Hesperus

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Hesperus

In Greek mythology

Greek mythology

Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the Ancient Greece concerning their List of Greek mythological figures#Immortals and Greek hero cult, Cosmology#Metaphysical cosmology, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices....
, Hesperus (Greek

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
Hesperos) (Roman equivalent: Vesper cf. "evening", "supper", "evening star", "west"), the Evening Star is the son of the dawn goddess Eos

Eos

Eos is, in Greek mythology, the Titan goddess of the dawn, who rose from her home at the edge of Oceanus, the Ocean that surrounds the world, to herald her brother Helios, the sun....
(Roman equivalent: Aurora

Aurora (mythology)

Aurora is the Latin word for dawn, the goddess of dawn in Roman mythology and Latin poetry. Aurora is comparable to the Greek mythology goddess Eos, though Aurora did not bring with her any resonance of a greater archaic goddess....
) and brother of Eosphorus ( Eosphoros "dawn-bearer"; also Phosphorus, Lucifer
Lucifer

Lucifer is a name frequently given to Satan in Christian belief. This usage as a reference to a fallen angel stems from a particular interpretation of a passage in the Bible that speaks of someone who is given the name of "Day Star" or "Morning Star" as fallen from heaven....
"light-bearer", Iubar), the Morning Star. Hesperus' father was Cephalus

Cephalus

Cephalus is an Ancient Greek name, used both for historical persons and for characters in Greek mythology. The word cephalus is Greek for "head", perhaps used here because Cephalus was the founding "head" of a great family that includes Odysseus....
, a mortal, while Eosphoros' was the star god Astraios

Astraeus

In Greek mythology, Astraeus was an astrology deity and the Titan-god of the dusk. His original Ancient Greek name, Astraios , translates as "dawn of the stars" , the time when the stars come out, or simply dusk....
.

erus (Greek Hesperos) is the personification of the "evening star", the planet Venus

Venus

Venus is the second-closest planet to the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus , the Roman mythology goddess of love....
in the evening.

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Variant names

Hesperus (Greek Hesperos) is the personification of the "evening star", the planet Venus

Venus

Venus is the second-closest planet to the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus , the Roman mythology goddess of love....
in the evening. His name is sometimes conflated with the names for his brother the personification of the planet as the "morning star" Eosphorus (Greek , "bearer of dawn") or Phosphorus

Phosphorus

Phosphorus is the chemical element that has the symbol P and atomic number 15. The name comes from the and . A Valency nonmetal of the nitrogen group, phosphorus is commonly found in inorganic phosphate minerals....
(Ancient Greek

Ancient greek language

#REDIRECT Ancient Greek...
: , "bearer of light", often translated as "Lucifer

Lucifer

Lucifer is a name frequently given to Satan in Christian belief. This usage as a reference to a fallen angel stems from a particular interpretation of a passage in the Bible that speaks of someone who is given the name of "Day Star" or "Morning Star" as fallen from heaven....
" in Latin), since they are all personifications of the same planet Venus. "Heosphoros" in the Greek LXX Septuagint

Septuagint

The Septuagint , or simply "LXX", is the Koine Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, translated in stages between the 3rd century BC and 1st century BC in Alexandria....
and "Lucifer" in Jerome

Jerome

Saint Jerome was a Christian priest and Christian apologetics best known for translating the Vulgate. He is recognized by the Catholic Church as a canonized saint and Doctor of the Church, and his version of the Bible is still an important text in Catholicism....
's Latin Vulgate

Vulgate

The Vulgate is an early Fifth Century version of the Bible in Latin, and largely the result of the labors of Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 to make a revision of Vetus Latina....
were used to translate the Hebrew "Helel" (Venus as the brilliant, bright or shining one), "son of Shahar (Dawn)" in the Hebrew version of Isaiah

Isaiah

Isaiah is the main figure in the Biblical Book of Isaiah, and is traditionally considered to be its author. He was an 8th-century Before Christ Judean prophet who declared that all the world belonged to God and that God will destroy it....
14:12.

When named thus by the early Greeks, it was thought that Eosphorus (Venus in the morning) and Hesperos (Venus in the evening) were two different celestial objects. The Greeks later accepted the Babylonian view that the two were the same, and the Babylonian identification of the planets with the Great Gods, and dedicated the "wandering star" (planet

Planet

A planet , as 2006 definition of planet by the International Astronomical Union , is a celestial body orbiting a star or Stellar evolution#Stellar remnants that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared the neighbourhood of planetesimals....
) to Aphrodite

Aphrodite

Aphrodite is the classical Greek mythology goddess of love, sex, and beauty. According to Greek oral poet Hesiod, she was born when Uranus was castrated by his son Cronus....
(Roman Venus

Venus (mythology)

Venus was a major Roman mythology goddess principally associated with love, beauty and sexual reproduction, the equivalent of the Greek mythology Aphrodite....
), as the equivalent of Ishtar

Ishtar

Ishtar is the Assyrian and Babylonian counterpart to the Mesopotamian mythology Inanna and to the cognate northwest Semitic goddess Astarte....
.

Eosphorus/Hesperus was said to be the father of Ceyx and Daedalion

Daedalion

In Greek mythology, Daedalion was a son of Hesperos and brother of Ceyx. He is described as a cruel and warlike man. His daughter Chione was so beautiful that both Apollo and Hermes impreganted her....
. In some sources, he is also said to be the father of the Hesperides

Hesperides

In Greek mythology, the Hesperides are nymphs who tend a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, located near the Atlas mountains in Ancient Libya, or on a distant blessed island at the edge of the encircling Oceanus....
.

"Hesperus is Phosphorus"

"Hesperus is Phosphorus" is a famous sentence in the philosophy of language

Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for Analytic philosophys is concerned with four central problems: the nature of Meaning , language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality....
(see, e.g., proper name

Proper name

"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"....
). Gottlob Frege

Gottlob Frege

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a Germany mathematics who became a logician and philosophy. He helped found both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy....
used the terms "the evening star" and "the morning star" to illustrate his distinction between sense and reference

Sense and reference

The distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung was an innovation of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in his 1892 paper ?ber Sinn und Bedeutung , which is still widely read today....
, and subsequent philosophers changed the example to "Hesperus is Phosphorus" so that it utilized proper names. Saul Kripke

Saul Kripke

Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosophy and logician, now emeritus from Princeton University. He teaches as distinguished professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center....
used the sentence to demonstrate that the knowledge of something necessary (in this case the identity of Hesperus and Phosphorus) could be discoverable rather than known a priori

A priori and a posteriori (philosophy)

The terms "a priori" and "a posteriori" are used in philosophy to distinguish two types of knowledge, justifications or arguments....
.

Hesperus

Variant names

"Hesperus is Phosphorus"

See also