In Greek and Roman mythology, Cyparissus (Ancient Greek Κυπάρισσος, "cypress") is a beautiful youth — in Ovid, from Ceos — beloved of Apollo, who accidentally killed his tame sacred stag and was transformed into the mourning cypress. The myth is an aetiology of the tree's funereal associations. He is distinct from the Phocian town Cyparissus in Homer's Catalogue of Ships and from founder-figures of the same name.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Cyparissus" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Identity and homonyms
Ovid's Cyparissus is the fairest youth of Ceos, loved by Apollo. Servius makes a Cyparissus son of Telephus (hence grandson of Heracles). A different tradition names a Cyparissus son of Minyas as mythical founder of the Phocian town Cyparissus (later Anticyra). Homer's Catalogue of Ships lists Cyparissus as a Phocian coastal settlement — not this youth. This atlas node (cyparissus-ceos) follows the Ceian metamorphosis tale.
II.Ovid's metamorphosis
In Metamorphoses 10, Orpheus's song gathers a grove of listening trees; the cypress's place in that cavalcade prompts the tale. Cyparissus cherished a stag sacred to the nymphs of Carthaea, with gold-tipped antlers and a jeweled collar. At noon he cast a javelin at a moving shadow and killed the pet. Apollo's comfort failed; the boy begged to grieve forever, and the god turned him into the slender cypress whose sap falls like tears.
III.Other lovers and meaning
Servius and the Vatican Mythographers substitute the woodland god Silvanus (or, elsewhere, Zephyrus) for Apollo; in Servius's brief account Silvanus himself kills the deer by accident. Nonnus has Zephyrus find solace with Cyparissus after Hyacinthus's death. No Greek hero cult of Cyparissus is securely identified; the funereal cypress is better attested in Roman than in early Greek practice. Like Hyacinthus, the myth has been read as an initiatory or pederastic Apollo story and as botanical aetiology.