Fairest youth of Ceos in the grove Orpheus raised with his song, who loved a sacred stag with golden collar — and when a mis-thrown javelin killed the pet at noon, Apollo changed him into the cypress that still weeps at graves.1
Orpheus' lyre had raised a hilltop grove where trees and beasts gathered to listen. Among them came a stag sacred to the nymphs of Carthaea, with antlers tipped in gold and a jewelled collar — tame enough to accept strangers' hands, but dearest to Cyparissus of Ceos, who led it to pasture and wove garlands for its horns.2
At high noon, when the Crab burned overhead, the stag lay in forest shade. Cyparissus cast a javelin at a moving shadow — and struck the beloved creature. Apollo comforted him in vain; the youth could not endure life without the stag and begged the gods that he might grieve eternally.3
Phoebus granted the prayer with sorrow: Cyparissus' limbs took a green tint, his hair became a bristling crest, and he rose a slender tree pointing to the stars — the cypress, forever associated with mourning.4
Homer names Cyparissus as a Phocian town in the Catalogue of Ships — the coastal settlement from which Schedius and Epistrophus led forty ships — not the Ceian youth who became a tree in Ovid's Orphic grove.5
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story