Cheating The Dawn

Critical scholarship of the works of the so-called Poet of Keros reveals that he was most likely a dramatist as well, as suggested by the satirical tone of his writings. Regardless, prior to this new prose translation by James Kerner (MA 2008), the only published version of this particular work was only available in the brief and heavily bowlderized verse version done by Professor AE Millis in 1897.

This myth provides one of the best characterizations of the dawn goddess Eos, whose sexual voraciousness may have been downplayed during the Middle Ages as a result of rising propaganda in support of the Marian ideal. Further scholarship is showing that, contrary to the traditional view, Eos was likely to have been a far more significant deity than she was long thought to be, complete with a nascent cult and a series of well-appointed temples.

* * *

A low slurred bar of sand to the west, solid against the endlessly tossing hills of water, glinted gold in the falling sun: dry, brittle Argos, olive-hued on its high ground, rose slow from the sea like a wakening giant. The lazy kind, the kind that has forgotten how to fight, how to dance. For this was old land, tired land, its people trodden under by cynical kings and eager advisors, ambitious for place and pleasure.

But they still looked for ships, those people, hopeful for wine and silver, grain and dear-bought iron, that wonder of the gods. And so they sent boats to meet the surging Phylaxes' thrusting ship, plowing through the hesitant waves, virile as its master. He laughed from the steering oar, built strong and tall, knowing how little he needed to care about those shell-shattered boats of the men of Argos, for he was after different prizes, and they waited in the beds of the women of the city.

The man, Phylaxes: slim and bronzed as a sword, teeth shell-white when he smiled into the sun, well-built and heavy with confidence such that there were people who wondered whether his father had been a god. And his father had not been, but Phylaxes had heard those whispers and had done nothing but smile, for they nudged at his vanity.

His vanity seldom needed nudging.

He leapt from his vessel even as it pierced the sand,g its long bow plowing the land, thick and deep within the soft wet furrow of the beach. Vainly that sand grasped at Phylaxes' feet as though the earth itself wanted him close, wanted him to stay. And yet the man strode firm and tall into Argos as though he owned the place, his eyes casting about at lesser men.

But not so much as they cast at the women.

* * *

"You have been busy in the bedrooms of Argos."

By the window stirred Aphrodite, watching as Apollo urged his horses over the rim of the world. The ship of Phylaxes had been a week on the beaches where the slow-flowing stream of Inachos lost itself in the green glimmer of the sea, but it was one of a hundred thousand ships resting on the many beaches that fringed the Pelopponese as laurel crowns fringe the heads of champions. There was no reason for Aphrodite to know, or to care, about any of those ships, but she bent her thought now to distant Argos, pondering. "Yes," she said at last, turning to smile at her niece, "there are many happy women there."

"Every one of them praises your name." Eos arrived in rose-golden glory, that glow that forever followed her eager hands and her searching fingers. All the day she rested, the better to prowl the beds of the night, seeking the endless end of her lusts only to find, as she yawned toward her gates in the dawn, that the emptiness had returned. And so she must seek again, the next night. And the next.

Aphrodite knew this well. It was she who had caused the cursed lusts. She sighed now. "Noble Aunt of the Rose-gold Fingers, I am honored by the faith of my people. Honored, and yet wearied." She shook her head, hair like sprinkled gold upon her shoulders. "There is no end to the lusts of the mortals, men and women alike."

"Certainly not the women. Not when they are blessed with the attentions of a man skilled with the spear." She smiled as she sank onto the couch beside Aphrodite. Their paths met often, and usually in the service of the people who met and mingled their flesh, their tongues, their bodies.

"The spear." Aphrodite frowned. Hers was not a world where intentions needed to be masked. She was goddess of one thing and one thing only, the most important of all the things. That which made life begin. "You joke about that which you do not understand."

"You know how wrong you are. I understand fully," Eos replied softly, fixing the other goddess' eye, and after long moments that hung like raindrops from the eaves, it was Aphrodite who looked away. Love in all its forms was hers to share, and Eos often thought she paid it too much importance. "Pleasure is enough, often, without the fetters of heart or tears. Like the pleasure I took from Ares, the pleasure that so grievously provoked you."

