History

By Patricia Nell Warren
Outsports.com 

On a summer day in August 2008, the world’s best discus throwers will assemble in Beijing.  Time and again, they will uncork that powerful spin to build up centrifugal force, so they can shoot the discus off their index or middle finger.  The discus will go whizzing away on a high arc, hopefully getting some loft from a light breeze, spinning with no wobble.  Throwing technique has changed over the centuries.  So has the discus itself – today it’s made from high-impact plastic side plates, often with a stainless-steel rim.  Yet early practitioners of this sport, who lived in Iron Age Greece, would recognize it easily.   

Indeed, the most notable throw in history happened on a summer day 3,000 years ago, to a Spartan kid named Hyacinth.   

There’s a myth about this day -- the myth of Hyacinth and how the god Apollo loved him.  But, as many historians admit, the core of myth is real history.  Ancient historians can help us reconstruct who the real Hyacinth might have been.  It’s yet another story that shows how gay people have influenced sports since the earliest times. 

Prince of Sparta

Hyacinth’s home town was a sprawling village in Greece’s southern peninsula, the Peloponnese. Located five miles southwest of the city of Sparta, Amyclae’s mud-brick marketplace and homes commanded a fertile plain ringed by mountains.  Its slaves tended livestock, olive trees and grain crops along the nearby Eurotas River.  Its temple of Apollo was a humble brick affair with tree-trunk pillars – nothing like the marble wonders that Greek engineering would later create.  On the open-air altar, smoke drifted from ashes where bull carcasses had burned in sacrifice to Apollo. 

That summer day around 1100 BCE, Amyclae’s unmarried aristocrat males may have been getting ready for the July festival of Apollo.  This annual affair honored the chief deity and patron of everything important to Spartans -- education, soldiering, medicine, law, government, sports.  The boys were excited about competing in the festival war-dancing, war songs and games.  But today was just a practice day, in a public space dedicated to sports near Apollo’s temple.  As usual, the noisy troop of young guys stripped, slathered some olive oil on their bodies and ran out to compete naked.  They ranged in age from pre-teen to 20-something.  All wore their long hair twisted into a knot on the top of their heads, ready for action.  

On other days, they might have jumped into boxing, running, archery, equestrian drills.  But today the Zephyr, a western breeze, was blowing, so it was a good day for discus.  Maybe some of the boys groaned – throwing was hard to learn, and they struggled with it. 

Their diskos was a thin metal plate, 10 or 12 inches wide, made of hand-cast iron or lead.  Like a Ninja throwing star, it could be hurled with deadly accuracy to brain an enemy or game animal.  But the discus also made a great training game -- it built concentration, balance and control.  While instructors got out the clanking metal rounds, King Amyclas and some of the temple priests gathered to watch. 

All eyes were on the king’s oldest son, Prince Hyacinth, among the older males.  He was electrifyingly good-looking.  In fact, Hyacinth had everything – athletic talent, brains, guts, heart and charm, the ancient schoolboy overachiever who was the pet of the whole temple.  The old folks doted on him.  The little boys looked up to him.   

Indeed, a great poet named Thamyris, who sometimes visited from nearby Thrace, was known to be madly in love with Hyacinth.  Thamyris was famous for performances of his poetry, which he accompanied by playing his lyre. He may have yearned to be Hyacinth’s erastes or “inspirer,” an older aristocrat who traditionally was given mentorship of a youth.  Most likely, though, Hyacinth had picked a local warrior or sports champion to be his teacher, leaving the foreign poet to nurse his frustrated love.     

In short, Hyacinth was his father’s pride and joy, future king of the House of Sparta. 

A Different Breed of Greek 

Only four generations before, around 1200 BCE, the ancestors of Hyacinth’s father had invaded this region from the north.  They called themselves Dorians, after their leader-king Dorius.   

The eastern Mediterranean had slowly recovered from a supervolcano explosion at the island of Thera (Santorini).  The blast and its earthquakes and tidal waves had wiped out civilizations and human populations wherever they struck.  Afterwards a long period of volcanic dust in the stratosphere, feeble sunlight, hard winters, crop failures, famine and plague had sent desperate survivors migrating and fighting each other over better places to live.  Arriving on that rich plain where the story takes place, the Dorians found settlers from the great inland city of Mycenae just 75 miles away.   

It was a time when only the toughest, best-organized tribe would make a mark on history.   

The Dorians had the right stuff: love of war, a ruling military caste, frugal lifestyle, and organized training for the young that made them incredibly tough.  Indeed, their god Apollo was a patron of education.  They were taller and lighter-skinned than other Greek tribes, with a culture and dialect that set them apart.  The men wore long hair, and the women were freer than most.  For weapons they favored that new stuff, iron – use of bronze had dwindled.  Austere as they were, the Dorians did love beauty – elegant pottery, red cloaks, and music. Their warriors marched into battle with flutes and lyres instead of blaring trumpets.  Most of all, they adored beautiful bodies.  Both men and women stripped for sports, and rubbed themselves with olive oil to highlight their muscles, so they could enjoy looking at each other and be viewed as living art.    

