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Ganymede was Trojan not Greek, identifying him as part of the earliest, pre-Hellenic level of Aegean myth. Plato said the Ganymede tale was invented by the Cretans, to account for their homosexual lusts, and Minoan Crete was a power center of pre-Greek culture. Homer doesn't dwell on the erotic aspect, but it is certainly in an erotic context that the goddess refers to Ganymede's blond Trojan beauty in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, mentioning Zeus' love for Ganymede as part of her enticement of Trojan Anchises.
The Roman poet Ovid adds vivid detail of the aged tutor's reaching out to grab him back, and Ganymede's dogs barking at the sky (Carmina, x). In Olympus, Zeus made Ganymede his lover and cupbearer. All the gods were filled with joy to see the young man, but Hera, Zeus' wife despised Ganymede and her hate of him later spilled over into a hate of all the Trojans, and led to her destruction of Troy at the time of the Trojan war.
A later, alternative version says that Eos, the dawn-goddess and nymphomaniac, kidnapped Ganymede and also Tithonus to be her lovers. Zeus decided he wanted the beautiful youth Ganymede for himself but to repay Eos he promised to fulfill one wish. She asked for Tithonus to be immortal, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus indeed lived forever but grew more and more ancient, eventually turning into a cricket.
In either version, Ganymede's father grieved for his son. His father was either Tros or Laomedon. Sympathetic, Zeus sent Hermes to Tros with two horses so swift they could run over water. Hermes also assured Ganymede's father that he was immortal and would be the cupbearer for the gods, a position of much distinction. The theme of the father recurs in many of the Greek coming-of-age myths of male love, suggesting that the relationships symbolized by these stories took place under the supervision of the father.
Zeus later put Ganymede in the sky as the constellation Aquarius, which is still associated with that of the Eagle (Aquila).
In poetry, Ganymede was a symbol for the ideally beautiful youth and also for homosexual love, sometimes contrasted with Helen of Troy in the role of heterosexuality.
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2 Renaissance and Baroque Ganymede 3 External Link |
Ganymede in ancient arts
In Athens, vase-painters often depicted the mythological story, which was so suited to the all-male symposium or formal banquet. The Ganymede myth was treated in recognizable modern terms with common behavior of homoerotic courtship rituals. On an Attic red-figure vase (ca 450 BCE), Zeus pursues Ganymede on one side, while Ganymede runs away, rolling along a hoop and carrying a cock (presumably a courtship gift from Zeus) [1]. On a vase by the "Achilles Painter" Ganymede also flees with a cock.
Leochares (about B.C. 350), a Greek sculptor of Athens who was engaged with Scopas on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus cast a bronze group of Ganymede and the Eagle, a work remarkable for its ingenious composition, which boldly ventures to the verge of what is allowed by the laws of sculpture, and also for its charming treatment of the youthful form as it soars into the air. It is apparently imitated in a well-known marble group in the Vatican, half life-size.
Vollmer's Wörterbuch der Mythologie aller Völker. Stuttgart, 1874 illustrates "Ganymede" by an engraving of a Roman relief, showing a seated bearded Zeus who holds the cup aside in order to draw a naked Ganymede into his embrace.
When painter-architect Baldassare Peruzzi includes a panel of The Rape of Ganymede" in a ceiling at the. Villa Farnesina, Rome, (ca 1509-14), Ganymede's long blond hair and girlish pose make him unidentifiable at first glance, though he grasps the eagle's wing without resistance. In the version by Antonio Allegri "Corregio" (1439/1534),(Vienna), Ganymede's grasp is more intimate. Rubens' version portrays a full-fleshed young country lad. But when Rembrandt paints the Rape of Ganymede for a Calvinist Dutch patron in 1635, all disquieting erotic overtones are suppressed: the dark eagle carries aloft a plump cherubic baby (Paintings Gallery, Dresden).
At Chatsworth in the 19th century the bachelor Duke of Devonshire added to his sculture 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.
Renaissance and Baroque Ganymede
In Shakespeare's As You like It (1599), a comedy of mistaken identity in the magical setting of the Forest of Arden, Celia, dressed as a shepherdess, becomes "Aliena" ("stranger") and Rosalind, because she is "more than common tall", dresses up as a boy, Ganymede, a well-known image to the audience. She plays on her ambiguous charm to seduce Orlando, but also (involuntarily) the shepherdess Phebe. Thus behind the conventions of Elizabethan theater in its original setting, the young boy playing the girl Rosalind dresses up as a boy and is then courted by the boy playing Phebe.External Link
![[1]](http://www.uark.edu/campus-resources/achilles/graphics/ganymede.gif){kind=link}