Listed 12 sub titles with search on: Mythology for destination: "CYPRUS Country EUROPE".
Pugmalion. A king of Cyprus and father of Metharme. He is said to have fallen in love with the ivory image of a maiden which he himself had made, and therefore to have prayed to Aphrodite to breathe life into it. When the request was granted, Pygmalion married the maiden, and became by her the father of Paphus.
A maiden of Cyprus, treated her lover Iphis with such haughtiness that he hanged himself at her door. She looked with such indifference at the funeral of the youth that Aphrodite changed her into a stone statue.
Harry Thurston Peck, The Perseus Project, August 2002
Following WebPage with hyperlinks.
The most beautiful of young men was the son of king Cinyras of Cyprus and his
daughter Myrrha. The gods turned Myrrha into a tree, and out of its trunk Adonis
was born. Because of the fact that he was the result of incest, he was hidden
in the underworld and looked after by Persephone.
When Aphrodite saw him she fell desperately in love, and when he was
killed while hunting by a wild boar, she pleaded with Zeus to bring him back to
life. Zeus agreed to get the young man back, but he had to stay in the underworld
during winter and be with Aphrodite in summer, thus making the vegetation die
in winter and blossom in summer.
The cult of Adonis was the first important cult in ancient Greece.
It has been suggested that Adonis was a semitic god, since his name seems to be
a grecian for of adon - the lord. The myth also resembles the Babylonian story
of the god Tammuz' death: here, it is Ishtar who laments him and brings him back
to the world.
Especially the ancient Greek women would worhip Adonis, and womens'
laments were sometimes called Adoniscries. The so-called Adonisgardens were pots
with flower seeds in them surrounding a statue of the god. In summer the flowers
would grow and in winter wither, symbolizing the myth above.This makes Adonis
a god of vegetation as well.
In spring there would be Adonis' festivals where wild celebrations
of joy would take place, and in autumn there would be mourning processions.
This text is cited Sept 2003 from the In2Greece URL below.
(more about Adonis at Ancient Phoenice )
(Graiai)."The old women," daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, and three in number-- Pephredo, Enyo, and Dino, also called Phorcydes. They had gray hair from their birth, and only one tooth and one eye in common, which they borrowed from each other when they needed them.
Graeae, (Graiai), that is, " the old women", were daughters of Phorcys and Ceto. They had grey hair from their birth. Hesiod (Theog. 270, &c.) mentions only two Graeae, viz. Pephredo and Enyo; Apollodorus (ii. 4.2) adds Deino as a third, and Aeschylus (Prom. 819) also speaks of three Graeae. The Scholiast on Aeschylus (Prom. 793) describes the Graeae, or Phorcides, as he calls them, as having the figure of swans, and he says that the three sisters had only one tooth and one eye in common, which they borrowed from one another when they wanted them. It is conmmonly believed that the Graeae, like other members of the family of Phorcys, were marine divinities, and personifications of the white foam seen on the waves of the sea.
This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Nov 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
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