Sources
Hymen was mentioned in Euripides's The Trojan Women, where Cassandra says:
Bring the light, uplift and show its flame! I am doing the god's service, see! I making his shrine to glow with tapers bright. O Hymen, king of marriage! blest is the bridegroom; blest am I also, the maiden soon to wed a princely lord in Argos. Hail Hymen, king of marriage!
He is also mentioned in Virgil's Aeneid and in five plays by William Shakespeare: Hamlet, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing, Titus Andronicus, and As You Like It, where he joins the couples at the end —
- "'Tis Hymen peoples every town;
- High wedlock then be honoured.
- Honour, high honour, and renown,
- To Hymen, god of every town!"
Hymen also appears in the work of the 6th- to 7th-century Greek poet Sappho (translation: M.L. West, Greek Lyric Poetry, Oxford University Press):
- High must be the chamber –
- Hymenaeum!
- Make it high, you builders!
- A bridegroom's coming –
- Hymenaeum!
- Like the War-god himself, the tallest of the tall!
He was the son of Dionysus/Bacchus (god of revelry) and Aphrodite (goddess of love); or, in some traditions, Apollo and one of the Muses.
Other stories give him a legendary origin. In one of the surviving fragments of the Megalai Ehoiai attributed to Hesiod, it's told that Magnes "had a son of remarkable beauty, Hymenaeus. And when Apollo saw the boy, he was seized with love for him, and wouldn't leave the house of Magnes".
Aristophanes' Peace ends with Trygaeus and the Chorus singing the wedding song, with the repeated phrase "Oh Hymen! Oh Hymenaeus!", a typical refrain for a wedding song.
Read more about this topic: Hymen (god)
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