This is a weird one. I was torn between these two characters for today's post, and decided to do both, in part because I don't have a huge amount to say about either of them. (Also, I like the way their names sound together like that. 🤣)
So. Ganymede is not who you're thinking of. Probably.
See, the Ganymede I'm talking about today is a very important member of the Trojan court when Atalanta, Ariadne and Eurysakes arrive in Scions of Troy. He's very handsome, but very mysterious. He's also quite ambitious, and doesn't seem to get along well with the king.
He doesn't make a very good first impression on our young trio (or maybe I should say they don't make a very good impression on him?).
The herald led them across the agora to the palace, where a number of well-dressed Trojan men were waiting for them. “Are these the visitors from Cypros?” the wealthiest-looking of them asked, addressing the herald. The man speaking was quite the prettiest man that Atalanta had ever seen, which made her wonder if that meant he was King Korythos himself. And yet, he didn’t seem to be any better dressed than her former master, even though surely the king of Troy should be wealthier than the king of a little port town like Methymna. He didn’t even have a diadem, but maybe kings didn’t wear those except for special occasions? (Atalanta had rarely seen her master outside of major religious ceremonies, after all.) And yet, how many girlishly pretty men could there be in a single court?
“Indeed they are, my lord,” the herald replied, with a slight bow.
“Hmm. Well, one of them certainly matches expectations,” he commented, his critical gaze settling on Eurysakes for a moment, before moving on to Atalanta and Ariadne, prompting a disapproving look on the man’s face. “As to the other two…” He frowned, and shook his head. “It would not be proper to present them in such a begrimed manner to his majesty.” So he really wasn’t King Korythos, then…
“You’re quite right, my lord Ganymede,” another man standing near him said in a foul, toadying manner.
“Ganymede?!” both Atalanta and Ariadne chorused at once in their shock.
“It’s an old family name,” the man told them, with a smile that struck Atalanta as being rather vain. “I assure you, I’m not the one you’ve heard of.”
“I should hope not,” Ariadne chuckled. “Zeus the thunderer would surely be much aggrieved to be without his cup-bearer.”
The man called Ganymede laughed, but he seemed angry rather than amused. “Zelotes!” he snapped.
“Yes, my lord?” the sycophant at his elbow oozed, bowing deeply, even though his lord wasn’t looking at the gesture.
“Take these three boys into the palace and see that they’re thoroughly washed before they’re presented to the king. Washed and perfumed,” he added, waving a hand in front of his face as if in objection to their stink. Personally, Atalanta thought they didn’t smell badly at all, especially considering that they had walked for two days straight before reaching the campsite last night.
His relations with the king are no less snippy, of course... (Regarding references in the quote below, Eutychos is a man in service to Teukros, Eurysakes' uncle. He served under Aias in the Trojan War. Oh, and the backwards tunic thing is because they're wearing Hittite tunics, which are longer in the back then in the front (according to an archaeologist's study that I found online while I was working on the rewrite of Scions of Troy) but they're wearing them backwards so the longer part is in the front, to reduce the chance of it being blown upwards and exposing anything. And Hattusa is the capital of the Hittites, and Hatti was what they called their empire.)
Comfortable or no, Korythos was certainly sitting on his throne, wearing long, ornate robes, and the headgear of a priest-king, though Ariadne wondered just what god he was priest to, considering his odd choice of temples to build. Standing beside him was that same Ganymede from before, but now he wore garments almost as fine as those of the king, and had even more gold rings on his fingers than Korythos was wearing. His dark hair clustered in tight curls that hung down almost to his shoulders; in fact, as Ariadne glanced around, she realized that most of the men of the court had hair that was nearly shoulder-length, as well as being beardless, so it must have been the Trojan fashion for men to grow their hair long and shave their beards. In his fine raiment, Ganymede, too, seemed to merit the word “beautiful” more than anything else; honestly, it was hard to imagine that the Ganymede up on Olympos could be any more beautiful. The both of them together like that, two such androgynously beautiful men, made Ariadne feel a bit of a failure as a woman, even though the visitors to the court at Methymna had always claimed to find her quite beautiful herself. (The only consolation she could feel at the comparison, realistically, was that the men of the Trojan royal family were famous for their beauty—from the original Ganymede through Tithonos, abducted by Eos herself for his fairness of face, all the way to Alexander—and Ganymede was almost certainly related to Korythos, as they had a similar shape to their faces, and the exact same shade of blue eyes.)
Once the four of them reached the throne and bowed before the king—somewhat awkwardly on Atalanta and Ariadne’s parts—Korythos rose from the throne and preceded them over to the feast, where the waiting slaves served him his food. He ordered the slaves to serve his guests next as they all took their positions at the feast.
