Hylas  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

In classical mythology, Hylas (Ὕλας) was a youth who served as Heracles' (Roman Hercules) companion and servant. His abduction by water nymphs was a theme of ancient art, and has been an enduring subject for Western art in the classical tradition.

Cultural references

The story of Hylas and the nymphs is alluded to in Book 3 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Canto XII, Stanza 7:

Or that same daintie lad, which was so deare
To great Alcides, that when as he dyde
He wailed womanlike with many a teare,
And every wood, and every valley wyde
He fild with Hylas name; the Nymphes eke "Hylas" cryde.

Hylas is also mentioned in Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II: "Not Hylas was more mourned for of Hercules / Than thou hast been of me since thy exile" (Act I, Scene I, line 142-3), and in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11. "...and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas."

"Hylas" is the name of one of the two characters in George Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. He represents the materialist position against which Berkeley (through Philonous) argues. In this context, the name is derived from ὕλη, the classical Greek word for "matter." Stanisław Lem adopted these characters in his 1957 non-fiction, philosophical book, Dialogi (Dialogues).

In the 1963 film, Jason and the Argonauts, Hylas (played by Scottish actor John Cairney) is depicted as an intelligent and witty character who serves a role as the "sidekick" of Hercules. In the film he is not abducted by water nymphs, but instead crushed under the body of the stricken Talos when he foolishly tried to retrieve a goddess' gold brooch pin dropped by Hercules. Hercules then leaves the Argonauts afterwards to search for his friend in vain.

In the third sentence of Eric Linklater's 1929 novel, Poet's Pub, Hylas is mentioned as a character: "The hunted poet Hylas stood up, weak as water because of the rape he had eluded, and vanished before his knees could knock again."

Thomas Azier's debut album is named Hylas. Its opening track of the same name retells Hylas' encounter with the nymphs.

See also

• List of cultural references in The Picture of Dorian Gray
• LGBT themes in classical mythology
• Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) by George Berkeley
• Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse