Aurora (mythology)

Aurora
Personification of dawn
L'Aurore by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1881)
AbodeSky
SymbolChariot, saffron, cicada
Genealogy
SiblingsSol and Luna
ConsortAstraeus, Tithonus
ChildrenAnemoi
Equivalents
GreekEos

In Roman mythology, Aurora (/ɔːˈrɔːrə/ or /əˈrɔːrə/; Latin: Aurōra, Latin pronunciation: [au̯ˈroːra]) is the goddess and personification of the dawn. Aurora is the Latin word for dawn, and she appeared frequently in Latin literature.

Like the Greek Eos and Rigvedic Ushas, Aurora continues the name of an earlier Indo-European dawn goddess, Hausos.

Name

Aurora stems from Proto-Italic *ausōs, and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *haéusōs, the "dawn" conceived as divine entity. It has cognates in the goddesses Ēṓs, Uṣas, Aušrinė, Auseklis and Ēastre.[1][2]

Roman mythology

In Roman mythology, Aurora renews herself every morning and flies across the sky, announcing the arrival of the Sun. Her parentage was flexible. The poet Ovid named her as the daughter of the Titan Hyperion,[3] but also referred to her as Pallantis, signifying she was the daughter of Pallas.[4] She has two siblings, a brother— Sol, the Sun— and a sister— Luna, the Moon. Roman writers rarely imitated Hesiod and later Greek poets by naming Aurora as the mother of the Anemoi (the Winds), who were the offspring of Astraeus, the father of the stars.

Most commonly, Aurora appears in erotic 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 Jupiter to grant immortality to Tithonus. Jupiter granted her wish, but she failed to ask for eternal youth to accompany his immortality, and he continued to age, eventually becoming forever old. Aurora turned him into a cicada.

In Roman literature

Ovid's Heroides (16.201-202), Paris names his well-known family members, among which Aurora's lover as follows:

A Phrygian was the husband of Aurora, yet she, the goddess who appoints the last road of night, carried him away

Virgil mentions in the fourth book of his Aeneid:[5]

Aurora now had left her saffron bed, And beams of early light the heav'ns o'erspread

Rutilius Claudius Namatianus mentions in his 5th century poem De reditu suo:[6]

Saffron Aurora had brought forward her fair-weather team: the breeze offshore tells us to haul the sail-yards up.

Aurora has been referenced and depicted frequently in literature, poetry, theater, and music.

  • Aurora and Flora, the goddess of spring, are depicted interacting with Neptune in the traditional Irish folk song "Lord Courtown."
  • The 18th century African-American poet Phillis Wheatley referenced the relationship between Aurora and Tithonus in "On Imagination."[8]
  • In Chapter 8 of Charlotte Brontë's Villette, when Madame Beck fires her old Governess first thing in the morning, Lucy Snowe compares her to Aurora.[9]
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson described Aurora as glimmering, with sweet, bright eyes and red cheeks in his poem "Tithonus."[10][11]
  • The 20th-century Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert wrote about Aurora's grandchildren in "Kwestia Smaku." In the poem they are ugly, but will eventually grow to be beautiful.[12]
  • The first and strongest of the 50 Spacer worlds in The Caves of Steel and subsequent novels by Isaac Asimov is named after the goddess Aurora. Its capital city is Eos.
  • Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk describes the goddess in the song "Aurora" on her Vespertine album.

Depiction in art

See also

References

  1. ^ Vaan, Michiel de (2018-10-31). Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages. Leiden; Boston. p. 63. ISBN 9789004167971.
  2. ^ Mallory, J. P.; Adams, D. Q. (2006-08-24). The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. OUP Oxford. p. 409. ISBN 9780199287918.
  3. ^ Fasti v.159; also Hyginus, Preface to Fabulae.
  4. ^ "When Pallantis next gleams in heaven and stars flee..." (Ovid, Fasti iv. 373.
  5. ^ The Aeneid by Virgil - Translated by John Dryden
  6. ^ LacusCurtius ● Rutilius Namatianus — A Voyage Home to Gaul
  7. ^ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1 Lines 137-145
  8. ^ "On Imagination". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  9. ^ Charlotte Brontë, Villette
  10. ^ Alfred, Lord Tennyson. "Tithonus". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  11. ^ D. A. Harris, Tennyson and personification: the rhetoric of 'Tithonus' , 1986.
  12. ^ Zbigniew Herbert, Kwestia Smaku
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Aurora (mythology).
Look up Aurora in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.