"Enough." Aphrodite had lately been unwell, and was in no fit mood to be teased so. It had nearly broken her, seeing her Ares with wily Eos, and her revenge had turned the mistress of the dawn into a wholly sensual vessel doomed never to be filled, seeking always her next lover. She had not expected that another result of her curse would be Eos' prodding, the constant goading reminder of how Ares had enjoyed his long, eager journey through Dawn's closest and most intimate gates. "Focus. What is your concern with the wombs of Argos, aunt?"

Eos' shoulders tossed, a gesture as abrupt as it was careless. "The wombs? Nothing. As you well know, Aphrodite, I am much more interested in what fills them." Her eyes sparkling starlike, she smiled her sunrise smile. "Have you not heard of the man who walks there, in Argos?"

"Of the Argives I have heard much," Aphrodite replied, head cocked. "Of Temenus, and of Argus the ship-maker. More lately of Diomedes Tydides the much-loathed, he whose wife I gave to Cometes when her husband came to destroy my beloved Troy." She frowned, remembering, for to the end of time her heart would weep for the unburied dead of that terrible war. Even Eos bowed her head, remembering her son Memnon, slain before the city. "Served him right to be cuckolded," Aphrodite added, feral.

Memnon's memory dwelt, then fled from its shadow of grief, his mother feeling warmth in her loins. "The man I speak of is no Argive," Eos said, low and secret, her smile still bright. "He is a mariner from far over the sea, a man with preternatural skill beneath the blankets. Or so it is told."

"Beneath the blankets?" Aphrodite's frown vanished. "Always a good place, for a man with skill."

"Indeed, daughter of Zeus. And the skill for which this man is renowned is, they say, equal to no man on earth or Olympus." Her eyebrows arched like the sun breaking through her gates. "Not even our illustrious Ares, whom we've both enjoyed."

"I told you: enough." The frown returned at once to Aphrodite's radiant face, her quick eyes clouding. "No more of that, aunt. I need no reminder." Indeed she did not, her humiliations still fresh: her husband Hephaestus had in those days just recently caught her disporting herself with Ares, and on top of that had fallen great Troy. No. She needed no reminder.

And most certainly not from Eos of the dawn, she whom Aphrodite had cursed with a permanently needy cleft, its moisture forever pouring forth, craving relief from a man. Perhaps a man with preternatural skill...

"The reminder is in yourself," Eos murmured, smug, for these were the days when all the gods still mocked her at Hephaestus' bidding. Speaking of cuckoldry... "In any event, I think it might be a good time of year for me to pay a visit to Argos."

"To meet a sailor?" Aphrodite freighted her voice with all the contempt a dweller on Olympus could muster, a withering blast of scorn meant to flay rosy-armed Eos from the high chamber, weeping. "Is that the best you can manage?"

"To meet the best lover in the world, Aphrodite Philommenes," Eos corrected, quick and sparkling like the dew beneath her gate, "and certainly I shall let him manage me."

Courtly yet stern, the love goddess' eyes narrowed. "He is a mortal. He cannot be so singular."

"And yet." Eos sighed, eyes staring far away to the south, to Argos. "Yet the Argive women shake and scream under the light of my sister Selene, and when I open my gates my rosy light finds them sated, heavy, thick with his seed." She grinned merrily. "My brother Helios says they walk slowly under his day, as if in a dream. And they leave wetted footprints behind them," she laughed.

Intrigued, and yet trying to maintain her hauteur, Aphrodite peered from high Olympus' window, brooding over Eos and her many slights. "You should go there, then. I regret that I must remain, O aunt of the reddened fingers. I have vital things to do here."

"Oh, most certainly I shall go. And, on my behalf, pray remember me to your 'vital things,' for such are we calling Ares now. No?" Aphrodite looked away from the mocking eyes that glared back down at her. "I thought so. I would tell you of my encounter with this man, O lover of laughter, but you are Aphrodite. So you can watch for yourself, from high above, as we couple." She smiled. "I shall go. I've many miles to go before I find my lover, and after all I must be back at the margin of the world to fling aside the Gates of Dawn by tomorrow's birth." She bustled toward the door.

"It's never as good when it's rushed, Eos," Aphrodite reminded her.

"Indeed. So tonight I shall merely introduce myself. Tonight I plant my goad, so that tomorrow he may plant his." She nodded. "Until then, Aphrodite Philommedes." She swept from the room, leaving a ponderous and heavy-minded goddess behind her as Helios disappeared into the dusk's uncertain light.

