A sports accident? Or a rival’s jealousy?

In an earlier story we followed Apollo — one of the twelve Olympian gods, and the god of music and the sun — in his unsuccessful pursuit of the nymph Daphne, who escaped him by transforming into a laurel tree. That painful experience did not, however, discourage the god from seeking love elsewhere. Ancient sources credit Apollo with numerous affairs — among them one with a young man: Hyacinth, a beautiful prince from Sparta.

Apollo and Hyacinth spent their days together. Apollo taught him to play the lyre, they went hunting, and they competed in sports, enjoying themselves with discus throwing. Apollo was passionately fond of this young man. Whether their relationship was platonic, or whether the two were lovers rather than simply close companions, is left to our imagination.

As with the story of Daphne, the Roman poet Ovid tells the tale of Hyacinth in his Metamorphoses, composed in the first century AD. Each episode of the story was later illustrated by painters, sculptors, and illuminators across the centuries.

1. Apollo and Hyacinth
2. Throwing the discus
3. A sports accident…
4. …or a rival’s jealousy?
5. Turning into a flower

Let us follow it from beginning to end.

1. Apollo and Hyacinth

This engraving by Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio (c.1527) belongs to a celebrated series on the Loves of the Gods. It captures the moment when Apollo, crowned with laurel and lyre at his side, is drawing the beautiful Spartan prince Hyacinth close to him — not aware yet of the tragic end of their story. In the background, a naughty Cupid seems to be entertaining himself, very much in the spirit of the scene.

The eight-line poem beneath the image is a first-person confession by Apollo himself. To understand it, a small step back is needed. Apollo had previously fallen desperately in love with the nymph Daphne — but she fled from him and was transformed into a laurel tree just as he was about to catch her. A painful experience, even for a god. Don’t blame me, Apollo says, for loving a boy — look what a woman did to me.

Don’t blame me for treasuring
my boy’s cheeks above jewels and gold;
not after love proved so cruel and faithless
in the one who made the green laurel grow.
I have turned my back on that desire,
I burn and grow pale for this one alone,
and his young body pleases me so greatly
that I grant him the highest honour of all.

2. Throwing the discus

The ancient Greeks took their athletics seriously. The discus throw was one of the five disciplines of the pentathlon, alongside running, jumping, javelin throwing and wrestling, and it featured in the Olympic Games from at least 708 BC. It was considered not merely a test of strength but of grace and technique — a combination of physical power and elegant form.

The famous bronze Discobolus by the Greek sculptor Myron (c.450 BC), known to us through Roman marble copies from the first two centuries, captures precisely that moment of coiled energy just before the throw.

It is in this athletic world that Ovid sets the story of Apollo and Hyacinth. The two are not watching from the sidelines — they are competing, as equals, naked, oiled and ready:

One day, when the sun stands roughly halfway between the coming and the departing night, equally distant from both, they undress and rub themselves gleaming with the oil of smooth olives, ready to compete with the discus. Apollo was the first to swing the disc around and hurl it away, breaking through the blanket of clouds; only after a long time did the heavy thing feel solid ground again — proof of Apollo’s skill and strength.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, (261-274)

It is a vivid scene — a god and a mortal, side by side, playing sport together in the sunshine. What could possibly go wrong?

3. A sports accident…

What could go wrong, went wrong. Ovid tells it simply and brutally:

Reckless and fired up by the game, Hyacinthus immediately rushed forward to pick up the discus. But it was thrown back up by the hard ground and flew straight into his face.

The god himself turned as pale as the boy who lay limp upon the earth… Apollo lifts Hyacinth into his lap, holds him close, dabs the terrible wound and tries to save the life ebbing away with the help of healing herbs. No medicine avails — the wound can no longer be cured.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X (274-284)

The accident is over in a few lines — sudden, irreversible. A moment of impatience, a bouncing disc, and a god is left cradling a dying boy, powerless again to change the outcome.

Peter Paul Rubens captured this moment of helpless grief in a small but intense sketch, now in the Prado in Madrid. Despite its modest size (15x14cm), the painting is remarkable in its emotional directness — Apollo’s anguish is unmistakable as he touches the head of Hyacinth, the discus still visible as a reminder of what just happened. Rubens strips the scene down to its emotional core: a god who cannot save the person he loves most.

