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The myth of Hyacinthus, best known in Sparta, also involves the premature death of
a handsome youth. In Ovid’s version, Apollo was Hyacinthus’s lover, in keeping with the
Greek— and particularly the Spartan— practice of pederasty, whereby an older male served
as the lover and mentor of an adolescent boy. One day Apollo and Hyacinthus were tak-
ing turns throwing the discus. Hyacinthus tried to chase and catch the discus thrown by
Apollo, but the object glanced off a rock and struck the boy in the face, killing him. The
Spartan festival Hyacinthia was held every summer to commemorate his death and cel-
ebrate his rebirth as the flower Hyacinth. Frazer observed that because Hyacinth’s lover was
a male, he didn’t fit into the mold of an agricultural deity symbolizing fertility. Therefore,
he hypothesized that the original pre- Greek myth involved a heterosexual relationship
between Hyacinth and a goddess and that the Greeks had altered it to a pederastic relation-
ship. However, the Greeks themselves knew the myth as Ovid described it. As Apollo’s
young lover, Hyacinthus’s gender is ambiguous and effeminate. The fact that he was killed
by his own ineptness in catching a discus also makes his death, like the death of Adonis,
unmanly and unheroic. Thus, his transformation into a flower is consistent with his lack of
masculinity. Ovid compares his death to the picking of a flower:As in a garden, if one breaks a flower,
crisp violet, or poppy, or straight lily
erect with yellow stamens pointing high,
the flower wilts, head toppled into earth.^31By comparing Hyacinthus’s death to the death of a plucked garden flower, Ovid empha-
sizes his delicate, fragile beauty. While it is true that Ovid does mention “yellow stamens
pointing high,” which, if he were writing in the late eighteenth century, one might interpret
as a sexual reference, there is no evidence that the sexual function of stamens was known in
Ovid’s time. The “pointing” stamens in Ovid’s metaphor function to illustrate the turgor
pressure of a fresh, living flower as opposed to a plucked, wilted one.Dionysus/ Bacchus: Wine and Ecstasy
The one male vegetation deity who clearly represents sexuality in its frankly phallic form
is Dionysus, whom the Romans referred to as Bacchus. Dionysus is the god of wine and
drama, and he was also associated with a transcendent state. Unlike Adonis and the
other youthful vegetation gods who died young, Dionysus attained adulthood after a life
of travel and adventure in which he survived numerous close calls with death. According
to the Theban myth, his mother was a mortal, Princess Semele of Thebes, and his father
was Zeus. When Semele was seven months pregnant with Dionysus, Hera, jealous of
Zeus’s mistress, told her that Zeus was not the true father. Semele then demanded that
Zeus show himself to prove he was the father. Knowing that the sight of him would
be lethal to a mortal, he resisted at first, but finally yielded to her persistent demands.
As expected, when he materialized before her arrayed in lightning bolts, Semele was
instantly incinerated. Zeus somehow managed to save the fetus, however, sewing him
into a slit in his thigh. Two months later, Dionysus was born and was thenceforth
known as the “Twice- Born.”