A Trojan shepherd carried off by an eagle ended up as Aquarius in the sky
Homer called Ganymede the loveliest mortal ever born, so lovely that the gods took him from Troy to pour wine for Zeus. Later tellers made Zeus's eagle, or Zeus himself in feathers, snatch the boy from a hillside near Troy. In many versions the god finally set him among the stars as Aquarius, the water carrier.
Ganymede was a prince, son of Tros, the king from whom Troy supposedly took its name. The Iliad, composed around 750 to 700 BC, simply says the gods whisked him away for his beauty. Zeus compensated the grieving father with a pair of horses fast enough to run over water, delivered by Hermes, and Tros took comfort that his son had become immortal and held an honoured post. On Olympus Ganymede received eternal youth, and some accounts say he took over the cup from Hebe when she married Herakles.
The details grew with retelling. Some versions have him tending sheep on Mount Ida, a humble start typical of heroes' boyhoods, when the eagle swoops. Virgil gave the scene pathos, with elderly tutors reaching up in vain and hounds barking at the sky, a motif artists loved. In the Aeneid, Hera resents him as a rival for Zeus's attention, and in one comic episode from the Argonautica he sulks after Eros cheats him at knucklebones. The earliest myths carry no romance, but by the 6th century BC Theognis described the bond as erotic, while Xenophon has Socrates insist Zeus loved him for his mind.
Painters on Athenian vases in the 5th century BC showed Zeus chasing him while he runs off with a hoop and a rooster. The sculptor Leochares cast a famous bronze of Ganymede and the eagle around 350 BCE, probably echoed in a marble copy in the Vatican, and at least 16 Roman sarcophagi carry the scene.
From the Renaissance to the late Victorian era he was a leading symbol of love between men in art and poetry. Rubens and Correggio painted him, and in Shakespeare's As You Like It, from 1599, Rosalind disguises herself as a boy and borrows his name, a joke the original audience would have caught at once.
Source: Ganymede (mythology)
