The Seba library treats Eos in 7 passages, across 3 authors (including Gregory Nagy, Kerényi, Karl, Burkert, Walter).
The divine motive for abduction by Eos is thus both preservative and sexual.
Nagy argues that Eos’s serial abductions of beautiful youths encode a structurally dual function — erotic desire fused with the impulse toward immortalization — parallel to Zeus’s abduction of Ganymede.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis
the originally fused functions of mating with the consort and being reborn from the mother were split and divided between Aphrodite and Eos respectively.
Nagy uses comparative Vedic evidence to argue that Eos’s original functions — solar consort and regenerative mother — were fragmented in Hesiodic tradition, leaving her as birth-mother of Phaethon rather than his divine mate.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis
when the words are ‘incorrect,’ as in the myth of Eos and Tithonos, then the immortalization is ruined by the failure of preservation.
Nagy identifies the Tithonos myth as the canonical negative paradigm of immortalization, in which Eos’s request for eternal life without eternal youth condemns her beloved to a living death.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis
the goddess in question is not some derivative Dios thugatēr but Eos herself. The only surviving attestation of her taking a direct part in epic action is the Aithiopis, where she translates her dead son Memnon into a state of immortality.
Nagy establishes Eos’s unique function in the Aithiopis as a divine agent of heroic immortalization, distinguishing her direct role from the derivative functions of other goddesses.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis
Eos’s great love for handsome youths, whom she used to carry off by force, so greatly dominated the tales concerning her that it was even asserted that her continual passions were a punishment inflicted on her by Aphrodite.
Kerényi characterizes Eos as mythologically defined above all by her compulsive erotic pursuit of mortal men, a role he traces to a punitive narrative frame originating with Aphrodite.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951thesis
kalleos heineka hoio, hin’ athanatoisi meteiē on account of his beauty, so that he might be among the Immortals
Nagy demonstrates that the formulaic phrase applied to Ganymede’s abduction by Zeus also governs Eos’s abduction of Kleitos, establishing beauty as the mythological trigger for divine seizure and immortalization.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
Eos, 17, 121
Burkert’s index entry places Eos among the primary Greek deities without developing an extended analysis, confirming her canonical status in the Greek religious pantheon.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977aside