There are Hours and there are Hours. The Horai of the Greek Hesiod’s Theogony are three in number, the daughters of Zeus and Themis, a Titaness of the generation of gods before the Olympians. Hesiod names them Eunomia (Order), Dike (Justice) and Eirene (Peace). As important as one might think they should be, they have no tales in their own right, being the personifications of abstract ideals, and are relegated to odd jobs such as guarding the gates of Olympus, joining the retinue of Hera/Juno, generally serving as handmaids to earn their keep. These are not the Hours seen most often on cameos.
Although they tend to waft by unrecognized, identified as Muses or dancing girls or dancing Muses, or, often, Aurora/Eos, they turn up fairly frequently. These are the Hours as Ovid describes them: residents, along with other divisions of time—Day, Month, Year and the Seasons—of the Palace of Apollo, where they are “at equal distance from each other”. Ancient sources vary, but they are the daughters of Time or of the Sun. These are the Hours who mark the quotidian passage of time.
These Hours also have no tales of their own. Their roles seem to be to wait in attendance, to accompany the Chariot of the Sun or Eos/Aurora, goddess of the dawn, and to harness and unhitch their horses. If Petrarch is to be believed, they are also responsible for waking Apollo to get him going in the morning, and Raphael embossed them on the chariot in his fresco of the Sun’s Day. As is speculated in the section on the Days of the Week, it may be two Hours who draw Luna’s car, her more modest light requiring a smaller complement than the much greater brilliance of her brother. The Hours were described as having shining hair.
Surrounding the solar chariot is where we recognize them the most readily. The scene of Phoebus and Aurora, or “Aurora’s Chariot”, painted by Guido Reni, has been widely reproduced on cameos. We do not know how the carvers of Torre del Greco became acquainted with their subject matter. Perhaps it was sometimes through postcards like this. A sepia version would have served them just as well.
John Flaxman, who created the so-called Dancing Hours for Wedgwood, also incorporated them into some of his illustrations for an edition of Alexander Pope's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer.
This cameo was auctioned by Bonham's as Aurora. Close, but this is Morning, keeping "her revels with the dancing Hours", from Flaxman's illustrations for the Odyssey.
Although rare, cameos based on other Flaxman drawings do appear from time to time. In the Iliad, an account of the tenth and last year of the Trojan War, the gods of Olympus are divided in their support of the two sides, although some, including Jupiter, prefer to remain neutral.
His wife, Juno, and daughter Minerva throw their considerable weight on the side of the Greeks. (Only natural since they were the losers in the Judgment of Paris, in which the Trojan shepherd prince, tasked with awarding a golden apple provided by the Goddess of Discord to "the Fairest", awarded the prize to Venus after she promised him the most beautiful woman in the world. His abduction of Helen, the wife of the Greek king Menelaus, is the sole cause of the war.) Eventually Jupiter declares there is to be no more Olympian intervention in this mortal affair. When Juno and Minerva set out once again to come to the aid of the Greeks
the displeased husband and father sends his messenger Iris, goddess of the rainbow, to convey his ire and turn back the rebellious twosome. Iris gives them both a good tongue lashing and all return. Flaxman imagined a sequel never described by Homer, the Hours Taking the Horses from Juno's Car.
The carver of the tiara had so much space to fill that he spread his figures more widely apart, requiring him to design for himself the feet and robe hem for the foremost Hour; there is more space between the necks of the horses on the right than in the Flaxman illustration.
The other carver added the fanciful touch of a starry bow for the whole cavalcade to travel, with cloud puffs like steppingstones for the horses.
When Flaxman uses only three Hours in a composition, it would be plausible to identify them as Hesiod’s Hours, met at the beginning: Order, Justice and Peace. But, according to Essick and La Belle, in their commentary on Flaxman’s Illustrations to Homer, the head wear Flaxman has given his figures is that seen on depictions of dancers on some ancient pottery, suggesting that for Flaxman these were the representatives of daily, not civil, order. Her headdress makes it possible to identify this lyre-plucking figure as the Muse Terpsichore, rather than as her sister Erato.
While very similar to the Hours removing the horses from Juno’s car, the scene on the cameos shown below are based on “The Hours Lead Forth the Horses of the Sun”, a bas-relief executed by John Gibson, a protegé of Flaxman, as a companion piece to his Phaeton. Here the Hours are bringing the horses to be harnessed for that ill-fated ride across the sky by a head-strong boy trying to govern four even more head-strong horses. Gibson's Hours are not so much leading the horses as running to keep up with them. In a drawing for the relief, Gibson included Apollo cautioning his son.
There is disagreement among various sources about every figure in this scene. It is most often described as the Triumph (procession) of Ariadne, or of Bacchus and Ariadne. The two female figures, under a cupid's guidance, trudging along despite their having wings, are sometimes referred to as small-P psyches. James Tassie dissented strongly from this reading, seeing instead Aurora, goddess of the Dawn, and Cephalus whom she abducted away from his loving wife, being drawn by a pair of Hours. (Another possibility would be that her passenger is the handsome young—but not forever, see Aurora/Eos—lover Tithonus, whom she also stole away.)
There is much to support this interpretation. While this is clearly a pair of lovers--the cupids helping to move the chariot along would tell us that, even if the posture of its two occupants did not--there is nothing to connect this entourage with the world of the wine god Bacchus/Dionysus. Not a wine vessel, nor vine, nor cluster of grapes, not even a grape leaf to suggest it. While each of the three versions of the scene shown varies in some details from the others, it is clear the semi-reclining female in the foreground is the dominant figure.
In this relief carving from the Palazzo Medici, her companion appears to very young indeed. This is not consistent with Bacchus and Ariadne. There is also no "mythologic" to having Hours draw the car for that pair. They are perfectly sensible as part of the advance of the day across the face of the earth, natural auxiliaries to any of the figures connected with time: Apollo/Sol (the Sun); Diana/Luna (the Moon, see Days of the Week); and Aurora/Eos, who follows Luna and precedes Sol.