“Now you are dying, Hyacinthus, robbed of your first bloom!”

so Apollo cries out…

“I see the wound that accuses me; the grief I feel for you I have brought upon myself! I am the cause of your dying! And yet — where does my guilt lie? Unless the discus game must bear the blame, or we are guilty because we were lovers? Oh, if only I could give my life for yours! Or die with you!"

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X (294-303)

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s large canvas (287x232cm), now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, takes a very different approach. Tiepolo took considerable liberties with the original story — most strikingly in his choice of weapon. Rather than a discus, the painting shows tennis balls and a racquet lying beside the stricken Hyacinth, with a third ball having rolled across the tiled floor. This was no careless mistake: Tiepolo based his composition on a 1561 Italian translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara, in which the discus is replaced by a tennis ball. This game, known at the time as pallacorda (or jeu de paume), was fashionable among the nobility and gave the ancient myth a contemporary aristocratic setting. In the right-hand corner of the painting, almost as an afterthought, Tiepolo includes a clump of flowers — the first hint of the transformation to come.

4. …or a rival’s jealousy?

But was it really an accident? Not everyone in antiquity was convinced. An older and darker version of the story points the finger not at bad luck or Hyacinth’s own impatience, but at a third party: Zephyrus, the god of the West Wind.

In this version, Zephyrus was himself in love with Hyacinth — and consumed with jealousy at the sight of the Spartan prince choosing Apollo’s company over his. When Apollo threw the discus, Zephyrus seized his moment. With a well-aimed gust of wind he deflected the disc mid-flight, driving it straight into Hyacinth’s face. What looked like a tragic accident was in fact a murder — committed by a lovesick god who could not bear to lose.

This version of the story is at least as old as the accident version. A Greek bell-krater — a wide-mouthed wine-mixing bowl — dating to around 430 BC, shows Zephyrus actively pursuing Hyacinth. The image predates Ovid by four centuries and is a reminder that the jealousy narrative was not a later invention but ran alongside the accident story from very early on.

5. Turning into a flower

Apollo’s grief did not end with Hyacinth’s death. Unable to reverse what had happened, the god did the only thing left to him: he transformed his beloved into a flower, ensuring that Hyacinth would live on in a different form — fragile, beautiful, and returning every spring. Ovid lets Apollo speak with tenderness:

"Hyacinth, your name will stay upon my lips; when I play my lyre, my songs will sing of you! You will become a new flower!”

Hardly had Apollo let his prophetic words sound, when — look — the blood of Hyacinth that had streamed to the ground and stained the grass was blood no more: more brilliant than purple, a flower grew up that resembled lilies, except that lilies are silvery white and this one was purple.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X (306-319)

The flower that bears Hyacinth’s name has puzzled botanists and scholars for centuries. The modern hyacinth is almost certainly not the flower Ovid had in mind. The description of a purple bloom shaped like a lily points more convincingly to either a larkspur (Delphinium species, Dutch: ridderspoor) or a dark lily. The larkspur in particular has long been associated with the myth, see the beautiful botanical illustration by Maria Sibylla Merian from 1679.

The medieval illustrators of the Ovide Moralisé — a lavishly illuminated French manuscript from around 1325 — told the story in two consecutive images. In the first (f.251r), Apollo cradles the dying Hyacinth in his arms. In the second (f.267r), Apollo points at the flower that has sprung from the ground — a French lily in this case, reflecting the illustrator’s own botanical world rather than the Greek original. In both images, Apollo wears a crown instead of his classical laurel wreath. This detail reveals how medieval artists filtered the ancient gods through a contemporary visual language, where divine or royal status meant a crown, not classical attributes.

The transformation is also the subject of a graceful painting by Nicolas-René Jollain (c.1768), ordered by Louis XV for the Châteaux de Versailles and still in situ. Where Rubens and Tiepolo focused on the violence and grief of the death scene, Jollain chose the gentler aftermath: Hyacinth already becoming a bed of flowers, the tragedy softened into something almost peaceful. It is a fitting image with which to close — the myth ending not in death, but in perpetual renewal.

As Ovid himself put it:

Apollo would have settled you in heaven, Hyacinthus, if grim fate had given him sufficient time. Still, you are immortal, for every time spring drives off winter, you rise and blossom once more.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X

A final word of caution: be careful when throwing a discus — or when watching someone throw one! Though given that the sport survives mainly at the Olympic Games, the rest of us are probably safe. But when someone suggests a game of frisbee, think twice!