In classical mythology, Philemon is the devoted old husband of Baucis, known only from Ovid's Metamorphoses. On a Phrygian hillside he shared their last goose and humble hearth with Jupiter and Mercury in disguise after a thousand proud doors stayed shut. Granted a temple priesthood and a shared end, he became a linden tree entwined with Baucis's oak.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Baucis and Philemon" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Theoxenia in Phrygia
Philemon and Baucis had married young in the same small cottage and grown old there, content with poverty. When Zeus and Hermes wandered the region without their insignia, every household bolted its doors; only the couple welcomed the strangers. Philemon helped serve the meal and chased the house goose for sacrifice until the gods stayed his hand and revealed the wine bowl refilling of its own accord.
Led up the hill, he watched the valley become a marsh and proud houses sink. Only their cottage was spared; it rose into a temple. With Baucis he asked only to die together and to serve as priest beside his wife.
II.Metamorphosis
In old age, tending the shrine, Philemon saw Baucis putting forth leaves and felt his own limbs harden into bark; husband and wife became a linden and an oak whose branches formed a latticed screen. Ovid says garlands still hung on the boughs in his day (Metamorphoses 8.618–724).
The story appears nowhere else in surviving ancient literature. Folklorists class it with hospitality-reward legends (ATU 750); classicists treat it as a set piece of xenia and pious poverty against the flood of the inhospitable city.
III.Reception
Philemon and Baucis entered European letters and music as a pair — La Fontaine, Swift, Haydn, Gounod, Goethe's Faust II — and as a byword for long, faithful marriage in humble circumstances. This atlas node is Philemon specifically; his wife is the sibling file baucis-phrygia. Homonym caution: he is not the New Comedy playwright Philemon or other historical bearers of the name.