COMUS (from sd p.os, revel, or a

See also:

• COMPANY

company of revellers)  , in the later mythology of the Greeks, the god of festive mirth . In classic mythology the personification does not exist; but Comus appears in the Eucoves, or Descriptions of Pictures of Philostratus, a writer of the 3rd century A.D. as a winged youth, slumbering in a standing attitude, his legs crossed, his countenance flushed with wine, his head—which is sunk upon his breast—crowned with dewy flowers, his left hand feebly grasping a hunting spear, his right an inverted torch . Ben Jonson introduces Comus, in his masque entitled Pleasure reconciled to Virtue (1619), as the portly jovial patron of good cheer, " First father of sauce and deviser of jelly." In the Comus, sive Phagesiposia Cimmeria; Somnium (1608, and at Oxford, 1634), a moral allegory by a Dutch author, Hendrik van der Putten, or Erycius Puteanus, the conception is more nearly akin to Milton's, and Comus is a being whose enticements are more disguised and delicate than those of Jonson's deity . But Milton's Comus is a creation of his own .