Note 43 — Chapter III · CAVE DEITIES: SUBTERRANEAN TRANSLATION

The story of Hyakinthos is found in its familiar form in the poets of the Hellenistic period and their imitators, Nikander, Bion, Ovid, etc.: already Simmias and Euphorion had told it (see Welcker, Kl. Sch. i, 24 ff.; and G. Knaack, Anal. Alexandrino-romana, p. 60 ff.). It may even reach back to earlier times; the death of H. caused by Apollo’s discus-throw is mentioned by Eur., Hel. 1472 ff., though he does not speak of the love of Apollo for H. As the story was generally given, and, indeed, as it had already been implicitly told by Nikias, it had no local colouring and no importance as local legend. It was not ever even an aetiological myth for it could only account in the most general way for the melancholy character of the Hyakinthos festival and not at all for the peculiar features of its ritual. It is an erotic myth leading up to a metamorphosis, like so many others of its kind, in substance, it is true, closely related the Linos myth, etc., with which it is generally compared—and in accordance with the fashionable theory interpreted as an allegory of the spring blossom fading beneath the heat of the sun. It is, in fact, a regular mythological theme (the death through the cast of the discus occurring for example in the stories of Akrisios, Kanobos, Krokos [see Haupt, Opusc. iii, 574 f. In Philo ap. Galen, xiii, 268, read v. 13 ἠϊθέοιο, v. 15 perhaps κείνου δὴ σταθμόν]). We cannot tell how far the flower Hyakinthos had anything to do with the Amyklaian Hyakinthos (cf. Hemsterhuis, Lucian ii, p. 291 Bip.); perhaps nothing at all—there were no hyacinths used in the Hyakinthia. The similarity of the name may have suggested this addition to the metamorphosis story to the Hellenistic poets.