Cyparissus

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A 19th-century sentimental homosexual idyll: Apollo, Hyacinthus and Cyparissus Making Music and Singing by Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov.

In Greek mythology, the myth set in Chios tells of Cyparissus (Greek: κυπάρισσος, "Kyparissos" Latin: cupressus, "cypress"), a young boy and son of Telephus, who was one of Apollo's pederastic lovers.^[1] Though the mythic context and the setting is Hellenic, the subject is essentially known from Hellenizing Latin literature and Pompeiian frescoes.^[2]

Pederastic myths almost invariably concern initiations into adult male life.^[3] Like many pederastic myths, this ends in death (and transfiguration) for the eromenos: Apollo gave the boy a tame deer^[4] as a companion, but Cyparissus accidentally killed it with a javelin as it lay asleep in the undergrowth. The gift of a hunter's prey is an initiatory gift in the sphere of the hunt, a supervised preparation for the manly arts of war and a testing ground for behavior (Koch-Harnack 1983). The tameness of the deer may be purely Ovidian. In a late reversal of the boy's traditional role, perhaps an interpretation applied by Ovid,^[5] Cyparissus asks Apollo to let his tears fall forever. Apollo turns the sad boy into a cypress tree, whose sap forms droplets like tears on the trunk. Cypress was one of the trees Orpheus charmed.

No Greek hero cult devoted to Cyparissus has been identified.

According to a different tradition Cyparissus was the son of Orchomenus, the brother of Minyas, and the mythical founder of Kyparissos in Phocis, which later was called Anticyra.^[6]

[edit] Notes

^ "In all these tales the beautiful boys are doubles of Apollon himself" (Kerenyi 1951:240).
^ Cedric G. Boulter and Julie L. Bentz, "Fifth-Century Attic Red Figure at Corinth" Hesperia 49.4 (October 1980, pp 295-308), who present the possibility of an identification of Cyparissus on a fragment of a Corinthian pot, No. 36, p. 306. The frescoes in the Pompeiian Fourth Style are duscussed by Andreas Rumpf, "Kyparissos", JDAI 63/64 (1948-49), pp 83-90.
^ Bernard Sergent, Homosexualité dans la mythologie grecque, 1984 (Chapter 2), with an introduction by Georges Dumézil, whose lead Sergent follows.
^ Gifts of animals from the erastes are discussed, as they appear in Attic vase-painting, by Gundel Koch-Harnack, in Knabenliebe und Tiergeschenke: Ihre bedeutung im päderastischen Erziehungssystem Athens, (Berlin 1983).
^ The Cyparissus myth is related in Metamorphoses x.106ff.
^ Stephanus of Byzantium, s.v. «Aπολλωνία» and «Κυπάρισσος». Real Enzyclopädie VIII, col. 51, s.v. «Kyparissos» [Hirschfeld].