Divine Immortality and Its (Dis)Contents: The Rhetorical Function of the Tithonus Figure in the Lyric Poetry of Horace and Sappho

References to the myth of Tithonus and Eos in the poetry of Horace and his pre-classical Greek model, Sappho, have provoked philological controversies about the imagined mode of existence of the handsome Trojan after his abduction by Eos, Goddess of Dawn. According to the standard variant of the myth, Tithonus was granted immortality, though not eternal youth, by the supreme Olympian god, Zeus. In the two Horatian passages in the Odes where Tithonus is named, he is categorized among deceased heroic figures (C.I.28 and II.16). This apparent deviation from the conventional account of Tithonus’ “immortality” is explicable in terms of the deep argument of both poems, in which the everlasting life of gods is inextricably coupled with their eternal youth, while the old age of mortals is represented as a metonymic equivalent of death—a conceptual complex that is implicitly shared with the Sapphic portrayal of the hero’s fate in Fr.58.