Moon

The Moon is the only natural satellite of Earth and the second brightest object in the sky after the Sun. To the Greeks it was also a goddess, Selene, the sister of Helios and Eos, who drove her horses across the night sky; the Romans called her Luna. Later writers identified her with Artemis and Hecate. Selene has her own page; this one gathers what the ancient sources say about the Moon.

Selene

Family

Selene was a daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Thea. Hesiod (Theogony 371–374) says that Thea bore to Hyperion great Helios, bright Selene and Eos, so that the Sun, the Moon and the Dawn are brothers and sister. The Homeric Hymn to Helios (31) also makes the three children of Hyperion, but calls their mother Euryphaessa, and in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (99–100) Selene is the daughter of Pallas, son of Megamedes, a different version of her parentage.

The Chariot of the Moon

The Homeric Hymn to Selene (32) describes the goddess washing in the stream of Ocean, putting on her shining robes, and driving her team of long-maned horses at full speed in the evening of the mid-month, when she is full and her light is brightest. A golden crown shines on her head, and the hymn calls the full moon “a sure sign and token” for mortals. In art she drives a chariot or rides on horseback: on the base of the throne of Zeus at Olympia, Pausanias (5.11.8) saw her riding what he took to be a horse, though others said it was a mule.

Selene is linked to the oldest war of the gods. When Gaea sought a herb that would protect the Giants, Zeus forbade Dawn, Moon and Sun to shine until he had cut it himself (Apollodorus 1.6.1).

Selene’s Lovers and Children

Zeus

In the Hymn to Selene (32), the Son of Cronus was joined with the goddess in love, and she bore a daughter, Pandia, “exceeding lovely amongst the deathless gods.” This is the only child of Selene and Zeus named in the early poets.

Endymion

The best-known story of Selene is her love for a mortal, the young man Endymion. Hesiod made him a son of Aethlius, son of Zeus, and of Calyce, and said that Zeus granted him to be the keeper of his own death, to die when he chose (Catalogue of Women fr. 8, quoted by the scholiast on Apollonius 4.57). Apollodorus (1.7.5) says that the Moon fell in love with him, and that Zeus allowed him to choose what he wished, and he chose to sleep for ever, deathless and ageless. According to Pausanias (5.1.4) Endymion had fifty daughters by Selene. The Eleans showed his tomb at Olympia, but the people of Heraclea near Miletus said that he had withdrawn to Mount Latmus, where he had a shrine (Pausanias 5.1.5); and in Apollonius (Argonautica 4.57–58) Selene herself, watching Medea flee by night, speaks of going to the Latmian cave to visit him. Theocritus makes Endymion a herdsman whom Selene saw with his cattle and loved, coming down from Olympus to lie with him in the Latmian glade (Idyll 20.37–39).

Pan

Virgil (Georgics 3.391–393) says that Pan won the Moon with the gift of a snow-white fleece and called her into the depths of the woods.

A stranger connection is the Nemean Lion. Plutarch, in his essay on the face in the Moon, mentions the old tale that a lion fell from the Moon onto the Peloponnese (On the Face in the Moon 24), the lion that Heracles killed at Nemea.

The Moon and Other Goddesses

In the early poets Selene is the Moon itself and a separate goddess from Artemis; the identification of the two belongs to later writers. Plutarch takes it for granted: in his essay on the face in the Moon the speakers address the Moon as Artemis and Athena (5), and he notes that she is called “the goddess of three ways,” a title of Hecate (24). Nonnus has the Moon (Mene) declare that she not only turns the months in heaven but commands madness and lunacy (Dionysiaca 44.218–224). In Rome Diana was taken to be the Moon, as Apollo was the Sun (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 2.68). In Ovid the witch Medea prays in one breath to the Night, the Moon and three-faced Hecate (Metamorphoses 7.192–195).

See Also: Selene, Helios, Eos, Hyperion, Thea, Endymion, Artemis, Hecate, Sun, Zeus