Ganymedes, by Robert Graves, Excerpt from "The Greek Myths"

GANYMEDES

by Robert Graves

IN HIS OFFICE at the Terran Import Bureau of Standards, the tall man gathered up the morning's memos from their wire basket, and, seating himself at his desk, arranged them for reading. He put on his iris lenses, lit a cigarette.

"Good morning," the first memo said in its tinny, chattery voice, as Wiseman ran his thumb along the line of pasted tape. Staring off through the open window at the parking lot, he listened to it idly. "Say look, what's wrong with you people down there? We sent that lot of -- a pause as the speaker, the sales manager of a chain of New York department stores, found his records -- "those Ganymedean toys. You realize we have to get them approved in time for the autumn buying plan, so we can get them stocked for Christmas." Grumbling, the sales manager concluded, "War games are going to be an important item again this year. We intend to buy big."

Wiseman ran his thumb down to the speaker's name and title. "Joe Hauck," the memo-voice chattered. "Appeley's Children's." To himself, Wiseman said, "Ah." He put down the memo, got a blank and prepared to reply. And then he said, half-aloud, "Yes, what about that lot of Ganymedean toys?"

It seemed like a long time that the testing labs had been on them. At least two weeks.

Of course, any Ganymedean products got special attention these days; the Moons had, during the last year, gotten beyond their usual state of economic greed and had begun -- according to intelligence circles -- mulling overt military action against competitive interests, of which the Inner Three planets could be called the foremost element. But so far nothing had shown up. Exports remained of adequate quality, with no special jokers, no toxic paint to be licked off, no capsules of bacteria.

And yet ...

Any group of people as inventive as the Ganymedeans could be expected to show creativity in whatever field they entered. Subversion would be tackled like any other venture -- with imagination and a flair for wit.

Excerpt from "The Greek Myths"

Ganymedes, the son of King Tros who gave his name to Troy, was the most beautiful youth alive and therefore chosen by the gods to be Zeus’s cup bearer. It is said that Zeus, desiring Ganymedes also as his bedfellow, disguised himself in eagle’s feathers and abducted him from the Trojan plain.

Afterwards, on Zeus’s behalf, Hermes presented Tros with a golden vine, the work of Hephaestus, and two fine horses, in compensation for his loss, assuring him at the same time that Ganymedes had become immortal, exempt from the miseries of old age, and was now smiling, golden bowl in hand, as he dispensed bright nectar to the Father of Heaven.

Some say that Eos had first abducted Ganymedes to be her paramour, and that Zeus took him from her. Be that as it may, Hera certainly deplored the insult to herself, and to her daughter, Hebe, until then the cup bearer of the gods; but she succeeded only in vexing Zeus, who set Ganymedes’s image among the stars as Aquarius, the water-carrier.

Ganymedes’s task as wine pourer to all the gods—not merely Zeus in early accounts—and the two horses, given to King Tros as compensation for his death, suggest the misreading of an icon which showed the new king preparing for his sacred marriage. Ganymedes’s bowl will have contained a libation, poured to the ghost of his royal predecessor; and the officiating priest in the picture, to whom he is making a token resistance, has apparently been misread as amorous Zeus. Similarly, the waiting bride has been misread as Eos by a mythographer who recalled Eos’s abduction of Tithonus, son of Laomedon—because Laomedon is also said, by Euripides to have been Ganymedes father. This icon would equally illustrate Peleus’s marriage to Thetis, which the gods viewed from their twelve thrones; the two horses were ritual instruments of his rebirth as King, after a mock death. The eagle’s alleged abduction of Ganymedes is explained by a Caeretan black-figured vase; an eagle darting at the thighs of a newly enthroned king named Zeus typifies the divine power conferred upon him—his ka, or other self—just as a solar hawk descended on the Pharoahs at their coronation. Yet the tradition of Ganymedes youth suggests that the king shown in the icon was the royal surrogate, or interrex, ruling only for a single day: like the Phaethon, Zagreus, Chrysippus, and the rest. Zeus’s eagle may therefore be said not only to have enroyalled him, but to have snatched him up to Olympus.

A royal ascent to Heaven on eagle-back, or in the form of an eagle, is a widespread religious fancy. Aristophanes caricatures it in Peace by sending his hero up on the back of a dung-beetle. The soul of the Celtic hero Lugh—Llew Llaw in the Mabinogion—flew up to Heaven as an eagle when the tanist killed him at midsummer. Etana, the Babylonian hero, after his sacred marriage at Kish, rode on eagle-back towards Ishtar’s heavenly courts, but fell into the sea and was drowned. Etana’s death, by the way, was not the usual end-of-the-year sacrifice, as in the case of Icarus, but a punishment for the bad crops which had characterized his reign—he was flying to discover a magical herb of fertility. His story is woven into an account of the continuous struggle between Eagle and Serpent—waxing and waning year, King and Tanist—and as in the myth of Llew Llaw, the Eagle, reduced to his last gasp at the winter solstice, has its life and strength magically renewed. Thus we find in Psalm ciii, 5: “Thy youth is renewed, as the eagle’s.’

The Zeus-Ganymedes myth gained immense popularity in Greece and Rome because it afforded religious justification for grown man’s passionate love of a boy. Hitherto, sodomy had been tolerated only as an extreme form of goddess worship: Cybele’s male devotees tried to achieve ecstatic unity with her by emasculating themselves and dressing like women. Thus, a sodomistic priesthood was a recognized institution in the Great Goddess’s temples at Tyrre, Joppa, Hierapolis, and at Jerusalem until just before the Exile. But this new passion, for the introduction of which Thamyris has been given the credit by Apollodorus, emphasized the victory of patriarchy over matriarchy. It turned Greek philosophy into an intellectual game that men could play without the assistance of women, now that they had found a new field of homosexual romance. Plato exploited this to the full, and used the myths of Ganymedes to justify his own sentimental feelings towards his pupils; though elsewhere he denounced sodomy as against nature, and called the myth of Zeus’s indulgence in it ‘a wicked Cretan invention.’ (Here he has the support of Stephanus and Byzantium, who says that King Minos of Crete carried off Ganymedes to be his bedfellow, ‘having received the laws from Zeus.’) With the spread of Platonic philosophy the hitherto intellectually dominant Greek woman degenerated into an unpaid worker and breeder of children wherever Zeus and Apollo were the ruling gods.

Ganymede's name refers, properly, to the joyful stirring of his own desire at the prospect of marriage, not to that of Zeus when refreshed by nectar from his bedfellow’s hand; but becoming “catamitus” in Latin, it has given English the word ‘catamite’, meaning the passive object of male homosexual lust.

The constellation Aquarius, identified with Ganymedes, was originally the Egyptian god, presiding over the source of the Nile, who poured water, not wine, from a flagon; but the Greeks took little interest in the Nile.

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