Ganymede being carried off by the eagle was the subject of a bronze group by the Athenian sculptor Leochares, imitated in a marble statuette in the Vatican.
Heracles, on his way back from the land of the Amazons, offered to slay the monster and release Hesione, on condition that he should receive the wonderful horses presented by Zeus to Tros, the father of Ganymede, to console him for the loss of his son.
Ganymede was afterwards regarded as the genius of the fountains of the Nile, the life-giving and fertilizing river, and identified by astronomers with the Aquarius of the zodiac. Thus the divinity that distributed drink to the gods in heaven became the genius who presided over the due supply of water on earth.
When pederasty became common in Greece, an attempt was made to justify it and invest it with dignity by referring to the rape of the beautiful boy by Zeus; in Crete, where the love of boys was reduced to a system, Minos, the primitive ruler and law-giver, was said to have been the ravisher of Ganymede.
Veckenstedt (Ganymedes, Libau, 1881) endeavours to prove that Ganymede is the genius of intoxicating drink (thOv, mead, for which he postulates a form pi bos), whose original home was Phrygia.