Kyparissus

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Kyparissos (disambiguation) .

Kyparissos weeps for the dead deer in a depiction by the Italian artist Jacopo Vignali ( Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg ).

Kyparissos (Greek: Κυπάρισσος; Latin: Cyparissus) from Keos is a figure in Greek mythology . He is a son of Telephos and a lover of Apollo .

The young man becomes close friends with a wild deer. He looked after the animal for a long time, so that it was even offered to him as a mount. When he accidentally kills it with his hunting spear while it sleeps in the undergrowth, he asks the gods to free him from his suffering, and they turn him into a cypress (Latin: cupressus) considered a mourning tree . His tears continue to flow as tree resin after his transformation .

According to another myth from the Orient, this happened when Kyparissus, a Cretan youth, fled to the Orontes River in Syria from the pursuit of Apollo or Zephyr .

See also

• Cyparissus (Cyparis) - projectionist of short stature in the novel “ The Last World ” by the Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr .
• cypress

Remarks

1. ↑ Nonnos , Dionysiaka 11,364
2. ↑ Ovid , Metamorphoses 10,130
3. ↑ Ovid, Metamorphoses 10,106
4. ↑ Ovid, Metamorphoses 10, 106-142

literature

• The New Pauly Encyclopedia of Antiquity , ed. by H. Cancik, H. Schneider, Metzler, Weimar and Stuttgart Vol. 6 1999 ISBN 3-476-01476-2 .
• Heinrich Wilhelm Stoll : Kyparissos 2 . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 2.1, Leipzig 1894, Col. 1711 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

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