Hymen is supposed to attend every wedding. If he did not, then the marriage would supposedly prove disastrous, so the Greeks would run about calling his name aloud. He presided over many of the weddings in Greek mythology, for all the deities and their children. Hymen is celebrated in the ancient marriage song of unknown origin Hymen o Hymenae, Hymen delivered by G. Valerius Catullus. At least since the Italian Renaissance, Hymen was generally represented in art as a young man wearing a garland of flowers and holding a burning torch in one hand.
Mythology
Hymen was mentioned in Euripides's The Trojan Women, where Cassandra says: Hymen is also mentioned in Virgil's Aeneid and in seven plays by William Shakespeare: Hamlet, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing, Titus Andronicus, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Timon of Athens and As You Like It, where he joins the couples at the end — There is a song to Hymen in the comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore by W. S. Gilbert and A. Sullivan. Hymen also appears in the work of the 7th- to 6th-century BCE Greek poet Sappho : Hymen is most commonly the son of Apollo and one of the Muses. In Seneca's play Medea, he is stated to be the son of Dionysus. Other stories give Hymen a legendary origin. In one of the surviving fragments of the Megalai Ehoiai attributed to Hesiod, it's told that Magnes "had a son of remarkable beauty, Hymenaeus. And when Apollo saw the boy, he was seized with love for him, and wouldn't leave the house of Magnes". Aristophanes' Peace ends with Trygaeus and the Chorus singing the wedding song, with the repeated phrase "Oh Hymen! Oh Hymenaeus!", a typical refrain for a wedding song. Hymen is also mentioned in chapter 20 of Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. Hymen is an early book of poetry by the Americanmodernist poet H.D. The eponymous long poem of the collection imagines an ancient Greek women's ritual for a bride.
Later story of origin
According to a later romance, Hymen was an Athenian youth of great beauty but low birth who fell in love with the daughter of one of the city's wealthiest women. Since he couldn't speak to her or court her, due to his social standing, he instead followed her wherever she went. Hymen disguised himself as a woman in order to join one of these processions, a religious rite at Eleusis where only women went. The assemblage was captured by pirates, Hymen included. He encouraged the women and plotted strategy with them, and together they killed their captors. He then agreed with the women to go back to Athens and win their freedom, if he were allowed to marry one of them. He thus succeeded in both the mission and the marriage, and his marriage was so happy that Athenians instituted festivals in his honour and he came to be associated with marriage. Hymen was killed by Nicaea.
