Leukothea

References in art and popular culture

• Leucothea is invoked as an evil-averting deity in an epigram by Philodemus preserved in the Greek Anthology.
• Milton, in Paradise Lost, associates Leucothea with the morning dew, in the scene in which the archangel Michael descends to Adam and Eve to declare that they must no longer abide in Paradise (1674 edition book XI, lines 133–136):

  …Mean while
  To resalute the world with sacred light,
  Leucothea wak’d, and with fresh dews imbalm’d
  the Earth…

• Leucothea is mentioned by Robert Graves in The White Goddess.
• In Ezra Pound's Cantos, she is one of the goddess figures who comes to the poet's aid in Section: Rock-Drill (Cantos 85–95). She is introduced in Canto 91 as "Cadmus's daughter":

  As the sea-gull Κάδμου θυγάτηρ said to Odysseus
  KADMOU THUGATER
  "get rid of parap[h]ernalia"

• She returns in Cantos 93 ("Κάδμου θυγάτηρ") and 95 ("Κάδμου θυγάτηρ/ bringing light per diafana/ λευκὁς Λευκόθοε/ white foam, a sea-gull… 'My bikini is worth yr/ raft'. Said Leucothae… Then Leucothea had pity,/'mortal once/ Who now is a sea-god…'"), and reappears at the beginning of Canto 96, the first of the Thrones section ("Κρήδεμνον…/ κρήδεμνον…/ and the wave concealed her,/ dark mass of great water.").
• Leucothea appears twice in Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò) by Cesare Pavese, which is dedicated to her.
• Leucothoé was the first work by the Irish playwright Isaac Bickerstaffe published in 1756.
• In Marcel Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Leucothea becomes a metaphor for the mist that covers a young man's gaze when looking on the beauty of young women: "…a cloud that had re-formed a few days later, once I had met them, muting the glow of their loveliness, often passing between them and my eyes, which saw them now dimmed, as through a gentle haze, reminiscent of Virgil's Leucothea."
• "Leukothea" is a poem by Keith Douglas.