Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

It was a terrible thing to do, but surprisingly enough it turned out to be more than an act of wanton lust. It really did seem to have something to do with real love. Zeus adored the boy and wanted to be with him always. Their acts of physical love only reinforced his adoration. He gave him the gift of immortality and eternal youth and appointed him to be his cupbearer. From now until the end of time he would always be the Ganymede whose beauty of form and soul had so smitten the god. All the other gods, with the inevitable exception of Hera, welcomed the youth to heaven. It was impossible not to like him: his presence lit up Olympus.

Zeus despatched Hermes to King Tros with a gift of divine horses to recompense the family for their loss.

‘Your son is a welcome and beloved addition to Olympus,’ Hermes told him. ‘He will never die and, unlike any mortal, his outward beauty will always match his inner which means that he will always be content. The Sky Father loves him completely.’

Well, the King and Queen of Troy had two other sons and they really were the finest gift horses in all the world, not to be looked in the mouth, and if their Ganymede were to be a permanent member of the immortal Olympian company and if Zeus really did love him …

But did the boy adore Zeus? That is so hard to know. The ancients believed he did. He is usually represented as smiling and happy. He became a symbol of that particular kind of same-sex love which was to become so central a part of Greek life. His name, it seems, was a kind of deliberate word play, deriving as it did from ganumai ‘gladdening’ and medon ‘prince’ and/or medeon ‘genitals’. ‘Ganymede’, the gladdening prince with the gladdening genitals became twisted over time into the word ‘catamite’.

Zeus and Ganymede stayed together as a happy couple for a very long time. Of course the god was as unfaithful to Ganymede as he was to his own wife, but they became almost a fixture nonetheless.

When the reign of the gods was coming to an end Zeus rewarded this beautiful youth, his devoted minion, lover and friend, by sending him up into the sky as a constellation in the most important part of the heavens, the Zodiac, where he shines still as Aquarius, the Cupbearer.

Moon Lovers

A word about two immortal sisters. We have met in passing Eos, or AURORA as the Romans called her, and know that her task was to begin each day by flinging wide the gates that let first the god Apollo and then her brother Helios drive the sun-chariot through. Their sister Selene (LUNA to the Romans) drove the nocturnal equivalent, the moon-chariot, across the night sky. By Selene, Zeus had fathered two daughters, PANDIA (whom Athenians celebrated every full moon) and ERSA (sometimes HERSE), the divine personification of the dew.

After Zeus tired of Selene, she fell in love a number of times. A fine, heroic youth called CEPHALUS caught her eye and she abducted him. She gave no thought to the fact that he was already spoken for – married, in fact, to PROCRIS, a daughter of Erechtheus, first King of Athens (the issue of Hephaestus’s spilled semen), and his queen, PRAXITHEA. Despite Selene’s radiant beauty and the luxurious moon palace she installed him in, the kidnapped Cephalus found himself missing his wife Procris dreadfully. No matter what silvery arts of love the goddess of the moon employed, she failed to arouse him. Disappointed and humiliated, she agreed to return him to his wife. All the time jealousy and injured pride were boiling inside her. How dare he prefer a human to a goddess? The idea that an ordinary woman could stimulate Cephalus while her divine being left him cold …

With mischievous insouciance she began to plant doubts in his mind.

‘Aiee,’ she sighed, sorrowfully shaking her head as they approached his home, ‘it saddens me to think how the oh-so-pure Procris will have been behaving in your absence.’

‘What can you mean?’

‘Oh, the number of men she will have been entertaining. Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘How little you know her!’ Cephalus returned with some heat, ‘She is as faithful as she is lovely.’

‘Ha!’ said Selene. ‘All it takes is honey and money.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Honeyed words and silver coins turn the most virtuous to treachery.’

‘How cynical you are.’

‘I ride over the world by night and see what people do in the dark. That’s not cynicism, it’s realism.’

‘But you don’t know Procris,’ Cephalus insisted. ‘She’s not like other people. She is faithful and true.’

‘Pah! She’d leap into bed with anyone when your back’s turned. I tell you what …’ Selene stopped, as if an idea had suddenly struck her. ‘If you were to make her acquaintance in disguise, yes? Show yourself willing, shower her with compliments, tell her you love her, offer her a few trinkets – I bet she’d be all over you.’

‘Never!’

‘Up to you, but …’ Selene shrugged and then pointed to the verge along which they had been walking. ‘Oh look – there’s a heap of clothes and a helmet. Imagine if you had a beard too …’