Selene

Greek religion had several goddesses touched by the moon, Artemis, Hecate, but Selene alone is the moon, the bright disc driving her chariot across the night, and the distinction mattered to the Greeks even as the three were increasingly blurred. In magic and later cult the three lunar goddesses fuse into a single triple power invoked at crossroads and in spells, and the Roman Luna takes on the same role. Selene's pure identity as the celestial body kept her central to astronomy and astrology even as her personal mythology stayed thin; where Artemis had temples and festivals, Selene had comparatively few, honoured more in hymn, invocation and the reckoning of the month than in civic cult.

A short Homeric Hymn, the thirty-second in the traditional collection, is addressed to Selene directly, praising the far-shining light that spreads from her immortal head and calling her a great help to young men and to gods alike, one of the few pieces of surviving Archaic Greek poetry devoted to her alone rather than shared with Artemis or Hecate. Where Helios drives horses, ancient sources and artists more often give Selene a chariot drawn by a pair of oxen or, in some accounts, mules, a detail some ancient commentators connected with the moon's comparatively slow, patient course across the sky, in deliberate contrast to the sun's swift daily gallop.

Selene's best-known myth is her love for Endymion, a beautiful youth, shepherd or king, for whom she obtained eternal sleep so that she might come to him each night unchanging; in some versions she bears him fifty daughters, read as the fifty lunar months of the Greek Olympiad. The image of the moon stooping to kiss a sleeping mortal became one of the most durable in Western art and poetry, taken up by Renaissance painters and by the Romantics, above all in Keats's long poem Endymion. That afterlife is out of all proportion to her modest ancient cult, and shows how a goddess who is simply the moon itself could carry, across centuries, the whole imagery of longing and the night.

Rome honoured the same power as Luna, with a temple on the Aventine Hill that Roman antiquarian tradition credited to the early king Servius Tullius, standing not far from Diana's own Aventine sanctuary in a district associated with plebeian and popular cult; the temple burned in the great fire of 64 CE under Nero and was apparently never fully restored to its earlier prominence, leaving Luna a comparatively minor presence in the developed state religion of the later Republic and Empire even as poetic and astrological writers continued to invoke her as the moon's personification alongside Selene's Greek mythology.