* * *

She stood on the beach beside the sleepy Inachos, the wide river losing itself in the glooms of the north, the glooms of her husband Astraios, him who shut her gates in the evenings. He'd be off now, staring up at her silver sister Selene, dazzled by her beauty. Which was as well, since his wife had a mortal to seduce.

Eos frowned down at the strand, kissed by Poseidon. She listened to the fretting Nereids as the surf sucked the sand. The prow of the great ship lay on the lap of the sand under the young stars, quiet, still, and yet brimming with the same magic phallic threat she often sensed in her lovers as they lay docile after coupling, their own prows spent and motionless and yet waiting, somehow, to roar back to life, plunging into the sea's wet heart as her men would plunge again into her own.

She shivered, the image almost palpable to her. It was near-real, both form and nature of the man she aimed to meet, and so she smiled to herself as she took the Argos road, feet not even deigning to dent the sandy shore or the road, rock-roughened under Selene's faint shimmer, mounting the sky as night's cold, sharp answer to fulsome Helios. Her fingers had lost their rose-golden shimmer, her arms their dawntime glow, but her figure beneath the rich robes was full and lissome, her face beautiful as only a goddess' might be beautiful, and though there were few Argives abroad in the darkening evening, they stirred in the eddies of her passage like leaves on the river nearby.

And, in a bed near the Temple of Hera the town's daughter, Phylaxes the mariner sat up.

He could not have told why, nor how, but he was certain his destiny lay elsewhere than that bed. It was the chamber of one Deiramona, sweetly-scented wife of Hera's priest, now combing out her long eager tresses at the basin beside her bedroom. She had made sport with Phylaxes all that afternoon and into the dusk-carved silence of the evening, as her husband completed the sacrifices and supervised the cleansing of Hera's altar nearby. She sat now with her combs and brushes, naked and shining, still sleek with the lewd bloat of the seed he'd left her with, three times in succession as the servants had whispered at her door.

She started, eyes darting to see him in her flat brazen looking-glass, then smiled in the winking moments before, entranced, her lover rose from her bed and made for the doorway. She began to say something, to ask what he had heard, to beg of him another gasping, writhing hour on her pallet before her husband would return, but even as she drew breath to speak he was shrugging into his simple mariner's cloak and, with a listless glance at her tumbling half-dressed hair, he had strode from her room and her life just as swiftly as he'd arrived, that afternoon behind his pearl-toothed smile and the splendid flow of his hips.

Deiramona's servants peered into the room in the hollow of the space in the house's life that Phylaxes had left behind him, their eyes asking all the questions their naked mistress could not possibly answer. But Phylaxes never again thought of Deiramona, his mind bent now toward a new space he sensed himself filling, a new flower to pluck in the dust of the road by the Inachos.

They saw each other at the same moment. He knew, a prickling sense pressing at him from far behind his stomach, pushing out and down. Making him surge.

And she knew, too. Because she was a goddess, cursed with the need to find a man, to mate with him. And her body knew its man, just as the man's body knew her. She smiled, though it was all she could do not to kneel at the riverside and offer herself. "Well met, sir."

"Indeed." He halted, licking his lips, tasting Deiramona there. "You're abroad under the light of the moon, lady. Should I guard you from the night-perils?"

"Can you?" She swayed slightly, giddy like a woman with wine. "Are you some warrior?"

He shrugged, the starlight gleaming blue-white from his teeth. "I am called Kontotechnes by those who know me away from home."

"Kontos." She laughed. "A bargepole." She was skilled in the use of the mortals' tongues.

His smile was quick, easy. "A word soldiers in my home use for their spears. The longest kind."

"Ah." She nodded. "A man skilled with his long spear," she translated, then reached to stroke his arm. "But not the kind of spear a warrior must use, for you are not built like a warrior."

"No indeed. My spear is not the sort one uses for war, though that does not make it any less potent."

She laughed. "Not for war? For hunting, then?"

He joined in naturally, easily, as though he'd been expecting the laugh. He was a man who knew women, and how they thought. "It hunts, yes. And it often pierces what I aim at. Hence the name."

Her eyes fell shut, grave and unyielding. "It aims often?"

"Often enough." He bowed. "My parents named me Phylaxes."

"And I am called many names," she nodded, old in the ways of dealing with mortal men, "though you may choose the one you wish."

His smile grew. "Later, perhaps. I am not so rude as to leave a strange lady on her own in the night. I should get you to your bed."

