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This essay examines surviving traces of the Zeus and Ganymede myth and identifies two interwoven discourses on male love in antiquity: one, a tradition integral to a Cretan initiatory rite and its didactic nature evidenced by an analogous and opposite Boeotian cautionary myth; the other, a nucleus of polemic and shifting male love constructions from Minoan times through Late Antiquity. The mythic tradition is discussed as an archetypal key to identifying the ancient pedagogical and erotic functions of male love and the ancients' evolving attitudes toward such relationships. As the myth and its offshoots, which are presented here in the form of a pastiche evocative of the atmosphere of the tradition, reflect their Classical and modern echoes through Western and Oriental interpretations, a recurring male love ethic and aesthetic is seen to take shape.
Keywords: male love, pederasty, ancient Greek rites and initiations, homosexual morality, Greek mythology, Zeus and Ganymede
The boy and the eagle pictured on the cover of this journal have signified radically different things to different people over the course of time. Bertel Thorvaldsen, the sculptor of the group from which the cover piece was selected, was a northern European who chose to live much of his life in a Mediterranean clime with weather and mores more to his liking. There he sculpted a number of pieces attesting to his appreciation for the young male form. To him, the Greek couple, Zeus and Ganymede, surely signified the beauty and tenderness of male love,1, see page 118 a statement that in his time could only be made symbolically.
Although the original recountings of this myth have long been lost, by piecing together from ancient fragments2 a narrative of the love between the Olympian god and the Trojan youth, we can begin to get a sense of how else the icons of Zeus and Ganymede have been employed, and what they may have symbolized for other cultures since first the divine lovers stepped upon the stage of history.
Zeus and Ganymede
On the wide plain at the feet of Mount Ida, King Tros, Zeus' own grandson, fell for the daughter of the river god and lay in her arms. In time, she grew heavy with child and gave life to a golden-haired...