, a Trojan of the line of Laomedon (brother of Priam in common genealogy). She asked Zeus to make him immortal, and Zeus granted it—but she forgot to ask for eternal youth. While Tithonus was in his blooming manhood, Eos lived with him joyfully by Ocean’s streams at the ends of the earth; but when the first grey hairs appeared, she ceased to share his bed though she still nourished him with food and ambrosia in her halls. When hateful old age pressed him utterly and he could not move or lift his limbs, she laid him in a chamber and shut the shining doors; his voice flows on endlessly, but there is no strength left as there once was. Later poets and scholia add that he dwindled into a cicada (or grasshopper), still chirping—an aetion not stated in the Hymn itself but attached to the same immortal-age paralysis. Each morning Homeric formula still has Dawn rise from Tithonus’s couch: the marriage endures as cosmology even after the lover’s ruin. Their son Memnon, king of the Ethiopians, will die at Troy by Achilles’ hand (entry 04/030). The myth is Aphrodite’s cautionary exemplum to Anchises: divine love for a mortal mis-asked becomes endless decay.