L’eroe azzurro. Ganimede nel romanzo latino.

Chosen by the divine father as an eromenos, seized and carried off among the clouds to the realm of the immortals, Ganymede is rewarded with eternal spring and entrusted with the perpetual task of pouring nectar. Cherished in antiquity, this myth inspired numerous themes in classical art and literature. This essay explores – through a comparative, symbolic, and anthropological perspective – its reworking in the Latin novels of Petronius and Apuleius. These narratives, in turn, enable readers to reconstruct the myth’s underlying structure and to recover its twofold dimension: both homoerotic and initiatory-ascensional.