Ganymede

The sheep were still grazing when the shadow crossed them. Up on Ida, above Troy, the grass turns silver under the wind and the black pines hold the day’s heat long after the light has left them, and a king’s youngest son was up there alone with the flock, doing the unglamorous work that younger sons did in the old stories. Then the air moved wrongly. Something came down out of the glare with a wingspan wider than a man is tall, and when it climbed again the boy went with it, and the flock was left to find its own way down.

The oldest telling has no eagle in it at all. Homer, running through the Trojan royal line in the twentieth book of the Iliad, names Tros and his three sons, Ilus, Assaracus and Ganymede, and says of the last that he was the loveliest born of the race of mortals, and therefore the gods caught him away to themselves to be the wine-pourer of Zeus, for the sake of his beauty, so that he might live among the immortals. The gods, plural. No bird, no talons, no named abductor. The eagle arrives centuries later and then never leaves, because it is a far better picture.

Even his parentage refuses to settle. Apollodorus makes him the son of Tros, king of Troy, by Callirhoe the daughter of the river Scamander, with Ilus and Assaracus for brothers and Cleopatra for a sister. Cicero and Euripides give him to Laomedon instead. Tzetzes hands him to Ilus, and Hyginus to Erichthonius in one book and to Assaracus in another. What every version agrees on is the family. He belongs to the house that would become Troy, four or five generations before the walls came down.

Zeus paid for him. In the fifth book of the Iliad the horses of Aeneas are traced back to a divine stock given by Zeus to Tros in recompense for his son, and they are called the finest of all horses beneath the sun and the dawn. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite fills in what Homer leaves out. Tros did not know where the whirlwind had taken the boy and mourned him without pause, until Hermes came down at Zeus’ order and told him plainly that his son would be deathless and unageing, exactly as the gods are. The hymn says the father stopped weeping then, and rejoiced in his heart, and drove his storm-footed horses gladly. A lost poem of the epic cycle disagrees about the price and makes it a golden vine, worked in gold with clustering grapes, handed to Laomedon. Heracles would later come to Troy and demand those horses as his fee for saving Hesione from the sea monster, which says something about what the compensation was worth and how long the family kept the receipt.

Nobody in the ancient record describes his face. Homer gives only the superlative, the hymn gives golden hair, and everything else we think we can see comes from the vase painters and the sculptors, who show a youth on the near edge of adulthood, sometimes trundling a hoop along in front of him, sometimes carrying a hunting javelin, sometimes in the soft peaked cap and saffron tunic that Roman comedy would use as shorthand for a Phrygian shepherd boy. Statius, describing the scene embroidered into a robe, has him hunting on leafy Ida with his javelin, hot from the chase, an instant before the sky opens. That is as close to a portrait as antiquity gets.

The work itself was small and endless. At the feasts he stood at the great mixing bowl and drew the nectar and carried it round the circle of golden thrones, and Hebe, who had held the post before him and was the daughter of Zeus and Hera, stood down. Hera did not forgive it. Virgil lists the taking of Ganymede among the old injuries that kept her hating Troy, and Statius has her look at him in anger, withdraw her hand and refuse the cup when he offers it. Nonnus, writing five centuries later, was still working the same grudge, with Hera calling him a cowman and a country clown and wanting her daughter’s job back.

The earliest versions carry no desire in them. Homer’s reason is beauty, and beauty in that line is a quality the gods collect rather than something they want to take to bed. By the fifth century the reading has changed and Zeus is in love. Plato, in the Phaedrus, has Zeus name the flooding stream of longing himeros, desire, while he is in love with Ganymede. In the Laws he is blunter and much less charmed, accusing the Cretans outright of inventing the whole story so that they could point at Zeus while doing as they liked. A Greek philosopher calling the myth a fabrication with a motive behind it is worth more than any modern gloss on the same question.