“Now that we are at our meal, I hope you will indulge my curiosity and introduce your young companions,” Korythos said, looking at either Eutychos or Eurysakes. “My herald was not provided their identities.”
“They are barbarians from the far north,” Ganymede told him. “By their own admission.” He chuckled meanly. “Perhaps that is why they didn’t realize they were putting their tunics on backwards.”
“My cousin and I hail from Hyperborea,” Ariadne said, smiling at Ganymede in a manner that was probably a bit more baring her teeth than truly smiling. “And at home this is the prevailing fashion when trousers are not being worn. We have great gusts of wind in the mountains, and there is nothing more rude or more obscene than the accidental exposure of the genitalia.”
“Hyperborea,” Korythos repeated, casually taking a sip of his wine. “Really?”
“That is certainly what the young gentlemen told King Teukros upon their arrival,” Eutychos said. “They were shipwrecked near our shores, and washed up all but naked on the beach. Please forgive my impropriety in failing to introduce them to you, as members of our party. The dark-haired lad is Arios, and the fair one is Atleus.”
“Surprisingly Achaian names for Hyperborean barbarians,” Ganymede commented.
“We have translated them to your tongue,” Ariadne replied, her eyes narrowing.
“It is not my tongue, child,” Ganymede retorted. “We speak the language of the Great King here,” he added in the courtly tongue of Hattusa.
“That is rude, Ganymede,” Korythos said, scowling at him. “It is fortunate enough that these boys speak Achaian so well. Do not expect them to speak so many languages. Especially after I ordered the entire court to speak Achaian to make our guests from Salamis welcome.”
“I wonder what your father would say to that,” Ganymede replied, still in the Hatti tongue.
“My father is not the subject under discussion,” Korythos snarled.
(The whole "in disguise as Hyperborean boys" is...uh...convoluted. But I had fun with it, and most of the strange stories about Hyperborea that Ariadne invents to answer the court's questions about their homeland are actually things Herodotos had to say about Hyperborea. 🤣)
Here's a fun moment shortly after Atalanta receives her father's spear (from a mysterious man that she very quickly guesses to have been Hermes) within the armory in the Trojan palace. (Ahhiyawa is a Hittite name for one of the other cultural groups of their time, one which most scholars now believe is their rendition of the Mycenaean Greek term that would become the name Achaian by the time the Iliad was being composed.)
Irnuasu withheld a groan at the sound of someone else entering the armory. Plainly, he would get no peace today!
This time, it was Lord Ganymede himself who was stalking towards him like an enraged lion. “Where did that spear come from?” he demanded, just like all the others had.
“I have no idea, my lord,” Irnuasu assured him, just as he had all the others.
“You are supposed to know every blade, handle and scabbard in this armory.”
“And indeed I do,” Irnuasu agreed, nodding. “I never set eyes on that weapon before seeing it in that boy’s hands. He claimed a man gave it to him. I’ve searched this room five times over since then, and there is no one here but me.”
“What do you mean, he claimed—he doesn’t speak our tongue!”
Irnuasu chuckled. None of the others had picked up on that. “Oh, he speaks our language, all right, my lord. Claimed he only knew a little, but…well, that might be true. His Ahhiyawa accent was certainly atrocious.”
Ganymede frowned. “I suppose his companions must speak it as well, then; that red-haired boy is the dim one. We shall all have to watch our secrets when those children are about.” He shook his head. “Take me to the place where the boy claimed this other man appeared to him.”
“Don’t see what that matters, but fine. Follow me, my lord.” Irnuasu did his best not to grumble about it as he led Ganymede towards the back corner where the old Ahhiyawa weapons were stored. Ganymede was allegedly from a branch of the royal family, and the king still didn’t even have a wife, let alone any children. That made Ganymede a potential heir to the throne—maybe the only possible heir, short of King Aineias returning. Best to keep on his good side if Irnuasu didn’t want to lose his position should there be any more regnal strife…
It is also hinted--but never confirmed, especially not by him!--that he might actually be that Ganymede after all, returned to Troy late in the war by an angry Zeus who was ticked off because he kept begging Zeus to save Troy from the marauding Achaian army. (I know I wrote something at some point where Ganymede was begging Zeus to stop the war so constantly that Zeus gave him an ultimatum to shut up or go back to Troy to die with the rest of his kin, but I'm not sure where that was. Might have been in that Trojan War novel I wrote for my very first NaNoWriMo...)
My favorite part of writing for the character is constantly dropping those hints and refusing to ever confirm them. 🤣
“Oh, really?” Chryseis looked curious. “You’ve met Lord Ganymede?”
The three of them nodded. “Is that odd?” Atalanta asked. “He seemed to be really important. Like he was running the court whenever the king was busy.”
“Yes, he’s the king’s most important advisor,” Chryseis agreed, “it’s just…he’s sort of…” She frowned. “How can I put this without giving the wrong impression?”
