Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Cinyras, legendary king of Cyprus, stands in Greek song as a favorite of Apollo and Aphrodite—wealthy, musical, founder of Aphrodite’s Cypriot cult honors, and in Homer the distant guest-friend who sends Agamemnon a splendid corselet. His house is also the stage of the Myrrha disaster. By Aphrodite’s wrath (or by Ate), his daughter Myrrha conceived a passion for him; deceived, he became father of Adonis by her, then, discovering the crime, sought to kill her. She became the myrrh tree; Adonis was born from it. Some strands give Cinyras other children (as Metharme, wife of Pygmalion in Apollodorus’s Cypriot list) and a death by suicide or by Apollo’s anger when he challenged the god in song—parallel to Thamyris-type hybris. The catalogue keeps those as variant edges. The core for this file: Cinyras is the prosperous Cypriot king whose intimacy with Aphrodite’s island does not protect him from the goddess’s punishment inside his own bedroom, and whose unwitting fatherhood links Near Eastern Adonis to Greek heroic genealogy and Trojan-war guest-gifts.