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.
