Information AboutTithonus |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT TITHONUS | |
| greek mythology | |
| 1859 poems | |
|
Eos kidnapped Ganymede and Tithonus to be her lovers. Zeus decided he wanted the beautiful youth Ganymede for himself but to repay Eos he promised to fulfill one wish. She asked for Tithonus to be immortal, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus indeed lived forever but grew more and more ancient, eventually turning into a grasshopper, eternally living, but begging for death to overcome him. Some stories say that Eos turned Tithonus into a grasshopper or cicada. Tithonus and Eos had two sons, Memnon and Emathion . Memnon later became King of the East, until he was killed by Achilles . Some mythographers say that Tithonus also had a mortal wife, named Cissia (otherwise unknown). A poem on Tithonus is the 4th extant complete poem by ancient Greek lyrical poetess Sappho . The poem was published for the first time by Martin West in the Times Literary Supplement, June 21 (or 24) of 2005. ''Tithonus'' is also the name of an important poem by Alfred Tennyson , first written as ''Tithon'' in 1833 and completed in 1859. This poem is a dramatic monologue: the entire text is spoken by a single character whose words reveal his identity. The lines take the form of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). The poem as a whole falls into seven paragraph-like sections of varying length, each of which forms a thematic unit unto itself. Like Ulysses, Tithonus is a figure from Greek mythology whom Tennyson takes as a speaker in one of his dramatic monologues (see the section on "Ulysses"). According to myth, Tithonus is the brother of Priam, King of Troy, and was loved by Aurora, the immortal goddess of the dawn, who had a habit of carrying off the beautiful young men whom she fancied. Aurora abducted Tithonus and asked Zeus to grant him immortality, which Zeus did. However, she forgot to ask that he also grant eternal youth, so Tithonus soon became a decrepit old man who could not die. Aurora finally transformed him into a grasshopper to relieve him of his sad existence. In this poem, Tennyson slightly alters the mythological story: here, it is Tithonus, not Aurora, who asks for immortality, and it is Aurora, not Zeus, who confers this gift upon him. The source of suffering in the poem is not Aurora's forgetfulness in formulating her request to Zeus, but rather the goddesses referred to as "strong Hours" who resent Tithonus's immortality and subject him to the ravages of time. An episode of the television show '' The X-Files '' was titled "Tithonus." It concerned a man who cheated Death, but eventually came to see his immortality as a curse rather than a gift. EXTERNAL LINKS |
|
|