“Overly ambitious?” Eurysakes suggested.
“No, that’s not what I mean at all!” Chryseis laughed. “I suppose the word I was searching for is ‘mysterious.’ He’s supposedly from some branch of the royal family, but no one knows who his father was, or even how he’s related to the royal family. Some say he simply turned up on the day Aineias became king, while others claim he arrived at court before the city fell. Whoever was king when he arrived, it was to the king and the king alone that he explained himself, and he hasn’t done so since.”
“Is that why he and Korythos don’t get along?” Ariadne asked. “I had thought it was because Ganymede refused to accede to his authority.” And probably had his eyes on the throne, but it didn’t seem entirely politic to say so. Especially not in front of Atalanta, who might repeat it without thinking.
Anyway, if you'd like to learn more about this Ganymede, Scions of Troy is available in interactive and text-only form on itch.io and in text-only form on AO3.
As to Grant. Where do I start?
I mean, other than with "technically he belongs under U."
He's a character from my first visual novel, A Song Of Warriors. Which was in turn named after and inspired by a bit in one of my Velvet Goldmine fanfics, wherein Curt Wild becomes an actor, and his first acting gig is in a rock opera adaptation of the Iliad. So, I had the crazy idea of trying to actually tell that story myself. Only with a lot less panache, no blood or nudity, and potentially a lot less death. (The traditional deaths are all left for the bad end, and narrated only in a very brief way.)
Anyway, so Grant is the lawyer who represents the band the Warriors (or more accurately represents their manager), and he is technically a character I brought over wholesale from half-written alternate takes on the 1970s backstory of...hnnh. This is awkward to explain.
All right, starting at the beginning. One year for NaNoWriMo I had decided to do a sci-fi novel, but of the "giant robot anime"-inspired variety. Specifically, I transplanted the cast of the Trojan War to the moons of Jupiter (so the Trojans lived on Ganymede, of course) but the twist is that it wasn't a retelling in a new setting but a reincarnation thing: they were all playing out the Trojan War over and over again, about once every 100-150 years. And Cassandra could remember all those past lives, and was always trying to prevent the war from happening. (And in that case, it was prevented, but in a very weird way, and...well, the novel fell apart because I was having too much trouble writing battles where no one died, and also because I still hadn't figured out just why they kept having to repeat the war over and over again. That was the biggest problem, tbh.) Anyway, because Cassandra remembered all those lives, I had to have at least some idea what they all were, or at least when. In the case of the one in the 1970s, I made the mistake of writing about the moment when that particular incarnation of Patroclos and Achilles finally acted on their love for each other...and consequently I really liked that particular set of versions of them and didn't want them to die after all. 😅 Consequently, I kept writing alternate reality stories to save them, and even entirely different novels about them just as independent characters, but I never managed to finish those other novels. 😭 (I did finally find a way to insert them into a Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic, though, as other users in an online chat for people who remember their past lives. So that was something, anyway.) In the course of writing all that other stuff about the 1970s version, I had come up with some of the names for the rest of the cast. And Odysseus had become the son of a pair of Civil War buffs who named their son Ulysses, with the middle name Grant. Seeing as Ulysses is not a name often used these days, he decided to go by Grant. (Bonus perk: he was born and raised in Ithaca, New York. 😜)
Gah. So, yeah, the tl;dr of all that is that I borrowed a bit of who Grant is from various of my unfinished, vaguely Trojan War-inspired works. And made him into the lawyer in this visual novel. He does serve some of the same functions as Odysseus in the Iliad, though. Witness the game's equivalent to the embassy to Achilles:
(The guy in the Spinal Tap t-shirt is A.J. the Axeman (Aias of Salamis), the band's guitarist; beside him is Dimsdale (Diomedes) who has nebulous security functions and might be involved in organized crime; that's Grant in the center; Ace (Achilles) is the one with his shirt hanging open; Pat (Patroclos) is the one in the rainbow tie-dye T-shirt that I dearly want in my own wardrobe.)
Grant doesn't get a whole lot of screen time in the game, but I did periodically get to have fun with his dialog:
...hmm. Seems like there's not really much more to say about him than that. (His wife is still named Penelope. Because why not?)
EDIT: I forgot to address his last name! His last name, Nemo, comes from the Odyssey. It's the name Odysseus gives when he introduces himself to the cyclops Polyphemos as his 'guest.' It's (ancient) Greek for "no one." I thought it was a fitting name for a version of Odysseus.
Anyway, A Song of Warriors is available on itch.io, but it's a bit....mmm, raw. In the sense of "it really needed to cook longer." But I still think there's some worth to it. Especially when you consider that I wrote the script (about 50k long) in less than a month. (Like all my games, it's entirely free.)
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