Endymion, and the Moon That Loves a Sleeper

Selene's best-known myth is her love for Endymion, a beautiful youth, shepherd or king, for whom she obtained eternal sleep so that she might come to him each night unchanging; in some versions she bears him fifty daughters, read as the fifty lunar months of the Greek Olympiad. The image of the moon stooping to kiss a sleeping mortal became one of the most durable in Western art and poetry, taken up by Renaissance painters and by the Romantics, above all in Keats's long poem Endymion. That afterlife is out of all proportion to her modest ancient cult, and shows how a goddess who is simply the moon itself could carry, across centuries, the whole imagery of longing and the night.

Rome honoured the same power as Luna, with a temple on the Aventine Hill that Roman antiquarian tradition credited to the early king Servius Tullius, standing not far from Diana's own Aventine sanctuary in a district associated with plebeian and popular cult; the temple burned in the great fire of 64 CE under Nero and was apparently never fully restored to its earlier prominence, leaving Luna a comparatively minor presence in the developed state religion of the later Republic and Empire even as poetic and astrological writers continued to invoke her as the moon's personification alongside Selene's Greek mythology.