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.

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 Walden, Henry David Thoreau states:

All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

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

Aurora by Guercino (1591–1666)
The Countess de Brac as Aurora by Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766)
Aurora e Titone by Francesco de Mura (1696–1782)
The Gates of Dawn by Herbert James Draper (1863–1920)
Aurora and Cephalus by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833)

Notes

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

[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

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