MEMNON

Below: This Greek vase from around 500 BCE depicts Achilles (left) and Memnon fighting. Their mothers stand behind them.

Memnon, king of Ethiopia, was the son of Eos, goddess of the dawn, and of a mortal named Tithonus. Toward the end of the Trojan War, Memnon joined the Trojans in their fight against the Greeks, but he was killed by Achilles during combat. Zeus, who favored Memnon, granted him immortality.

Memnon’s mother, the goddess Eos, took several lovers, some of whom were mortals. The best-known of these was Tithonus, the son of King Laomedon of Troy, and brother of Priam, who ruled Troy during the Trojan War. Eos seized Tithonus, who was said to be the most handsome man alive, and carried him off to Ethiopia, the edge of the known world and the place where the sun rose and the dawn originated. There she gave birth to Memnon and his brother, Emathion. Both Memnon and Emathion grew up to become kings in the east, taking the thrones of Ethiopia and Arabia respectively.

Eos was so in love with Tithonus that she begged Zeus, king of the gods, to make Tithonus immortal so that he would be her companion for eternity. Zeus granted her

Request but not in the way Eos expected. He made Tithonus immortal yet prone to the ravages of time. Tithonus aged and withered until, increasingly frustrated with her unattractive lover, Eos either locked him up in their bedchamber or, according to other accounts, transformed him into a grasshopper, which renews itself Mss periodically by shedding its skin.