Ganymede

Ganymede belongs to the royal house of Troy. In Iliad Book 20, Aeneas recites the line to Achilles: Dardanus, son of Zeus, then Erichthonius, then Tros. Tros had three sons, Ilus, Assaracus and godlike Ganymede, who was born the fairest of mortal men. Ilus's line runs down to Priam, and Assaracus's to Anchises and Aeneas. Homer lists no children for Ganymede.

Homer tells his fate in one sentence. Because of his beauty, Aeneas says, the gods caught him up on high to be cupbearer to Zeus and to dwell with the immortals. The Iliad names the gods as a group here, not Zeus alone. The same poem also shows Hebe pouring nectar for the gods as they sit in council at the start of Book 4.

The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells the story at more length. Aphrodite tells it to Anchises as proof that his family is the most godlike of mortals. Wise Zeus, she says, carried off golden-haired Ganymede for his beauty. He was to live among the deathless gods, honored by all of them, and draw red nectar from a golden bowl in the house of Zeus. His father Tros did not know where the heaven-sent whirlwind had taken his son, and mourned him without end.

Zeus pitied Tros and gave him high-stepping horses, the kind that carry the immortals, as recompense for his son. At Zeus's command, Hermes, the slayer of Argus, told Tros that his son would be deathless and unageing, like the gods. Tros stopped mourning and drove his storm-footed horses with joy. The hymn then turns to Eos and Tithonus, another Trojan taken by a god, whose immortality came without youth.

The horses outlast the story. In Iliad Book 5, Diomedes tells Sthenelus to seize the horses of Aeneas, because they come from the stock Zeus gave Tros as recompense for Ganymede, the best horses under the dawn and the sun. Anchises had secretly put his mares to that stock without the knowledge of Laomedon, and gave two of the foals to Aeneas.

Later accounts give the abduction to an eagle, and they do not agree on who the eagle was. A papyrus fragment of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women says an eagle caught up Ganymede for Zeus. Apollodorus says Zeus carried him up on an eagle and appointed him cupbearer of the gods in heaven. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Zeus turns himself into the eagle, the one bird able to bear his thunderbolts, and snatches the Trojan boy himself.

Virgil gives the scene a place. In Aeneid Book 5, Aeneas awards a cloak woven with the story. Young Ganymede chases deer with a javelin through the forests of Mount Ida, until the armor-bearing eagle of Jupiter swoops down and carries him off in its talons. His aged guardians stretch their hands to the sky in vain, and his hounds bark at the air.

Homer and the Hymn speak of beauty and service. Other writers make Zeus a lover. Ovid says the king of the gods once burned with love for Ganymede. Pindar's first Olympian Ode sets him beside Pelops, whom Poseidon, overcome with desire, carried to the house of Zeus, where Ganymede later came to perform the same service. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates names the stream of desire after Zeus's love for Ganymede. The Athenian speaker in Plato's Laws says everyone accuses the Cretans of inventing the Ganymede story to excuse their own practice.

Hera's resentment belongs mostly to the Roman poets. Virgil counts the honors paid to the stolen Ganymede among the grievances that feed Juno's anger at the Trojans. Ovid ends his version by saying that Ganymede still mixes the cups and serves nectar to Jupiter, against Juno's will.

Not every source makes Tros his father. In Euripides's Trojan Women, the chorus calls Ganymede the son of Laomedon, filling Zeus's cups while his homeland burns in the Trojan War. A fragment of the Little Iliad, quoted by an ancient commentator on that passage, has Zeus give Laomedon a golden vine made by Hephaestus as the price for Ganymede. Apollodorus keeps Tros as the father but puts the divine mares in Laomedon's hands. Laomedon promised them to Heracles for saving his daughter Hesione, then refused to pay.

Ganymede's name reached the night sky twice. The Astronomica attributed to Hyginus reports that many people identified the constellation Aquarius, the water-pourer, with him. In January 1610, Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter. Simon Marius, following a suggestion from Johannes Kepler, named them after the god's loves, and described Ganymede as the son of Tros carried to heaven by Jupiter in the form of an eagle. Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system.