Background
The love of Selene for Endymion was so familiar that the briefest reference would bring it to mind for the Greek listener or reader. No explicit narrative has come down to us, however, even in a fragment. In Argonautica (iv.57ff) the "daughter of Titan", the Moon, was witness to Medea's fearful night-time flight to Jason, and "rejoiced with malicious pleasure as she reflected to herself: 'I'm not the only one then to skulk off to the Latmian cave, nor is it only I that burn with desire for fair Endymion'" she muses. "But now you yourself it would seem, are a victim of a madness like mine." Lemprière's Classical Dictionary reinforces Pliny's account of Endymion's attachment to astronomy and cites it as the source of why Endymion was said to have a relationship with the moon as she passed by.
The mytheme of Endymion being not dead but endlessly asleep, which was proverbial (the proverb - Endymionis somnum dormire, "to sleep the sleep of Endymion") ensured that scenes of Endymion and Selene were popular subjects for sculpted sarcophagi in Late Antiquity, when after-death existence began to be a heightened concern. The Louvre example, found at Saint-Médard d'Eyrans, France, (illustration, left) is one of this class.
Some believe that he was the personification of sleep, or the sunset (most likely the last one as his name, if it were Greek rather than Carian can be construed from "to dive in", which would imply a representation of that sort. Latin writers explained the name from somnum ei inductum, the "sleep put upon him."
The myth of Endymion was never easily transferred to ever-chaste Artemis, the Olympian associated with the Moon. In the Renaissance, the revived moon goddess Diana had the Endymion myth attached to her.
Read more about this topic: Endymion (mythology)
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