According to some historians, the Dorians brought man-to-man love, which spread to most of Greece.  Some think that widespread homosexuality sprang up after the catastrophe, along with late marriage, to ensure that the birth rate didn’t outstrip sparse resources.  The Spartan system of man-boy mentoring also ensured a close-knit army.  Many Greek males lived in this mercurial bisexuality.  But then, as today, the practice was sometimes controversial.  Many disapproved of anal sex, believing that it feminized a man. According to most ancient Greek historians, in Sparta these mentoring relationships were usually chaste ones -- the Spartans admired restraint, especially in their young men.  Indeed Apollo was the embodiment of “moderation and balance in all things.”  But mentoring was clearly charged with controlled eroticism.  Everywhere in Greece, adults sometimes abused this privilege, and might be punished for it.   

Right away the Dorians turned those local Myceneans into second-class citizens or slaves.  They occupied the region’s chief city, which they re-named Sparta.  

King Amyclas extended Dorian rule to this suburb, which was now named Amyclae, after himself.  He and his wife Diomede had several children.  As a priest-king, he held both the political and spiritual life of that city in his hand.  The local Myceneans had prayed for better crops at a local shrine to their own flower and vegetation god, Hyacinth.  Amyclas now ordered that Apollo worship reign supreme in Amyclae.  But he wanted to get along with his powerful neighbor, Mycenae, so he sent a friendly message by naming his firstborn son after the neighbor’s flower god, Hyacinth. 

When that fateful summer day dawned, the town was a happy place.   

So some adult – probably Hyacinth’s inspirer/instructor -- spun a discus into the air with an extra-powerful throw.  Maybe he was showing off, or trying to demonstrate a fine point.  The lethal round of metal hissed away across the dusty field of competition, towards the target.   

Untimely Monument 

Prince Hyacinth went running to recover the discus. His bare legs were a blur, his dark-blond curly hair coming loose from its knot.  Running west into the wind, the young man might have gotten the sun in his eyes, so he didn’t see that he was closing dangerously on the flying weapon. 

When the discus hit the ground, it rebounded off a rock. The sharp edge slammed Hyacinth right in the face.  As the young man collapsed in the dust, a shout of horror went up from the watchers.   

With his head broken and bleeding, Hyacinth was carried into the cool interior of Apollo’s temple.  There, the priests used all their knowledge of medicine to try and save him. But he died in everyone’s arms.

The whole Spartan kingdom went wild with grief -- people wailed and struck their foreheads as a sign of mourning.  The discus teacher surely felt devastated.  As for Amyclas and Diomede, their hopes were shattered that this promising young man would be king.  They gave Hyacinth a hero’s burial in a tomb near the temple. 

Ancient times looked at heroes differently than we do.  A Greek hero was not necessarily someone who risked his (or her) life for others.  He was usually a prominent deceased who had a prominent tomb and a cult dedicated to his memory.  Though his spirit now lived in the land of the dead, he “lived” anew on Earth as long as he was remembered.  Says Harvard scholar George Nagy: "The worship of heroes was very much like ancestor worship, including [that of] the Japanese.  There were literally thousands of hero-cults throughout the locales of the ancient Greek-speaking world.”

When Thamyris heard the news, he surely wept, then grabbed his lyre and composed a heartbroken poem.  Greek historian Apollodorus, writing in the 2nd century before Christ, would credit Thamyris as “ the first man to become enamored of males.”   

But in this case the routine hero thing wasn’t enough.  Amyclas and Apollo’s priests agreed that the July ceremony of Apollo would be renamed the Hyacinthia and celebrated in the young man’s memory.  At some point, the House of Sparta hired famous architects to build a more appropriate monument.  The old mud-brick temple vanished, replaced by a walled stone sanctuary with state-of-the-art engineering and stately pillars in the simple Dorian style.  Within it, a giant bronze statue of Apollo, towering 13 meters high, sat amidst the drifting smoke of sacrifice, on a sculptured marble throne enclosing Hyacinth’s tomb.  The ongoing effort and expense suggests that Hyacinth had been an extraordinary young person whose death left a large gap in their world.  

When Amyclas finally died, the next son, Argylas, succeeded him.   

With time, Amyclae emerged as the spiritual heartland of the Spartan state, and the Hyacinthia its second most important ceremony.  Spartans even broke off their war campaigns and declared a temporary truce so they could go home and celebrate Hyacinth’s “resurrection” in people’s hearts, plus all the games and feasting that made it fun.   

