Flower Myth Series: Hyacinthus

 The Death of Hyacinthos, by Jean Broc (1801)

From:  Homer, Illiad ii.595 - 600 (c. 700 BCE); Palaephatus, On Unbelievable Tales 46. Hyacinthus (330 BCE); Apollodorus, Library 1.3.3 (140 BCE); Ovid, Metamorphoses 10. 162-219 (1CE - 8 CE); Pausanias, Description of Greece 3.1.3, 3.19.4 (160 - 176 CE)

"The festival of Hyacinthus,

That lasts throughout the tranquil night.

In a contest with Apollo

He was slain."

-The Story of Helen by Euripides 

Before launching into this story of another beautiful young man who was killed and subsequently made into a flower, it may be helpful to think about just why such myths arose.  To the ancient Greeks, the earth was a much closer entity than it is to us.  They harvested corn, they picked flowers, and it directly affected their lives; they had nothing to explain why a particular season bore a bad harvest.  So it isn't hard to reproduce their logic: we harvest corn and it nourishes our blood, so our blood may in turn nourish the corn.  This intimate connection, I think, explains their relative credulity about people turning into flowers.

Hyacinth Hyacinthus was one of Apollo's best friends.  They played together, had various sporting contests, and were generally quite buddy-buddy.  One day, they were having a discus-throwing competition, and Apollo made a terrible mistake: he threw the discus directly at Hyacinthus' head, and struck him with a mortal wound.  There was blood all over the place, and Apollo tried desperately to contain it.  His head fall back like a flower with a broken stem.

The Death of Hyacinth, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1752)

Apollo thought fast.  He knew that Hades desperately wanted to claim Hyacinthus' soul.   So he decided to make him into a beautiful flower, the hyacinth.  Apollo would gladly have traded his own life for Hyacinthus', but this was the best he could do.  As a last gesture, he inscribed the Greek letters ai, meaning "Alas," in the flower's petals.  Apollo thus memorialized his endless sorrow.

Amethyst hyacinth

Notes:

-In some version of the story, Zephyr, the West Wind, is responsible for blowing the discus into Hyacinth's head.  It was Zephyr's own love of Hyacinthus, and his jealousy of Apollo, that led him to do so. 

-Various historians claim that Hyacinthus actually become a different flower; many point to the iris.

-This myth inspired a Mozart opera, Apollo and Hyacinth.