Aurora (mythology)

Aurora (Latin: [awˈroːra]) is the Latin word for dawn, the goddess of dawn in Roman mythology and Latin poetry. Like Greek Eos and Rigvedic Ushas (and possibly Germanic Ostara), Aurora continues the name of an earlier Indo-European dawn goddess, *Hausos.

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Roman mythology

In Roman mythology, Aurora, goddess of the dawn, renews herself every morning and flies across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun. Her parentage was flexible: for Ovid, she could equally be Pallantis, signifying the daughter of Pallas,[1] or the daughter of Hyperion.[2] She has two siblings, a brother (Sol, the sun) and a sister (Luna, the moon). Rarely Roman writers[3] imitated Hesiod and later Greek poets and made babies Anemoi, or Winds, the offspring of the father of the stars Astraeus, with Eos/Aurora.

Aurora appears most often in sexual poetry with one of her mortal lovers. A myth taken from the Greek by Roman poets tells that one of her lovers was the prince of Troy, Tithonus. Tithonus was a mortal, and would therefore age and die. Wanting to be with her lover for all eternity, Aurora asked Zeus to grant immortality to Tithonus. Zeus granted her wish, but she failed to ask for eternal youth to accompany his immortality, and he became forever old. Aurora turned him into a grasshopper.

Usage in literature and music

From Homer's Iliad :

Now when Dawn in robe of saffron was hastening from the streams of Okeanos, to bring light to mortals and immortals, Thetis reached the ships with the armor that the god had given her. (19.1)
But soon as early Dawn appeared, the rosy-fingered, then gathered the folk about the pyre of glorious Hector. (24.776)

From Virgil's Aeneid :

Aurora now had left her saffron bed,
And beams of early light the heav'ns o'erspread,
When, from a tow'r, the queen, with wakeful eyes,
Saw day point upward from the rosy skies.

In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (I.i), Montague says of his lovesick son Romeo

But all so soon as the all-cheering sun
Should in the furthest east begin to draw
The shady curtains from Aurora's bed,
Away from the light steals home my heavy son...

In the poem "Tithonus" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Aurora is described thus:

Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renewed.
Thy cheek begins to redden through the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosened manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of a fire[4]

In singer-songwriter Björk's Vespertine track, Aurora is described as:

Aurora
Goddess sparkle
A mountain shade suggests your shape
I tumble down on my knees
Fill my mouth with snow
The way it melts
I wish to melt into you

The post-punk rock band The Sexual Side Effects's track "Aurora" alludes to the Greek goddess:

Aurora
Save me from the fallen shadows
Pull me out of my dream
Aurora
Wade me through the phantom shallows
Shelter me from the screams
you hear me call
and shine your eyes
blind my heart, linger inside
beneath your skies
you hear me call
and shine your eyes
blind my heart, linger inside
beneath your skies

In Chapter 2 of Walden, Where I Lived and What I Lived for, Henry David Thoreau states:

Every morning was a cheerful invitation
to make my life of equal simplicity,
and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.
I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.
I got up early and bathed in the pond;
that was a religious exercise,
and one of the best things which I did.

In Chapter 8 of Charlotte Brontë's Vilette, Madame Beck fires her old Governess first thing in the morning and is described by the narrator, Lucy Snowe:

All this, I say, was done between the moment of Madame Beck's issuing like Aurora from her chamber, and that in which she coolly sat down to pour out her first cup of coffee.

Depiction in art

Notes

  1. ^ "When Pallantis next gleams in heaven and stars flee..." (Ovid, Fasti iv. 373.
  2. ^ Fasti v.159; also Hyginus, Preface to Fabulae.
  3. ^ The examples given in translation at TheoiProject are all Greeks or Greek-inspired.
  4. ^ D.A. Harris, Tennyson and personification: the rhetoric of 'Tithonus' , 1986