Selene, the Greek goddess who drives the chariot of the Moon
Who Selene was: Hesiod's genealogy, the Homeric Hymn, her chariot and horses, her images on the Parthenon and Pergamon Altar, and Thessalian beliefs.
For the Greeks the Moon was not merely a heavenly body: it was a goddess with a name, a family and a face. Selene, whose name recalls the word selas, «brightness», is the direct personification of the lunar disc. Unlike Artemis or Hecate, who acquired lunar features only over time, Selene was the Moon from the very beginning, and for this very reason she had few temples but many images in poetry and art.
A Titaness born of light
In the Theogony Hesiod makes her the daughter of Hyperion and Theia, a pair of Titans connected with light, and gives her Helios, the Sun, and Eos, the Dawn, as siblings. The genealogy is telling: the three forms of the sky's brightness, day, dawn and night, belong to a single lineage older than the Olympian gods. Selene therefore precedes Zeus and his order, and keeps an almost cosmic character, closer to a natural phenomenon than to a deity with an organised cult.
Other authors give different genealogies. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes she appears as the daughter of Pallas, son of Megamedes, a sign that local traditions were far from uniform. According to the Homeric Hymn dedicated to her, she bore Zeus a daughter named Pandia, «all-shining», who in Athens gave her name to a festival, the Pandia, about which we know very little. A later tradition, reported by Virgil in the Georgics, tells that the god Pan succeeded in seducing the Moon by offering her the gift of a snow-white fleece.
The chariot, the veil and the crescent
The Homeric hymn describes Selene bathing in the waters of Ocean, putting on gleaming garments and yoking long-maned horses before rising into the evening sky. The chariot, drawn by two horses and sometimes by oxen, became her most constant attribute, together with the wind-filled veil that forms an arch above her head and the lunar crescent resting on her brow.
On the east pediment of the Parthenon, carved around 438-432 BC, the head of one of Selene's horses projected from the right-hand corner, as if her chariot were sinking below the horizon while that of Helios rose on the left. The piece, now in the British Museum, is among the most famous sculptures of classical Greece. On the Pergamon Altar, in the second century BC, Selene appears instead on horseback, fighting in the battle against the Giants.
Drawing down the Moon
Alongside the poetic image there was a stubborn popular belief. The women of Thessaly were reputed to be able to «draw down the Moon» with their spells, and Aristophanes, in the Clouds, shows a character who would like to buy a Thessalian witch to capture the Moon and so stop paying interest, which fell due with the lunar month. The joke presupposes an audience well acquainted with that reputation.
In late antiquity Selene merged more and more with Artemis and Hecate, until the three formed a single figure with many names. Yet her original image, a veiled woman crossing the sky in a silver chariot, has remained the simplest and most enduring way in which the Western world has given human form to the Moon.