A number of centuries later, in the 2nd century after Christ, when famed Greek traveler and geographer Pausanius visited Amyclae, that temple was still standing, and the Hyacinthia was still going strong.  A careful reporter, Pausanius wrote:  "The pedestal of the statue is fashioned into the shape of an altar and they say that Hyacinth is buried in it….They devote offerings to Hyacinth as to a hero, into this altar through a bronze door, which is to the left of the altar.”  

On the altar, according to Pausanias, a sculpture portrayed the mortal Hyacinth with an interesting detail -- a beard, symbol of adult wisdom.  The great traveler noted that two traditions about Hyacinth were now around.  He said: “This statue of Hyacinthus represents him as bearded, but Nicias, son of Nicomedes, has painted him in the very prime of youthful beauty, hinting at the love of Apollo for Hyacinthus of which legend tells.”   

The beard suggested that Hyacinth was no boy, but a young adult on the cusp of marriage age when he was killed.  

Shaded by Myth  

Pausanias was right -- as Hyacinth’s story moved through the centuries, it was changing.  Different historians recorded bits and pieces of it.  Since they lived in a time when communications and record-keeping were not high-tech, they often got things garbled. 

Sparta changed less, stubbornly conservative.  While other Greek city-states became republics, Sparta clung to its rule by armored aristocrats.  While knowledge grew in the rest of Greece, with its greatest minds making scientific discoveries that led the Western world, Spartans stayed stuck in their old military social engineering.  In 776 BCE, when the Olympic Games were launched, Sparta did excel in the games – even though they were often jeered as “effeminate” because of their long hair and their colorful sexual reputation.  Their training gave them the edge.  For nearly two centuries, 46 of the 81 victors were Spartans.   

Then, in 640 BCE, the Spartans put themselves under their strictest military home rule.  Life got bleaker, more controlled.  Males got harsher training.  Youths had to show their readiness for manhood by enduring a brutal flogging.  Constant war undercut their economy.  Spartans stopped winning at the Olympics.  By the 5th century, Sparta’s heroic efforts to help the other Greek city-states stop the Persian invasion had left its people exhausted. 

In 146 BCE, when Sparta was conquered by Rome, little remained of its old Doric glory.  The broadminded Romans allowed the old local cults to continue.  Roman poet Ovid wrote his own long account of Hyacinth’s death.    

By now it was hard to recognize that original story of a real-life teenage discus thrower.    

Myth often shades what we call “history.” For instance, cultures like to sanitize or idealize their forebears.  In the U.S., certain historians fabricated a story about George Washington (the one where he couldn’t lie about cutting down the cherry tree) because they wanted to emphasize the virtues of our first President.  Many cultures also like to see their greatest mortals become divine -- as in the 3^rd century CE, when Christian church authorities decided to start teaching that Jesus, a human king and spiritual leader from Judea, was actually God in the flesh.   

Greek mythmakers chose to portray Hyacinth as the young unmarried youth.  The great Apollo adored him -- carried his weapons, took him hunting, taught him sports.  When the bard Thamyris fell for Hyacinth, Apollo got rid of this human rival by badmouthing him to the Muses, who blinded Thamyris and made him forget how to play the lyre.  The wind god Zephyrus loved Hyacinth too, and got jealous when the young man chose Apollo as his “inspirer.”  It was spiteful Zephyrus who made the discus ricochet on that summer day.  After Apollo wept over the accident, he made his loved one immortal.  Gathering Hyacinth’s blood from the ground, he changed it to a flower.   

In other myths, Apollo is crazy about other beauties of both genders.  There are other myths about discus fatalities – after all, it was a dangerous sport – and about blood turning into flowers.  What makes this myth stand out is the link to an actual tomb of a mortal hero located in Amyclae.  Hyacinth, son of Amyclas, had to be a real person. 

Many people today shrug off these myths, because some of them seem so preposterous, with gods and goddesses indulging in human behaviour.  But myth may have been a kind of symbolic short story, to make a historic event easy for ancient school kids to remember.  Mention of gods and goddesses may actually refer to the peoples or institutions who revered them. So the Hyacinth story is more than a tearjerker about gay jocks.  On one level, it may tell of a historic struggle among three different groups for control of Spartan youth, symbolized by Hyacinth.  If so, it was not unlike the struggle today between America’s religious right and liberal left, over whether creationism will be taught in our schools.   

As to the flower part, Pausanias wondered if it was “true history.”  For centuries, historians have argued over what species of flower this was.  It’s not the familiar potted hyacinth that we buy at Easter time!  Ovid said that the ancient hyacinth was a lily.  Today most experts think it was an iris or lily or lotus.  Why would Apollo pick a flower?  Because all over the eastern Mediterranean, a three-petaled flower was a symbol of male royalty and male erection – in Egypt, Crete, the Middle East and other places, including Mycenae.   

