Tithonus

Also Known As: Greek Τιθωνός, Tithōnos; Latin Tithonus
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He is deathless without being ageless, the one mortal on whom immortality was granted in half and worked as a punishment.
Role in Mythos: He is the consort of Eos, goddess of the dawn, and the standing Greek example of a wish granted exactly as worded.
Relation to Humans: He was born human, a prince of Troy and brother of Priam, and was removed from human company by a goddess rather than by death. Poets from Sappho onward hold him up to mortals as the proof that escaping death is not the same as escaping old age.

The doors were bright and they were shut. Behind them a voice kept going, thin and dry and continuous, saying nothing anyone needed to hear, and it did not stop when the light came into the room and it did not stop when the light went out of it. Eos had carried him in there herself. She had run out of anything better to do with him.

Tithonus was born into the royal house of Troy, a son of King Laomedon by Strymo, daughter of the river Scamander, which made him a brother of Priam and part of the last full generation of Trojan princes before the war that ended them. He had the kind of face the gods notice, and the goddess who noticed it was Eos, who opens the sky every morning. She had form in this area. Beautiful young men had gone up into the dawn before him and not come back, and Tithonus went the same way, without discussion.

For a while it was the best thing that had ever happened to anyone in that family. She kept him at the streams of Ocean at the ends of the earth, where the light arrives before it arrives anywhere else, and then she went to Zeus and asked that Tithonus be made deathless and live for all time. Zeus bowed his head and it was done. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, which tells the story around 600 BCE as a warning aimed at a goddess who has just fallen for a mortal of her own, is unkind about the oversight. Eos was too simple to think it through. She asked for endlessness and forgot to ask that the husk of age be stripped off him first.

She had asked for the wrong thing.

The good years get about four lines of poetry, which is roughly what happiness is worth in Greek. He had the sweet flower of his life and she had him, and every morning she got up out of the warm bed to go and open the day while the cold off the world’s edge came through the doorway behind her.

Then grey began to ripple out of that handsome head and that fine chin, and the hymn’s temperature drops with it. Eos stopped coming to his bed. She did not stop looking after him. He stayed in her house, he was fed bread and ambrosia, he was given rich clothing, and none of it made the slightest difference to what was happening to his body. Food that keeps a god going forever will keep a decaying man going forever too.

What the hymn describes at the end is not a heroic ruin. It is simple immobility. Loathsome old age presses down on him until he cannot move and cannot lift his limbs, arms that will not answer, a body that has become luggage. That is when Eos made her decision. She lifted him, carried him into a chamber, laid him down and pulled the shining doors closed. After that he is sound and nothing else. His voice pours out endlessly and there is no strength anywhere in the limbs that used to be quick.

He was not childless. Eos bore him Memnon and Emathion, and the later tradition set the household in Ethiopia, at the far edge of the sunrise. Memnon came to Troy to fight for his uncle’s city and Achilles killed him there, and Eos, who had already lost her husband to a room, lost her son to the field. Ovid leaves her weeping over it permanently, and says the wet on the grass every morning is what her grief looks like from the ground.

Later writers gave the noise behind the doors a body. In their versions Eos, or simple attrition, shrinks and dries him until what is left is a cicada: a small brittle thing with a shed skin and a voice out of all proportion to its size, chirring through the heat and stopping for nothing. The scholia on the Iliad make the connection explicit, and it throws a strange light back onto a famous passage. When Homer puts the old men of Troy up on the Skaian gate, too weak to fight and still magnificent talkers, he compares them to cicadas sitting in a tree and pouring out their lily-like voices. Those old men are Tithonus’s own kin, and one of them is his brother.

Sappho used him for the same purpose about two and a half thousand years before anyone needed to be told what it meant. Papyrus fragments published from the Cologne collection in 2004 restored most of a poem in which she looks at her own grey hair and knees that will no longer carry her, and reaches for him: the dawn once carried Tithonus off, beautiful and young, and grizzled old age caught up with him anyway, deathless wife and all. The poem does not offer a way out. It just puts him there and stops.

His single power is that he cannot die, and it is not a power he wields, only one he undergoes. Nothing can kill him. Illness cannot finish him, the years cannot finish him, and neither can the goddess who arranged it. That is also the whole of his weakness, because the same guarantee removes every exit a mortal has. He cannot heal, cannot be released, cannot even be put out of the way permanently, only shut behind a door and left to talk. He depends entirely on someone else to carry and feed him, and his one remaining faculty, speech, has nobody in the room to hear it. Tennyson understood the shape of it when he gave Tithonus a dramatic monologue in 1860 and let him complain that cruel immortality consumes him while the woods decay and fall and men get to lie down under the field.

The stories never let him out. The kindest of them only make him small enough to be carried off on a hot afternoon, still talking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tithonus in Greek mythology?

Tithonus is a prince of Troy, son of King Laomedon and the naiad Strymo and a brother of Priam, who was carried off by Eos, the goddess of the dawn. She made him her consort and had Zeus grant him immortality. He is best known as the man who was given deathlessness but not eternal youth.

Why did Tithonus never die?

Eos asked Zeus to make Tithonus deathless and live forever, and Zeus granted it. According to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite she forgot to ask for eternal youth alongside it, so the immortality held while his body continued to age. He grew grey, then frail, then completely immobile, and still could not die.

Did Tithonus turn into a cicada?

In later versions of the myth, yes. The earliest full account, in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, ends with Eos shutting Tithonus in a chamber where his voice runs on endlessly, with no transformation. Later writers and the scholia on the Iliad complete the picture by shrinking him into a cicada, an insect whose ceaseless dry chirring matched what was left of him.

Who were the children of Tithonus?

Eos bore Tithonus two sons, Memnon and Emathion. Memnon fought for Troy in the Trojan War and was killed by Achilles. Ovid describes Eos grieving for Memnon permanently, and identifies the morning dew as her tears.

Which ancient sources tell the story of Tithonus?

The fullest early account is the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, lines 218 to 238, dating to roughly 600 BCE. Sappho uses Tithonus as an example of unavoidable old age in the poem largely recovered from Cologne papyrus fragments published in 2004. Homer alludes to him in the Iliad and Odyssey, and the cicada version survives through later writers and the Iliad scholia.