Rating :: 4
Completed :: 2025-06-15

Highlights

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.

In a flood of grief Apollo refused Hermes the right to transport the youth’s soul to Hades, instead mixing the mortal blood that gushed from his adored one’s brow with his own divine and fragrant tears. This heady juice dropped into the soil and from it bloomed the exquisite and sweet-smelling flower that bears Hyacinth’s name to this day.

fn1 In answer to her prayer, the gods transformed Smyrna into a weeping myrrh tree. After ten months the tree burst open and disgorged a mortal baby boy. Naiads anointed the child with the soft tears that wept from the myrrh – a balm which remains the source of the most important birth and coronation oils to this very day – and he was given the name Adonis.

Aphrodite arrived in time to see her lover bleeding to death and the boar – or was it Ares? – grunting in triumph as it galloped away deep into the forest. There was nothing the weeping goddess could do but hold Adonis and watch him choke out his last in her arms. From his blood and her tears sprang up bright red anemones named after the winds (anemoi in Greek) that so quickly blow away the petals of this exquisitely lovely flower, which is known to be as short-lived as youth and as fragile as beauty.fn2

They tore Adonis’s stomach open and he fell, mortally wounded, to the ground. Aphrodite arrived in time to see her lover bleeding to death and the boar – or was it Ares? – grunting in triumph as it galloped away deep into the forest. There was nothing the weeping goddess could do but hold Adonis and watch him choke out his last in her arms. From his blood and her tears sprang up bright red anemones named after the winds (anemoi in Greek) that so quickly blow away the petals of this exquisitely lovely flower, which is known to be as short-lived as youth and as fragile as beauty.fn2

And Narcissus? Day after day he lay by the river, passionately and hopelessly in love with his own reflection, gazing at himself, filled with love for himself and longing for himself, with eyes only for himself, and consideration for no one and nothing but himself. He drooped down over the water, pining and pining until at last the gods turned him into the delicate and beautiful daffodil that bears his name and whose lovely head always bows down to look at itself in puddles, pools and streams.

As for their spirits – well, Pyramus was turned into the river that bore his name for millennia and Thisbe into a spring whose waters run into it. The flow of the Pyramus (now called the Ceyhan) has been dammed for hydroelectric energy, so the power of the two lovers now goes to light Turkish homes. Moreover, in honour of the couple’s love and sacrifice, the gods decreed that the mulberry fruit would from that moment on be always a deep crimson purple: the colour of their passion and their blood.

speared him to death. By this time Apollo’s own lustful blood was up. He materialized and began a pursuit of Daphne. The terrified girl leapt out of the river and ran away as fast as she could, but he quickly gained on her. He had almost reached her when she sent up a prayer to her mother, Gaia and her father, the river god LADON. Just as Apollo closed in and touched her he felt her flesh change under his fingers. A thin bark formed over her breasts, her hair began to slither out into shining yellow and green leaves, her limbs wreathed themselves into branches and her feet slowly drove down roots into her mother Gaia’s receiving earth. A stupefied Apollo found that he was clutching not a naiad but a laurel tree. For once in his life the god was chastened.

The Greeks, like all great civilizations, set a great price on music – placing it so high in the arts that it took its name from all nine of the daughters of Memory.

Few earned a finer reputation in their lifetime as singer, minstrel, bard, poet and musician than ARION, from Methymna on the island of Lesbos.fn1 He was the son of Poseidon and the nymph ONCAEA, but despite this parentage he chose to devote his musical talent to the celebration and praise of the god Dionysus. His instrument of choice was the kithara, a variation of the lyre.

Few earned a finer reputation in their lifetime as singer, minstrel, bard, poet and musician than ARION, from Methymna on the island of Lesbos.fn1 He was the son of Poseidon and the nymph ONCAEA, but despite this parentage he chose to devote his musical talent to the celebration and praise of the god Dionysus. His instrument of choice was the kithara, a variation of the lyre.fn2 He is accepted everywhere as the inventor of the poetic form known as the dithyramb, a wild choral hymn dedicated to wine, carnival, ecstasy and delight.

The Tarentum region was famous for the great wolf-spiders commonly found in the countryside all around. The locals called them, after their town, ‘tarantulas’. Arion had heard that tarantula venom could provoke hysterical frenzy and so he improvised for the crowd a variation on his wild dithyrambs that he called a tarantella. The delirious rhythms of this folk dancefn4 maddened the excitable Tarentines, but towards the end he tamed them with a medley of his softest, most romantic airs.

The dolphin gave a series of squeaks and clicks that seemed to indicate understanding and Arion laughed. On and on they went, chasing the never-nearing horizon. Arion, confident of his balance now, pulled his kithara back round and sang the song of Arion and the Dolphin. It is lost to us, but they say it was the most beautiful song ever composed.

Now, come with me, Arion and sing me a song of love and wine.’ At the end of the musician’s long and successful life, Apollo, to whom dolphins and music were sacred, set Arion and his rescuer amongst the stars between Sagittarius and Aquarius as the constellation Delphinus, the Dolphin.

After this, the waters of the Pactolus, which wind around the foothills of Mount Tmolus, became the single greatest source of electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, in all the Aegean.

For three years each side kept to the bargain. The barber’s wife and family waxed fat and happy on the extra money that came in and no one found out about the king’s asinine auditory appendages. Turbans in the Midas style caught on throughout Phrygia, Lydia, Thrace and beyond. All was well.

Lest we take worship of the potentially Christlike and ideal Prometheus too far (a favourite Greek motto was, after all, mēdén ágan ‘nothing too much’), Russell reminds us that the Greeks seemed to be aware of a need to counter his influence with darker, deeper, less stable passions: It is evident that this process [acting on prudence and forethought] can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by the miser. But without going to such extremes prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations. Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.