Ganymede (mythology)

Ganymede
Cupbearer to the gods
Roman marble bust depicting Ganymede, dating to the 2nd century, now at the Louvre
Abode	Mount Olympus
Personal information
Parents	Tros and Callirhoe or Acallaris
Siblings	Ilus, Assaracus, Cleopatra, Cleomestra

In

[Ganymedes] was the loveliest born of the race of mortals, and therefore
the gods caught him away to themselves, to be Zeus' wine-pourer,
for the sake of his beauty, so he might be among the immortals.

— Homer, Iliad, Book XX, lines 233–235.^[3]

The myth was a model for the Greek social custom of paiderastía, the romantic relationship between an adult male and an adolescent male. The Latin form of the name was Catamitus (and also "Ganymedes"), from which the English word catamite is derived.^[4] Socrates says that Zeus was in love with Ganymede, called "desire" in Plato's Phaedrus.^[5] According to Dictys Cretensis, Ganymede was abducted by the Cretans.^[6]

Family

In Greek mythology, Ganymede is the son of

According to the myth, Zeus saw and fell in love with a beautiful mortal youth by the name Ganymede. Ganymede was abducted by Zeus from Mount Ida near Troy in Phrygia.^[a] Ganymede had been tending sheep, a rustic or humble pursuit characteristic of a hero's boyhood before his privileged status is revealed, when an eagle transported the youth to Mount Olympus. The bird is sometimes described as being under the command of Zeus and sometimes as being Zeus himself.^[23]

On Olympus, Zeus granted Ganymede eternal youth and immortality as the official cup bearer to the gods, in place of Hebe, who was relieved of cup-bearing duties upon her marriage to Herakles. Alternatively, the Iliad presented Hebe (and at one instance, Hephaestus) as the cup bearer of the gods with Ganymede acting as Zeus's personal cup bearer.^[24][25] Edmund Veckenstedt associated Ganymede with the creation of mead, which had a traditional origin in Phrygia.^[26] In various literature such as the Aeneid, Hera, Zeus's wife, regards Ganymede as a rival for her husband's affection.^[27] In various stories, Zeus later put Ganymede in the sky as the constellation Aquarius (the "water-carrier" or "cup-carrier"), which is adjacent to Aquila (the Eagle).^[28] In recognition of this myth, the largest moon of the planet Jupiter (named after Zeus's Roman counterpart) was named Ganymede by the German astronomer Simon Marius.^[29]

In the Iliad, Zeus is said to have compensated Ganymede's father Tros with the gift of fine horses, "the same that carry the immortals", delivered by the messenger god Hermes.^[30] Tros was consoled that his son was now immortal and would be the cupbearer for the gods, a position of much distinction.

In poetry, Ganymede became a symbol for the beautiful young male who attracted homosexual desire and love. He is not always portrayed as acquiescent. However, in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, Ganymede is furious at the god Eros for having cheated him at the game of chance played with knucklebones, and Aphrodite scolds her son for "cheating a beginner".^[34] The Augustan poet Virgil portrays the abduction with pathos: the boy's aged tutors try in vain to draw him back to Earth, and his hounds bay uselessly at the sky.^[35] The loyal hounds left calling after their abducted master is a frequent motif in visual depictions and is referenced by Statius:

Here the Phrygian hunter is borne aloft on tawny wings, Gargara’s range sinks downwards as he rises, and Troy grows dim beneath him; sadly stand his comrades; vainly the hounds weary their throats with barking, pursue his shadow or bay at the clouds.^[36]

In the arts

Ancient visual arts

In 5th-century Athens, the story of Ganymede became popular among vase-painters, which was suited to the all-male symposium.^[38] Ganymede was usually depicted as a muscular young man, although Greek and Roman sculpture typically depicted his physique as less developed than athletes'.^[39]

One of the earliest depictions of Ganymede is a red-figure

Ganymede and Zeus in the guise of an eagle were a popular subject on Roman funerary monuments with at least 16 sarcophagi depicting this scene.[39]

The Carthage Paleo-Christian Museum has a fifth-century Roman statue of Ganymede.^[42]

Renaissance and Baroque

Ganymede was a major symbol of homosexual love in the visual and literary arts from the Renaissance to the Late Victorian era, until when Antinous, the reported lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, became a more popular subject.^[43]

