Mine is, naturally, a bed of godly proportions. This is despite the fact that I have not grown a millimeter since I was a fleshy thing of sixteen. My left foot, caught in a silk whirlpool. Oil stains, some still wet. I try to think of nothing—there is no better aid for retention than the very attempt to forget. The centuries have taught me that bad memories are like thunder clouds. Nothing more to do than close your eyes and wait for the wind to sweep them away. 

• • •

Summer 2018. I sat at my computer, ready to turn an extremely minor character in the Greek mythological canon into a star. No time to waste. I had discovered him before the others, sandwiched between verses of epic poetry and hiding deep within the hyperlink webs of Theoi.com. A young Trojan prince of uncanny beauty, kidnapped by a sharp-taloned Zeus, made immortal against his will to be his personal cupbearer for eternity. There was a lot, aesthetically, to latch onto: the violent, ascension-like episode, the drama of bestowed-upon immortality, the idea of an attractive young man. Though Ganymede’s ordeal struck me as nothing short of horrific, a crasser part of me jumped at the opportunity: a gritty retelling, I thought, practically wrote itself. But to pen the definitive retelling of Ganymede’s story, I would have to write something quite spectacular. Competition had never been more fierce. 

“The Golden Age of Greek Mythology Retellings” can refer to two different, overlapping things. On the personal level, it is the era of my creative life that Ganymede was the flagship project for: this was the time when, between the seventh and tenth grades, I half-wrote at least a half dozen distinct Greek mythology-inspired stories. On the macro level, it describes a real-life trend that took hold in the late 2010s and early 2020s, as the aging BookTube and up-and-coming BookTok swelled up with modern retellings of the ancient stories geared towards young adults, to the delight of chronically online teenage girls like myself. The Song of Achilles, The Silence of The Girls, Circe, The Penelopiad… and these are just some of the ones I read, to varying degrees of enjoyment.

Granted, I was undoubtedly the target audience for this renaissance. When I was around seven years old, I received the Usborne Book of Greek Myths as a Christmas present. To me, it might as well have been the Gospel. I read it so many times I memorized it, illustrations and all—the image of Jason’s Argo with its great big sail rendered in watercolor yellow amidst a sea of teal-green tongues is permanently etched into my brain. I sat my Barbies and plushies down, stood in front of my little blackboard and told them about Pandora’s box and Heracles’s tasks. 

With a seemingly infinite amount of potential stories to tell, why insist on continuing to draw from the same well? Renaissance poets imbued the popular characters with Catholic values. Playwrights in Nazi-occupied France swaddled calls for resistance in colorful, familiar narratives. The authors of the modern Golden Age focused on Greek myths to criticize the oppressive power structures they see inscribed at the core of the Western literary canon. To them, adaptation was reparative: it was a scramble to find the next scorned woman and rescue her from the unforgiving maw of history. In the few stories where he made an appearance, Ganymede was an eternal victim, a silent, shiny prop. He seemed, at first glance, a perfect subject for an adaptation in this vein. 

But I was not trying to compose an adaptation in this vein. Despite the wider movement I was witnessing, I did not feel any sort of urge to correct. I was much more compelled by the fact that, occasionally, rich, beautiful displays of humanity were able to find their way into the classical texts. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Ganymede is, for the first time, given a voice of his own. Nearing the end of the Trojan War, he becomes extremely distressed by his impotence in the face of the destruction of his homeland—which, from the near-omniscient standpoint he has on Mount Olympus, he can tell is evident. He implores that Zeus spare him from seeing Troy fall. But the god, in what could be construed as mercy or mockery, only summons a dense fog to literally obscure the carnage from Ganymede’s sight. 

I cannot fully articulate what about this scene moved me so much. I was struck by the fact that it seemed to illustrate an eternal human condition—one that even a teenage girl in the twenty-first century could very intimately recognize. I read the Aeneid hot on the heels of my own crisis of adolescence: the arbitrariness of the world had become impossible to ignore and, in the face of it, I felt completely powerless. I found a strange comfort in Ganymede’s frustration over his inability to control forces incomprehensibly greater than him, the genuine and completely irrational pain involved in accepting the apocalypse.

As my goal was to capture a feeling, I played with loose and otherwise unconventional adaptations. An extremely self-aware Ganymede befriended an equally-implausible Psyche and received secret visits from Bellerophon’s winged horse up on Olympus. A sci-fi setting saw Ganymede subjected to a different sort of forceful ascension: crippling inherited debts forced him to take a lonely, soul-crushing job as station master at the sparsely transited space station located on the constellation Aquarius. In a more politicized retelling, a Latin American Ganymede struggled against the eagle-figured embodiment of American imperialism.

But, creative as they may have been, none of these experiments satisfied me. I had been drawn in by the poetic force of Ganymede’s situation, the romanticism of a few striking images—as a result, I had declared myself above canon-compliant clarification. But, as I discovered through more research, there was more to Ganymede’s story than that. Apparently, describing Ganymede as Zeus’s cup-bearer was euphemistic—there is a shared understanding among ancient sources that their relationship was meant to read as sexual. It is extremely likely that the purpose of the Ganymede story as a piece of mythology was to give a sort of divine legitimacy to the ancient Greek institution of pederasty—the practice through which an older man would offer mentorship and social influence to a young boy in exchange for sexual favors. With this context, I had trouble reanimating the innocent curiosity that had drawn me to the Ganymede story. A stinging sensation in my chest demanded that I do something about it, no matter how stupidly symbolic. I finally came to feel, even more than I understood, the urge to correct. 

But this unexpected burst of passion came at a cost—given my age and naivete, the responsibility of definitively doing Ganymede justice wound up crushing my creative spark. No matter how much I drafted and redrafted, I remained just insecure enough about what I was doing to never show it to anyone. I now regret that. I wish I had realized that a piece of fiction need not be genre-defining to be worthwhile. Regardless of whether it ended up christening me as a modern Virgil rising above the sea of horny mythologically-inspired webcomics or not, it would have been nice to give Ganymede—and myself—the closure of a place to land.