Adonis

Adonis is the beautiful youth beloved of Aphrodite — a dying-and-rising god of vegetation, of Near-Eastern origin (akin to the Semitic Tammuz, his very name from the word for 'lord'). Killed by a wild boar, he was mourned by Aphrodite, and it was decreed that he should spend part of each year below with Persephone and part above with Aphrodite.

Like the grain and the turning year, he dies and returns; his cult, with its rites of mourning and rejoicing and its swiftly fading 'gardens of Adonis', set him among the vegetation gods of death and rebirth — kin in meaning to Persephone and to Dionysus.