In Shakespeare's

Allusions to Ganymede occur with some frequency in 17th-century Spanish theater. In El castigo sin venganza (1631) by Lope de Vega, Federico, the son of the Duke of Mantua, rescues Casandra, his future stepmother, and the pair will later develop an incestuous relationship. To emphasize the non-normative relation, the work includes a long passage, possibly an ekphrasis derived from Italian art, in which Jupiter in the form of an eagle abducts Ganymede.^[46] Two plays by Tirso de Molina, in particular La prudencia en la mujer, include intriguing references to Ganymede. In this particular play, a Jewish doctor who seeks to poison the future king, carries a cup which is compared to Ganymede's.^[47]

One of the earliest surviving non-ancient depictions of Ganymede is a woodcut from the first edition of

Calvinist patron in 1635, a dark eagle carries aloft a plump cherubic baby (Paintings Gallery, Dresden) who is bawling and urinating in fright.^[51] A 1685 statue of Ganymede and Zeus entitled Ganymède Médicis by Pierre Laviron stands in the gardens of Versailles

.

Examples of Ganymede in 18th-century France have been studied by Michael Preston Worley.[52] The image of Ganymede was always that of a naive adolescent accompanied by an eagle, and the homoerotic aspects of the legend were rarely dealt with. In fact, the story was often more sexualized. The Neoplatonic interpretation of the myth, also common in the Italian Renaissance, the rape of Ganymede, represented the ascent to spiritual perfection. These however seemed to be of no interest to Enlightenment philosophers and mythographers. Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre, Charles-Joseph Natoire, Guillaume II Coustou, Pierre Julien, Jean-Baptiste Regnault and others contributed images of Ganymede to French art during this period.

Gallery

• Ganymede in Renaissance and Baroque art
• 
  Michelangelo's Ganymede. Copy after a lost original (1532) pencil. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle
• 
  The Rape of Ganymede (1611–1612) by Rubens, Liechtenstein Museum
• 
  The Rape of Ganymede (1636–1638) by Rubens, Prado
• 
  The Rape of Ganymede (1635) by Rembrandt
• 
  The Induction of Ganymede in Olympus (1768) by van Loo
• 
  Ganymède Médicis (1684–1685) by Pierre Laviron at Versailles.

Modern

• José Álvarez Cubero's sculpture of Ganymede, executed in Paris in 1804, brought the Spanish sculptor immediate recognition as one of the leading sculptors of his day.^[53]
• Vollmer's Wörterbuch der Mythologie aller Völker,^[54] (Stuttgart, 1874) illustrates "Ganymede" by an engraving of a "Roman relief", showing a seated bearded Zeus who holds the cup aside to draw a naked Ganymede into his embrace. That engraving however was nothing but a copy of Raphael Mengs's counterfeit Roman fresco, painted as a practical joke on the eighteenth-century art critic Johann Winckelmann who was growing desperate in his search for homoerotic Greek and Roman antiquities. This story is very briefly told by Goethe in his Italienische Reise.^[55]
• At Chatsworth in the nineteenth century the bachelor Duke of Devonshire added to his sculpture gallery Adamo Tadolini's Neoclassic "Ganymede and the Eagle", in which a luxuriously reclining Ganymede, embraced by one wing, prepares to exchange a peck with the eagle. The delicate cup in his hand is made of gilt-bronze, lending an unsettling immediacy and realism to the white marble group.
• In the early years of the twentieth century, the topos of Ganymede's abduction by Zeus was drafted into the service of commercial enterprise. Adapting an 1892 lithograph by
  Budweiser
  beer. Collectibles featuring the graphics of the poster continued to be produced into the early 1990s.
• The poem “
  Goethe was set to music by Franz Schubert
  in 1817; published in his Opus 19, no. 3 (D. 544). Also set by Hugo Wolf.
• The Portuguese sculptor António Fernandes de Sá represented the abduction of Ganymede in 1898. The sculpture can be found in Jardim da Cordoaria, in Porto (Portugal).
• In stories by
  Junior Ganymede is a servants' club, analogous to the Drones, to which Jeeves
  belongs. Wodehouse named it after Ganymede presumably in reference to his role of cup-bearer.
• Ganymede is a reluctant music fan in Kurtis Blow's 1980 song "Way Out West". After hours of rap by "The Stranger" (Kurtis), he eventually gets up to dance.
• American artist
  Washington D.C.
  c. 1900, depicting an adolescent, nude Ganymede on the back of an eagle.
• Ganymede and the god
  K.A. Applegate's fantasy series Everworld
  . Ganymede is described as attracting both males and females.

