Hylas

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Hylas is a youth of Greek myth, the beloved companion and squire of Heracles, remembered chiefly for the manner of his vanishing: sent to fetch water during the voyage of the Argo, he was pulled down into a spring by the nymphs who desired him and never seen again. The episode is brief, but it left a long mark on later poetry.

In the standard account he is the son of Theiodamas, a king of the Dryopes whom Heracles killed in a quarrel; the hero then took the boy and raised him, and the two were inseparable. When Heracles joined the expedition for the Golden Fleece, Hylas went with him. The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, composed in third-century Alexandria, gives the fullest version: putting in on the Mysian coast, the crew scattered to make camp, and Hylas went off with a pitcher to find fresh water. He came to a spring where the naiads were dancing. One of them, seeing his beauty by the light of the rising moon, caught him by the arm as he dipped the vessel and drew him under. Heracles, hearing a faint cry, searched the woods through the night and into the day; the Argo, with a fair wind, sailed without him. So Heracles was separated from the voyage at Mysia — a detail the poem uses to explain why the greatest of heroes is absent from the rest of the quest.

The story was a favourite of the Hellenistic poets, who returned to it for its combination of tenderness and loss. Theocritus made it the subject of an entire idyll, framing it as a lesson that even a god’s son like Heracles knows what it is to love and to be bereft; the Roman poets Propertius and Valerius Flaccus took it up in turn. The repeated calling of the name — Heracles crying “Hylas” across the water, the cry coming back thin and far off — became one of antiquity’s recognised images of search and grief. Ancient sources report that the people of the region kept a yearly rite in which they roamed the hills calling for the vanished boy, a local cult of which the literary scenes may be an echo.

Hylas belongs to the wider Greek pattern of the beautiful young man taken by a divine or elemental power and held outside the human world. Readers from antiquity onward have set him beside figures such as Ganymede, carried off by the eagle of Zeus, and modern criticism has often read the episode in those terms. What the surviving texts state is narrower and simpler: a boy went to a spring, the water wanted him, and the calling went unanswered.

→ Related: Philoctetes · Eurydice · Aristaeus