Cyparissus

Overview

Cyparissus is a beautiful youth associated with Apollo whose grief for a beloved stag leads to his transformation into the cypress tree, which became a symbol of mourning.

Generation

Heroic Age

Symbols

Cypress tree, stag

Notes

Cyparissus is a young figure whose mythology belongs to the Greek and Roman tradition of transformation, grief and plants.

He is especially associated with Apollo, although surviving versions of his story developed significantly in later literature.

Cyparissus possesses or deeply loves a tame stag. The animal becomes his constant companion.

He accidentally kills the stag and is overwhelmed by grief.

Unable or unwilling to recover from the loss, Cyparissus wishes to mourn forever.

He is transformed into the cypress tree. The tree's association with mourning, death and funerary landscapes becomes linked with the youth's endless grief.

The story is best known from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is Roman rather than an early Greek source, so the surviving literary form should not automatically be projected unchanged back into archaic Greek mythology.

Cyparissus is nonetheless a good example of how myth explains a cultural association in the natural world: the cypress becomes not simply a tree but a permanent image of mourning.