Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Cyparissus was a beautiful youth of Ceos (or, in variant geography, of an island sacred to Apollo), beloved of Apollo. The god gave him a tame sacred stag—golden-horned, jewel-collared—as a companion. Cyparissus hung garlands on its antlers, rode its back, and led it to pasture. One summer noon, as the stag slept in the shade, the boy cast a javelin at random and pierced his pet unawares. Seeing the wound, he willed to die with it. Apollo healed in vain and begged him to grieve more moderately; Cyparissus asked only that his mourning never end and that he might weep through the ages. As his blood drained in grief, his limbs stiffened into a green tree: the cypress, whose pointed crown and dark foliage thereafter stood at tombs and in sacred precincts as a sign of endless lament. Ovid places the tale in Orpheus’s underworld-and-metamorphosis song, pairing it with Hyacinthus as another Apolline favorite destroyed by mishap and preserved in plant form. Because no Archaic Greek continuous narrative survives and the scenic version is Ovidian, the entry is labeled **Roman transmission** of a Greek mourning-aetiology for the cypress.