Sarcophagus with Selene and Endymion

In the 2nd century AD the satirist Lucian, who wrote in Greek, composed a short dialogue in which Aphrodite questions the moon goddess Selene about a young man. Selene admits that at night she comes down from the sky to the shepherd Endymion, asleep on Mount Latmos in Asia Minor, and creeps up to him on tiptoe so as not to wake him. In the myth he was given a sleep that never ended, and with it he never aged.

The story suited a tomb. A sleeper who is loved and visited, and never quite gone, offered a gentle picture of death, and in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD workshops in Rome carved it again and again on marble sarcophagi.

What you see here is the front of one of those chests, set into the wall. Endymion lies asleep, Selene arrives in her chariot, and around them crowd small winged Erotes, the figure of Sleep and personifications of the landscape.