Rome took the name and mangled it. Ganymedes reached Latin through Etruscan as Catmite and settled as Catamitus, which is where English gets catamite, a word that has never once been used kindly. Ovid tells the abduction in a handful of lines in the tenth book of the Metamorphoses, where the king of heaven finds there is something he would rather be than himself, becomes an eagle, and sweeps the boy of Ilion away; and the boy is still up there mixing the nectar, Ovid says, though Juno frowns. Plautus put him on the comic stage in a Phrygian cap and a saffron dress. Virgil embossed the abduction on a prize cup in the Aeneid, the eagle carrying him in claws that did not tear, while his old guardians stretch their hands up from below and the hounds bay at empty air.

Not everyone wanted the sky. Strabo notes a place on the coast near Cyzicus called Harpagia, the snatching, and says some writers made that the spot. The Byzantine Suda preserves two versions with the miracle taken out. In one, Tantalus of Thrace intercepts him on an embassy, mistakes him for a spy, injures him, then nurses him, and the boy sickens and dies anyway. In the other, Minos of Crete comes to Troy as a guest, learns the sons are out hunting by the Granicus, has his ships waiting downstream, takes the beautiful one aboard and sails; and Ganymede, to end the pain, kills himself with a sword, and Minos buries him. In neither of them does he reach Olympus. There is also a stray note that it was Eos who carried him off, which would make him one more Trojan boy the Dawn helped herself to, alongside Tithonus.

What survives him is mostly astronomical. Hyginus records that Aquarius, the water-pourer, is widely held to be Ganymede, and that the constellation Aquila is the eagle that took him, flying above his head across the whole width of the sky. The mixing bowl became Crater. Nonnus has him ladling the drink out of that bowl in the sky, which is a tidy way of saying that the boy, his tool and the bird that stole him all ended as fixed lights, still arranged in the order of the story.

He was given the two things mortals want most, and given them young and in perpetuity. He does not die and he does not age, and he sits at the only table that matters. What he was not given is anything to do. Ganymede has no deeds. He fights nothing, founds nothing, invents nothing and rescues no one, and he is the only permanent resident of Olympus with no myth of his own after the one that put him there; his power is entirely a property of his face, which means it was never his. Quintus Smyrnaeus gives him the single moment of agency in the whole tradition, and it is a failure. Watching from heaven as the Greeks broke his city, he cried out to Zeus in anguish for his own fatherland and begged, in tears, to be taken somewhere he would not have to look at it. He could not stop any of it. Down in the burning town there was a shrine to him, near Priam’s own house, and one of Priam’s daughters was killed beside it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Ganymede in Greek mythology?

Ganymede was a Trojan prince, most often named as a son of King Tros, whom Zeus carried off to Olympus and made cupbearer to the gods. Homer calls him the loveliest born of the race of mortals. In exchange for his beauty he was granted immortality and eternal youth, and he pours the nectar at the divine feasts.

Why did Zeus take Ganymede?

Homer gives the reason as beauty alone, with no erotic content: the gods took him because he was the most beautiful mortal alive and they wanted him among them. From the fifth century BCE onward the story was read as desire, and Plato has Zeus in love with the boy. Plato also records the accusation that the Cretans invented the whole tale to justify their own practices.

Did Zeus turn into an eagle to abduct Ganymede?

Not in the earliest version. Homer says only that the gods caught him away, with no bird involved at all. The eagle appears in later sources, including Apollodorus, Ovid and Virgil, and became the standard image in art and in the Roman poets.

What did Zeus give Ganymede’s father as compensation?

The Iliad says Zeus gave Tros a stock of divine horses, the finest under the sun, and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite adds that Hermes came down to tell Tros his son would be deathless and unageing, at which the father stopped mourning. A different tradition from the epic cycle says the gift was a golden vine given to Laomedon instead. Heracles later demanded those horses from Laomedon as payment for rescuing Hesione.

Is Ganymede a constellation?

Hyginus records that many identified Ganymede with Aquarius, the water-pourer, and the eagle that seized him with the constellation Aquila, which flies just above Aquarius in the sky. The mixing bowl he served from was identified with Crater. Ganymede is also the name of the largest moon of Jupiter, named for the same figure.

Related Entries

Zeus, Hera, Hebe, Aphrodite, Eros/Cupid, Eos, Tithonus, Aeneas, Sarpedon, Achilles, Heracles (Hercules), Minos, Adonis, Europa