Her laugh now was soft, throat catching as her desire grew for this confident man. She could smell him in the darkness, the piquant scent of a man sated with his lusts drained into a woman, and she felt sure she was not imagining it. "You've just come from a bed, Phylaxes, have you not?" He merely smiled. "You've been hunting all day, I think. And now you hunt again."

"My spear is always ready," he nodded, his own breath catching now as treacherous Selene passed from behind a cloud to shine on her sister's face. "It senses game, I think, even now as the night passes. I really should see you to your bed."

"Perhaps." She stirred then, the river murmuring beside them in the silence of the new night. "Tell me how you hunt, then."

"I do not fail," he said at once, drawing himself up sword-tall and lean.

"Never?"

"Never, lady. So skilled is my spear that my quarry longs for its touch. It brings not pain, but release. Rest. A languor greater than the rest a man needs after long labors."

She laughed once more. "Your quarry seeks its own death! This seems strange."

"A kind of death," he allowed, "but twinned with the most exquisite sense of fulfillment, as though to embrace fate with eagerness."

"Are you fate?" she smiled.

"I am not," he assured her, "but if an embrace is needed, none are better than I."

She drew a breath deep and shuddering, mouth filling with Aeolus' airs, feeling her senses sharpen through the dullness he was causing, the heaviness with which callow Aphrodite had cursed her: womb ever-ready, needing to be filled. There was no possibility, however slight, that Eos could ever feel enough of the sweetly-clutched pounding of a man between her thighs. "You would hunt me?"

"No." His hand took her elbow, strong in its confidence. "I would catch you. My spear would find you."

She sighed. "And I would seek what death you would choose for me." She found his eyes with her own. "So say you?"

"So I do." His voice was quick, measured. Precise, like a ship threading a channel. "Never would you be better pleased, nor quicker to your impalement on my spear. Do you believe me?"

"Must I?"

Selene, tricksy, passed back into cloud, a shadow spreading quickly across the land, toward the mariner as his voice deepened. "I swear it," he nodded, "by the one who rules the Styx. And may I see his kingdom soon, lady, if my spear prove my words untrue."

She faltered then, shaking her head. "A bold claim, Phylaxes Kontotechnes."

"A true claim," he pressed, "or I would not make it. So. Shall you watch me hunt?" His tongue emerged, a serpent tasting the air, but his face had passed into darkness from the moment he'd sworn his oath, and Eos struggled to master herself.

"Sir," she began, once she could trust her voice, "I say it like this: idle boasts do not touch me lightly, and I am no prey such as your spear has pierced before. So I return this night to my husband, and you? To your prayers. Sacrifice to the gods, I bid you. Tell them what you have told me, and when I return tomorrow, if you hold to your oaths?" Her smile grew slowly to match his. "Then we shall see if your deeds meet your boasts. Or whether Hades Polydectes shall await you beside a river other than this." Her golden hair nodded toward the Inachos, her breaths stilling at last. "Until tomorrow then, sir."

The man gave no hint of any trepidation. He knew he would not soon cross the Styx, knew it with the certainty of a mortal man's pride. "Meet me here, and I shall give you my measure. And more."

"And more," she sighed. "Let us hope, for us both, that you do not sing an empty song." And when Selene Hyperion's daughter next brought her chariot from behind the clouds, the mariner saw no sign of the bewitching woman with the hint of rose on her fingertips.

* * *

After the opening of the Gates of Dawn Eos came back to Olympus, her fiery colts drawing her chariot back to the stables. Barely did Eos rein them, for her thought lay elsewhere than on her duties that morning, the feather-itch in her loins drawing her mind far away.

Back to Argos.

Her kinswoman Aphrodite walked, proud and fair, along the marbled colonnades among the splendor of Zeus' kingdom, and in that way Eos turned her steps. "Greetings, Lover of Laughter," she called, her voice yet heavy with her pent lusts. She knew now that it had been a grievous mistake not to accept Phylaxes' advances the evening before, and yet the invocation of Hades Polydectes was apt to give even a goddess pause. "Shall we walk together?"

"We shall, Aunt of the Rose-gold Fingers." Helios' fat rays touched Aphrodite's silken hair like wrought gold in the treasure house of a mortal king. "Shall I ask about your evening with the spearman who rides the sea?"

"You shall." Eos produced a small smile, her thoughts still astray in wild carnal fields. "Tonight I shall conquer him. And he shall conquer me."