Ganymede

Youngest son of Tros, “the most beautiful of mortal men,” Ganymede was swept up — by the gods, says Homer; by Zeus’s eagle, says later art — to be cupbearer of the immortals, his father consoled with divine horses. Plato’s Phaedrus invokes the myth in its account of heavenly love; the Neoplatonists read the ascent as the soul’s rapture into divine service.