Selene and Endymion: the myth of eternal sleep on Mount Latmus
The myth of Endymion, beloved of the Moon: the versions from Elis and Caria, the ancient sources, Roman sarcophagi and the theme's later life up to Girodet.
Among the myths the Greeks connected with the Moon, none enjoyed a success comparable to that of Endymion, the beautiful youth whom Selene visited every night as he slept. It is a short story, almost without action, and perhaps for that very reason able to cross the centuries: an image of silent love, of beauty withdrawn from time, and of a goddess who descends from the sky to gaze upon a mortal.
Two homelands for one hero
Ancient sources know at least two Endymions. The first is a king of Elis, in the Peloponnese, father of Aetolus and other sons, who according to Pausanias made his sons race at Olympia to decide who would succeed him. The Eleans showed his tomb at Olympia itself. Pausanias also reports that, according to some, Selene bore him fifty daughters, a number that several modern scholars have linked to the lunar months of the Olympic cycle.
The second Endymion is a shepherd or hunter from Caria, in Asia Minor, who slept in a cave on Mount Latmus, near Miletus. The people of Heraclea under Latmus claimed that the hero had withdrawn to their mountain and dedicated a sacred place to him. Apollonius of Rhodes, in the Argonautica, has Selene herself recall the Latmian cave she used to visit, a sign that by the third century BC the Carian version had become the best known.
Why he sleeps forever
The versions disagree about the reasons for the sleep. In some it is Zeus who allows Endymion to choose his own fate, and the youth asks to sleep for ever, remaining deathless and ageless. In others it is Selene who obtains that sleep so that she can admire him without his growing old. Endymion's sleep became proverbial: Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations, recalls it as an example of rest so deep that it resembles death without being death.
This very closeness between sleep and death explains the spread of the theme on Roman sarcophagi of the second and third centuries AD. On many of them Selene steps down from her chariot, accompanied by Eros, towards the sleeping youth. For the families who commissioned them, the scene suggested a consoling idea: death as a sleep visited by light, not as a final end.
From poetry to modern painting
The myth did not die with the ancient world. John Keats gave the title Endymion to a long poem published in 1818, whose first line declares that «a thing of beauty is a joy for ever». In 1791 Anne-Louis Girodet painted The Sleep of Endymion, now in the Louvre, in which a moonbeam filters through the leaves and caresses the shepherd's body while a small Zephyr parts the branches.
The story of Endymion shows clearly how the Greeks imagined the Moon: a feminine, nocturnal and faithful presence who acts not by force but by her gaze. Unlike the Sun, who sees everything and reveals everything, Selene chooses a single face to contemplate, and in the silence of the night she guards it from the passing of the years.