Word of the Day
Eos (EE-ahss)
· Common clues: Goddess of the dawn; Dawn's divinity; Dawn personified
· Crossword puzzle frequency: 6 times a year
· Frequency in English language: 44072 / 86800
Eos ("dawn") was, in Greek mythology, the Titan Goddess of the dawn, who rose from her home at the edge of Oceanus, the Ocean that surrounds the world, to herald her brother Helios, the sun. As the dawn goddess, she opened the gates of heaven (with "rosy fingers") so that Helios could ride his chariot across the sky every day. In Homer (Iliad viii.1; xxiv.695), her yellow robe is embroidered or woven with flowers (Odyssey vi:48 etc); rosy-fingered and with golden arms, she is pictured on Attic vases as a supernaturally beautiful woman, crowned with a tiara or diadem and with the large white-feathered wings of a bird. The worship of the dawn as a goddess is inherited from Indo-European times; Eos is cognate to Latin Aurora and to Vedic Ushas.
Evelyn De Morgan (British, 1850-1919) Eos Painting Date: 1895 Medium: Oil on canvas Location: Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina, USA
She is most often associated with her Homeric epithet "rosy-fingered" (rhododactylos), but Homer also calls her Eos Erigeneia:
"That brightest of stars appeared, Eosphoros, that most often heralds the light of early-rising Dawn (Eos Erigeneia)."
—Odyssey 13.93
And Hesiod: "And after these Erigeneia ["Early-born"] bore the star Eosphorus ("Dawn-bringer"), and the gleaming stars with which heaven is crowned."
—Theogony 378-382
Thus Eos, preceded by the Morning Star, is seen as the genetrix of all the stars.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Eos".
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