Aurora- Roman GodDeity"The Rosy-Fingered"
Also known as: Matuta
Description
Each morning she rose from the ocean in saffron robes to open heaven's gates for Sol's chariot. But Venus had cursed Aurora with insatiable desire for mortal men, and the dawn goddess swept one lover after another from the earth, most fatefully the prince Tithonus.
Mythology & Lore
The Curse
Aurora had lain with Mars, and Venus did not forgive it. The goddess of love cursed Aurora with an unquenchable hunger for mortal men. From then on, the dawn goddess could not keep herself from the earth. She watched young men hunting at first light and took the ones she wanted.
Tithonus
The Trojan prince Tithonus was beautiful enough that Aurora carried him to her palace in the east and kept him. She loved him. She went to Jupiter and begged for his immortality, and Jupiter granted it. But she had not asked for eternal youth.
Tithonus aged. His skin tightened over his bones, his limbs shrank, his voice thinned to a whisper. He could not die. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Aurora shut him away in a chamber when his body had withered past recognition. Ovid and later tradition say he shriveled until he became a cicada, his voice reduced to the insect's endless chirp.
Their son Memnon became king of the Ethiopians and sailed to Troy to fight for Priam. Achilles killed him. Aurora's grief fell as dew each morning, and Roman poets never let their readers forget it. Virgil marks the dawn throughout the Aeneid with the same formula: Aurora rising from the saffron bed of Tithonus.
Cephalus
Ovid tells the story in the Metamorphoses. Aurora watched a young Athenian named Cephalus hunting at dawn and took him. He refused her. He loved his wife Procris and said so. Aurora let him go, but not cleanly. She disguised his face and sent him home to test whether Procris would stay faithful to a stranger bearing gifts.
Procris wavered. Cephalus revealed himself, and the marriage cracked. They reconciled, but the suspicion Aurora had planted never fully left. Procris gave Cephalus a javelin that never missed and a hunting dog that never lost its quarry. Later, hearing a rumor that Cephalus was calling a woman's name in the woods each morning (he was calling to the breeze, "Aura," for relief from the heat), Procris hid in the undergrowth to spy on him. Cephalus heard the rustling, threw the unerring javelin, and killed her.