My first thought, my first flash was that it was a beautiful woman.... The angel was beautiful, with a face dominated by immense, lustrous green eyes and framed by golden ringlets, and with a bow mouth and full lips and brilliant white teeth.
And only then, only after I had felt that first rush of improbable carnal lust, did it occur to me that this angel was a man.[56]

Thorvaldsens Museum

, Copenhagen, Denmark)

• In 1959 Robert Rauschenberg referenced the myth in one of his best-known works, Canyon and in another work, Pail for Ganymede. In "Canyon", a photo of Rauschenberg's son Christopher beautifully reiterates the infant portrayed by Rembrandt in the 17th century. A stuffed eagle emerges from the flat picture plane with a pillow tied to a piece of string very near his claw. The pillow also reflects upon the young boy's body and Rembrandt's painting.
• Ganymede is a reluctant son in W. H. Auden's poem of that name, but he adores the eagle which teaches him how to kill.
• Felice Picano's 1981 novel An Asian Minor reinvents the story of Ganymede.
• In the 2016 video game Overwatch, the character Bastion has a bird named Ganymede.
• A character in the
  Terra Ignota
  series by Ada Palmer is named Ganymede de la Trémoille
• The opening of
  Phone
  refers to 'agents of Ganymede' (p. 6) to explore caution within the homosexual community in previous decades.
• The first poem in Jericho Brown's Pulitzer Prize for Poetry-winning 2019 book The Tradition is titled "Ganymede". Brown, who frequently interrogates topics of sexuality and race, brings the Greek abduction myth into contact with the history of American slavery.
• In 2023's
  Percy Jackson and the Chalice of the Gods, the sixth novel of the Percy Jackson
  series, Ganymede presents Percy Jackson with his first quest to retrieve the stolen Chalice of the Gods.

Family tree

v t e Trojan race

Oceanus Tethys Atlas Pleione Scamander Idaea Simoeis Jupiter Electra Teucer Dardanus Batea Ilus Erichthonius Astyoche Callirrhoe Tros Ilus Ganymede Assaracus Hieromneme Laomedon Themiste Capys Priam Anchises Aphrodite/Venus Latinus Creusa of Troy Aeneas Lavinia Ascanius Silvius Aeneas Silvius Latinus Silvius Alba Atys Capys Capetus Tiberinus Silvius Agrippa Romulus Silvius Aventinus Procas Numitor Amulius Ares/Mars Rhea Silvia/Ilia Hersilia Romulus Remus

Notes

1. ^ Some variants of the myth have Ganymede abducted from Harpagion instead.^[22]

References

Sources

Ancient sources

Ganymede is named by various ancient Greek and Roman authors:

• Homer – Iliad 5.265; Iliad 20.232;
• Homerica – The Little Iliad, Frag 7;
• Homeric Hymns – Hymn V, To Aphrodite, 203–217;
• Theognis
  – Fragments 1.1345;
• Pindar – Olympian Odes 1; 11;
• Iphigenia at Aulis
  1051;
• Plato – Phaedrus 255; Laws 636c
• Apollonios Rhodios – Argonautica
  3.112f;
• ps-Apollodorus – Bibliotheke 2.104; 3.141;
• Strabo – Geography 13.1.11;
• Pausanias – Guide to Greece V.24.5; V.26.2–3;
• Diodorus Siculus – The Library of History 4.75.3;
• Hyginus
  • Fabulae 89; 224; 271;
  • Astronomica 2.16; 2.29;
• Metamorphoses
  10.152;
• Virgil – Aeneid 1.28; 5.252;
• Cicero – De Natura Deorum 1.40;
• Valerius Flaccus
  – Argonautica 2.414; 5.690;
• Statius
  • Thebaid 1.549;
  • Silvae 3.4.13;
• Apuleius – The Golden Ass 6.15; 6.24;
• Quintus Smyrnaeus – Fall of Troy 8.427; 14.324;
• Nonnus – Dionysiaca 8.93; 10.258; 10.308; 12.39; 14.430; 15.279; 17.76; 19.158; 25.430; 27.241; 31.252; 33.74; 39.67; 47.98;
• Suda – Ilion; Minos;

Modern sources

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Ganymede". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 11 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 454.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ganymede.

Wikisource has the text of The New Student's Reference Work article "Ganymede".

Zeus and Ganymede

Read by Timothy Carter, music by Steve Gorn, from the Lovers' Legends Unbound collection by Andrew Calimach

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• World History of Male Love: Zeus and Ganymede
• The Zeus and Ganymede Myth: Analysis and Resources by Andrew Calimach
• Ganymedes, Theoi Project
• Ganymede: Subject of the Visual Arts
• Goethe, "Ganymed" Archived 30 November 2015 at the Wayback Machine (in German)
• The Warburg Institute Iconographic Database (images of Ganymede)