Tithonus


In Greek mythology, Tithonus was the lover of Eos, Goddess of the Dawn. Tithonus was a prince of Troy, the son of King Laomedon by the Naiad Strymo. The mythology reflected by the fifth-century vase-painters of Athens envisaged Tithonus as a rhapsode, as attested by the lyre in his hand, on an oinochoe of the Achilles Painter, circa 470–460 BC.
An asteroid has been named after Tithonus.

Myth

Eos is said to have taken Tithonus, from the royal house of Troy, to be her lover.
The mytheme of the goddess' mortal lover is an archaic one; when a role for Zeus was inserted, a bitter twist appeared: according to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, when Eos asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal, she forgot to ask that he be granted eternal youth. Tithonus indeed lived forever,
but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.

In later tellings, he eventually became a cicada, eternally living, but begging for death to overcome him. In the Olympian system, the "queenly" and "golden-throned" Eos can no longer grant immortality to her lover as Selene had done, but must ask it of Zeus, as a boon.
Eos bore Tithonus two sons, Memnon and Emathion. According to Quintus Smyrnaeus, Memnon was raised by the Hesperides on the coast of Oceanus. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus, Tithonus, who had travelled east from Troy into Assyria and founded Susa, was bribed with a golden grapevine to send his son Memnon to fight at Troy against the Greeks.
The Tithonus poem is one of the few nearly complete works of the Greek lyric poet Sappho, having been pieced together from fragments discovered over a period of more than a hundred years.
Eos and Tithonus provided a pictorial motif inscribed or cast in low relief on the backs of Etruscan bronze hand-mirrors.

Modern poems

The poem is a dramatic monologue in blank verse from the point of view of Tithonus. Unlike the original myth, it is Tithonus who asks for immortality, and it is Aurora, not Zeus, who grants this imperfect gift. As narrator, Tithonus laments his unnatural longevity, which separates him from the mortal world as well as from the immortal but beautiful Aurora.