So when the story tells us that “the blood of Hyacinth was changed into a flower,” it might mean that the prince’s untimely death prompted his family towards a new marriage strategy.  As I learned from the ancient genealogies, the upstart House of Sparta finally expanded their sphere of influence by marrying with the royals of Mycenae – much the same way that the 19th century British royals married into other European ruling families.   

It isn’t known when the Hyacinthia was celebrated for the last time.  But two centuries after Pausanias visited Amyclae, a Christian emperor banned the Olympic Games and other pagan ceremonies. 

Today tourists can still find the village -- one of the oldest inhabited sites in Greece. Around 500 rural folk tend their orange groves, and sell orange juice into the EU market.  Outside the town, an ancient hill of rubble can be seen, with a church standing on it.  Centuries of earthquakes, war and pillage have devastated Apollo’s temple.  All that’s left is a few weathered steps, and tumbled blocks.  The tomb itself has yet to be found.      

Gone But Not Forgotten 

After the Olympics were banned, the knowledge of how to throw the discus was lost.   

But the Hyacinth story stayed in living memory -- one of countless pagan myths that were collected in manuscripts by later writers.  Quietly they were preserved through centuries of church persecution till the Renaissance, when they could be openly appreciated again.  I first read the story in Bulfinch’s Outline of Mythology when I was a high-school student, and was deeply touched.  After the gay rights movement started, loving mention of Hyacinth and Apollo proliferated through gay studies courses and gay history websites. 

In 1896, when the Olympics came back in a modern format, most of the ancient sports were revived.  These included the discus throw, as an individual event and part of the modern decathlon.  The challenge was to reconstruct how the ancients did it.  Today’s throw champions and throw coaches sometimes puzzle over the odd postures in ancient sculptures of athletes – the many copies of Myron’s famed Discobolus, for instance – and they’re sure that they have figured out a better way to throw that Iron Age thing.   

Even today, throwers struggle for many years to improve technique -- it’s not a sport where teen kids go out and beat everybody.  Al Oerter, an all-time great, won four gold medals, and threw his personal best of 227’ 10-12” at age 43. The effort to snap the shoulder-pelvis axis for centrifugal force can do serious injury. A Salt Lake City sportswriter recently commented in Deseret News, “The passion to throw the discus…can define and consume lives. Men have spent half their lives trying to achieve perfection in the art of throwing.” 

Outsports.com has its list of out throwers.  Right now women outnumber men 2-1.  As I write this, there’s Mary Margaret Towey, 2002 national runner-up in discus for U.S. women’s masters track.  In Australia, Lisa-Marie Vizaniari finished eighth in women’s discus at the 2000 Olympics, thanks to coaching by her partner Michelle Reeves.  This is appropriate – Spartan women threw the discus too.  But that’s another story.  As for men, Tom Waddell, founder of the Gay Games, placed sixth in the decathlon during the 1968 Olympics. 

Why does the story of that tragic discus throw still make such a long arc after three thousand years?   

Perhaps it’s because Hyacinth – whether he really lived or not -- can symbolize every exceptional young person who never got to fulfill the promise.  Perhaps it’s because he appeals so deeply to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people whose promise dies in the closet if they don’t come out.  Perhaps it’s because of the terrible burden that the beautiful ones are made to carry – not just the burden of talent, but the burden of that beauty.  Sex appeal doesn’t win medals, but it turns the beauties into a target for fan obsessions.   

Ancient historians give no clue about how Hyacinth might have felt.  We don’t know whether he was attracted to the people who loved him, or whether he wished they would leave him the hell alone.  In the myth, we see Apollo’s passion for him, but Hyacinth shows the classic restraint. 

But the celebrated sculpture of Apollo Belvedere gives a fleeting glimpse of what he might have been like.   Rediscovered in the 15^th century, it’s a marble Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze original.  The work is a marvel of warm and expressive realism.  The artist gives us that tall Dorian athlete.  He could be Hyacinth getting ready for action on that summer day -- his long curly hair is twisted high into a Spartan knot.  Except for sandals and a short cloak and the strap of a quiver around his torso, he is nude.   Though the chin lacks a beard, the body is that of an adult young male. 

He’s dignified and god-like, yet his eyes wear a wistful, eager, human expression.  He has no idea that death, and the end of his dreams, is near.  Nor does he know that his moment in the game will live forever. 

Further reading: 

Map of ancient Greece 

Greek mythology and male love  

Ruins of Amyklae today

Patricia Nell Warren wrote the 1974 bestselling novel The Front Runner about an Olympic athlete.  She also writes articles and commentary for many magazines.  Her webpage is at patricianellwarren@aol.com.  Email her at patriciawarren@aol.com.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Patricia Nell Warren.  All rights reserved.

July 11, 2007