Tithonos
Greek tales tell how Dawn once took
a lover, the young stud Tithonos.
She granted him an endless life,
but forgot to include eternal youth.
He withered as the years piled up.
Dawn ran off with an ageless god.
Fate made Tithonos a locust
doomed to hop the prairies forever.
Tales claim he still wanders with the bugs.
If Dawn remembers her lover at all,
I suppose she remembers him young.
Who knows what Tithonos remembers?
If fate was kind his brain has withered,
and he only remembers the wind in the grass.
Greek tales tell how Dawn once took
a lover, the young stud Tithonos.
She granted him an endless life,
but forgot to include eternal youth.
He withered as the years piled up.
Dawn ran off with an ageless god.
Fate made Tithonos a locust
doomed to hop the prairies forever.
Tales claim he still wanders with the bugs.
If Dawn remembers her lover at all,
I suppose she remembers him young.
Who knows what Tithonos remembers?
If fate was kind his brain has withered,
and he only remembers the wind in the grass.
Tithonus, Aurora's Husband, Turned into a Grasshopper -- Bernard Picart
The children of Chaos, titans Gaia (Earth) and her son Ouranos (Sky) bore Hyperion (“the high one”) and his sister Theia (“divine”’), who were the parents of Helios (the sun), Selene (the moon), and Eos (the dawn, known as Aurora to the Romans). Eos’ husband was Astraios (“starry”), the god of twilight, the son of Gaia and Aether (light; the personification of the "upper sky," the pure upper air that the gods breathe), the son of Erebus (darkness) and Nyx (night), also the children of Chaos; Eos and Astraios bore many sons, Hesperus (Venus, the evening star) and the other planets and the 4 Anemoi (winds) and a daughter Astraea (“starry one”), the virgin goddess of justice, innocence, purity and precision, the last of the immortals to live among humans before becoming the constellation Virgo. Due to Eos’ affair with the god of war Ares, his wife Aphrodite the god of love caused her to lust perpetually after handsome young men. She abducted many of these, including Cleitus (who was granted immortality) and Orion (son of Poseidon and Alcyone, one of the Pleiades), whose love affair was responsible for the dawn’s blush, but Artemis killed him out of jealousy or to appease the gods’ anger at Eos’ actions. She also abducted Kephalos, the son of the messenger of the gods Hermes (son of Zeus and Maia, the oldest of Atlas’ daughters known as the 7 Pleiads and Ersa, “dew,” the daughter of Zeus and Selene), and bore 3 sons including Hesperos the evening star, but she allowed him to return home to his wife. Later she abducted his son Tithonos and lived with him for many years. They had 2 sons, Memnon and Emathion. Memnon was raised by the nymphs of evening and golden light of sunsets the Hesperides (the ½ sisters of the Pleiads), became king of Ethiopia and led a huge army of Ethiopians and Indians to support his uncle (and father-in-law) Priam of Troy but was killed by Achilles the next day, and was, according to Snorri Sturluson's “Prose Edda,” the father of Thor the thunder god. Emathion became the king of Arabia but was slain by Heracles on his way to steal the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, but his descendants became the rulers of Macedon. As Tithonos aged, Eos had affairs with other mortals (including his son Phaethon, who became the night watchman at Aphrodite’s shrines and was recognized by the Minoans as the morning and evening stars) and Ganymede. But Zeus wanted Ganymede for himself, so he made Tithonos immortal at Eos’ request. Unfortunately, this did not include eternal youth. Out of pity, Eos transformed him into a locust, which continued to call out to be allowed to die.
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