Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Hemera.
The gallery
Day (Le Jour)
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1884
An academic oil painting personifying Hemera, the Greek goddess of daytime, as a female figure rising in flight against the morning sky. It belongs to Bouguereau's series of allegories of the hours, alongside Dawn, Twilight and Night, and was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1884.
Hemera (Day) from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias
Unknown (Roman Imperial), 1st century AD
A relief from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, now in the Aphrodisias Museum, personifies Day as Hemera among the imperial mythological programme of the Julio-Claudian complex. The goddess of daylight stands as a classical allegory of the bright half of the cosmic cycle — Hesiod's daughter of Night translated into Roman civic marble.
Night and Her Children Aither and Hemera (Hesiod, Theogony)
Henry Fuseli, late 18th / early 19th century
Henry Fuseli's print in the Metropolitan Museum of Art stages Hesiod's Theogony genealogy: Night with her children Aether and Hemera. The Romantic sheet gives the primordial Day her Hesiodic family — sister of bright Air, daughter of Nyx — rather than the later conflation with Eos.