And many men used to be as fond of having boys for their favourites as women for their mistresses. And this was a frequent fashion in many very well regulated cities of Greece. Accordingly, the Cretans, as I have said before, and the Chalcidians in Eubœa, were very much addicted to the custom of having boy-favourites. Therefore Echemens, in his History of Crete, says that it was not Jupiter who carried off Ganymede, but Minos. But the before-mentioned Chalcidians say that Ganymede was carried off from them by [p. 960] Jupiter; and they show the spot, which they call Harpagius;1 and it is a place which produces extraordinary myrtles. And Minos abandoned his enmity to the Athenians, (although it had originated in consequence of the death of his son, out of his love for Theseus: and he gave his daughter Phædra to him for his wife,) as Zenis, or Zeneus, the Chian, tells us in his treatise on Country.
Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet Of The Learned Of Athenaeus. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1854.
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