Eos

Eos is the goddess of the dawn, a second-generation Titaness, daughter of Hyperion and Theia and sister of Helios the Sun and Selene the Moon. Each morning she rises from the streams of Oceanus and opens the gates of heaven so that her brother's chariot may follow, and Homer's standing epithet for her, rosy-fingered, is among the most famous phrases in Greek poetry. A recurring theme in her myths is desire and its cost. In one tradition Aphrodite, jealous, cursed Eos with an unquenchable longing for mortal men, and she is repeatedly shown carrying off beautiful youths, Cephalus, Cleitus, Orion.

The most poignant tale is that of Tithonus: Eos begged Zeus to make her mortal lover immortal but forgot to ask also for eternal youth, so that Tithonus lived on, ageing endlessly, shrivelling until only his voice remained. The story became a classic ancient meditation on the difference between deathlessness and agelessness, and on the danger of getting exactly what one asks for.

Eos's grief for another lost son, Memnon, produced one of the strangest and best documented phenomena to survive from the ancient world into modern archaeology. Memnon, Eos's son by Tithonus, was an Ethiopian king killed by Achilles at Troy in the now largely lost epic the Aethiopis, and ancient sources describe Eos mourning him so bitterly that her tears became the morning dew and that birds called the Memnonides rose from his funeral pyre to fight in his honor each year. Centuries later, Greek and Roman travelers visiting Thebes in Egypt identified two enormous seated statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, now known as the Colossi of Memnon, with Eos's son, and one of the two, cracked, apparently by an earthquake in 27 BCE, began emitting an eerie sound around dawn, most likely caused by rising temperature and moisture evaporating from the stone, which visitors interpreted as Memnon's voice calling out to greet his grieving mother at first light.

The singing statue became a genuine tourist attraction of the Roman world: dozens of visitors, including at least one Roman emperor, Hadrian, and his wife Sabina, carved graffiti into the statue's base recording that they had heard it speak, some of these inscriptions surviving and still legible today as one of the more unusual bodies of ancient tourist testimony to survive from antiquity. The sound stopped after the Roman emperor Septimius Severus had the statue repaired around 199 CE, apparently sealing whatever combination of cracks had produced the phenomenon, so a myth about a mother's grief for her son ended up attached, for roughly two centuries of recorded visits, to an actual, physically documented acoustic event at one of Egypt's most visited ancient monuments.