Apollo, who loved numerous female nymphs and mortal women also loved and seduced certain beautiful youths, chiefest among whom was Hyakinthos. He was a young Spartan prince who had already been wooed by the poet Thamyris. He, however, proved no rival to Apollo.

But catastrophe awaited...Zephyr, The West Wind, had also fallen in love with Hyakinthos and he was wildly jealous of Apollo. Hyakinthos gave his love only to Apollo and so, enraged, Zephyr decided that if he could not have the youth, — then no one else would have him.

One day, while Apollo was teaching the prince how to hurl the discus, Zephyr caught it in mid-air and hurled it back, crushing Hyakinthos’s skull. Apollo mourned and made the hyacinth flower bloom from the fallen drops of blood in eternal memory of the beautiful youth. A renaissance print shows Apollo cradling the dying Hyakinthos in his arms.

Top of Page

APOLLO AND CADMUS

Although Cadmus was destined to marry Harmonia and have many children and grandchildren, as a young man this prince of Phoenicia had an affair with the sun god. It happened thus...

Zeus, in the form of a bull, kidnapped and ravished Europa, Cadmus’s sister. (The rape of Europa was a favorite subject for artists of the past.) Their father, King Aegnor, commanded Cadmus to retrieve his sister but it was impossible to go up against Zeus.

In desperation Cadmus consulted the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi for advice and the god took more than a passing interest in giving the handsome young prince a hand.

Apollo told Cadmus he couldn’t go home again but to abide with him for a time. Finally, after many intimate encounters, Apollo told him to go to a certain foreign place, there to follow a cow, and wherever she stopped, there to found a city. It was thus that Cadmus became the founder of Thebes.

The story of Apollo and Cadmus has more that a hint of sexual coercion in it; — not of the rape and ravishment kind so frequent in Greek mythology, but of the tit-for-tat, I’ll do this for you if you’ll do that for me variety. Further, it embodies the proposition that — to use a modern term — an essentially “straight” man can have a homosexual relationship from which emanates a great and wonderful good.
 

Top of Page