# sleeping like Endymion

idiom · CEFR C2

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/sleeping-like-endymion
Updated: 2026-07-29

## Meaning

Sleeping deeply and peacefully, as if in an unbroken, ageless slumber.

## Examples

- After the long hike, the kids were sleeping like Endymion.
- The baby finally settled and spent the whole night sleeping like Endymion, not stirring once until dawn.
- Exhausted after weeks of night shifts, she came home, fell into bed, and lay sleeping like Endymion through an entire day, deaf to the phone, the doorbell, and the traffic outside.

## Origin

Endymion was a young shepherd of surpassing beauty, and the tales of him are old and tangled, told a little differently in every mouth. But they agree on the heart of it: Selene, goddess of the moon, looked down from her silver course one night, saw him asleep on a hillside, and fell hopelessly in love. Night after night she came down to gaze on the sleeping youth, unwilling to let such beauty fade or such a life end the way mortal lives do. And so a wish was made — by Selene, some say, or by Endymion himself, when a god offered him any gift he cared to name — that he might sleep for ever, untouched by age or death. The wish was granted. Endymion was laid in a cave on Mount Latmus and sank into an eternal, dreamless sleep, ageless and serene, his beauty fixed exactly as it had been on that first night. And there he slept on, year after year and century after century, while the moon crossed the sky above him and came down, faithful, to watch over his rest. It is a soft, dreaming sort of myth, folk-told and half-remembered, less a tale of great deeds than a single unfading image: a young man asleep in the moonlight, at perfect peace, beyond the reach of everything that troubles waking life. To be sleeping like Endymion is to sleep just so — deeply, peacefully, untroubled, wrapped in a rest so sound and so serene that the world and its worries cannot reach you. (folk)

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.