Eric

Season: 5, Episodes: 2, Faction: DHARMA Initiative

Overview

Eric was a construction worker for the DHARMA Initiative. He appears wearing an Orchid construction helmet and a jumpsuit with a DHARMA logo patch.

Fertility (Water)

Sexuality

Sky

Space (Stars)

Sun (Fire)

1977

5×01 – Because You Left

   

He interrupts the filming of an orientation film for the Arrow to tell Dr. Pierre Chang about a problem at the construction site for the Orchid. (“Because You Left”)

5×14 – The Variable

   

He transported Dr. Chang in a DHARMA van to the Orchid greenhouse while it’s being built and goes underground to take Dr. Chang to a superior of his and to continue his work. (“The Variable”)

He may have been killed along with other members of the DHARMA Initiative in the Purge, or he may have left the island sometime between 1977 and The Purge.

Images Source | Image Source | Source

Related Character Images

   

Associated DHARMA Stations & Location

      

Decoded Season 2 & 4 Characters

Dr. Pierre Chang

Daniel Faraday

Miles Straume

Decoded Season 5 Characters

Fern

Jay

Tony

Key Episode(s) to Decoding the Character

5x01 "Because You Left" 5x14 "The Variable"

Wiki Info

In Greek mythology, Ganymede, or Ganymedes, is a divine hero whose homeland was Troy. He was a prince, son of the eponymous Tros of Dardania and of Callirrhoe, and brother of Ilus and Assaracus. Homer describes Ganymede as the most beautiful of mortals, which led the gods, or according to some, Zeus in the form of an eagle, to abduct him for service as cup-bearer in Olympus and, in Classical and Hellenistic Greece, as Zeus’s eromenos.

Myth

Ganymede was abducted by Zeus from Mount Ida in Phrygia, the setting for more than one myth element bearing on the early mythic history of Troy. Ganymede was there, passing the time of exile many heroes undergo in their youth, by tending a flock of sheep or, alternatively, during the chthonic or rustic aspect of his education, while gathering among his friends and tutors. Zeus, either sending an eagle or turning himself to an eagle transported Ganymede to Mount Olympus. Later, Zeus compensated Ganymede’s father by the gift of fine horses, “the same that carry the immortals”: in the Iliad, the Achaean Diomedes is keen to capture the horses of Aeneas: “They are of the stock that great Jove gave to Tros in payment for his son Ganymede, and are the finest that live and move under the sun.”

As a Trojan, Ganymede is identified as part of the earliest, pre-Hellenic level of Aegean myth. Plato’s Laws states the opinion that the Ganymede myth had been invented by the Cretans– Minoan Crete being a power center of pre-Greek culture – to account for “pleasure […] against nature” imported thence into Greece, as Plato’s character indignantly declares. Homer doesn’t dwell on the erotic aspect of Ganymede’s abduction, but it is certainly in an erotic context that the goddess refers to Ganymede’s blond Trojan beauty in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, mentioning Zeus’s love for Trojan Ganymede as part of her enticement of Trojan Anchises.

The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes presents a vignette (in Book III) of an immature Ganymede furious for having been cheated at knucklebones by Eros. Aphrodite then arrives and chides her son, Eros, for “cheating a beginner.” The Roman poet Ovid adds vivid detail – and veiled irony directed against critics of homosexual love: aged tutors reaching out to grab him back with impotent fingers, and Ganymede’s hounds barking uselessly at the sky. Statius’ Thebaid describes a cup worked with Ganymede’s iconic mythos (1.549):

“Here the Phrygian hunter is borne aloft on tawny wings, Gargara’s range sinks downwards as he rises, and Troy grows dim beneath him; sadly stand his comrades; vainly the hounds weary their throats with barking, pursue his shadow or bay at the clouds.”

In Olympus, Zeus granted him eternal youth and immortality and the office of cupbearer to the gods, supplanting Hebe. J.A.Edm. Veckenstedt (Ganymedes, Libau, 1881) endeavoured to prove that Ganymede is the genesis of the intoxicating drink mead, whose original home was Phrygia.

All the gods were filled with joy to see the youth, except for Hera, Zeus’s consort, who detested Ganymede.

In a possible alternative version, the Titan Eos, dawn-goddess and connoisseur of male beauty, kidnapped Ganymede as well as her better-remembered consort, his brother Tithonus, whose immortality was granted, but not eternal youth. Tithonus indeed lived forever but grew more and more ancient, eventually turning into a cricket, a classic example of the myth-element of the Boon with a Catch. Tithonus is placed in the Dardanian lineage through Tros, an eponym for Troy, as Ganymede. Robert Graves interpreted the substitution of Ganymede for Tithonus in a few references to the myth as a misreading of an archaic icon that would have shown the consort of the winged Goddess bearing a libation cup in his hand. A genesis for the Ganymede myth as a whole has been offered in a Hellene reading of one of the numerous Akkadian seals depicting the hero-king Etana riding heavenwards on an eagle.

Tros grieved for his son. Sympathetic, Zeus had Hermes deliver a gift of two immortal horses, so swift they could run over water (or perhaps the gift was a golden vine). Hermes also assured Ganymede’s father that the boy was now immortal and would be the cupbearer for the gods, a position of much distinction. The theme of the father recurs in many of the Greek coming-of-age myths of male love, suggesting that the pederastic relationships symbolized by these stories took place under the supervision of the father.

Zeus later put Ganymede in the sky as the constellation Aquarius, which is still associated with that of the Eagle (Aquila). However his name would also be given by modern astronomy to one of the moons of Jupiter, the planet that was named after Zeus’s Roman counterpart. Ganymede was afterwards also regarded as the genius of the fountains of the Nile, the life-giving and fertilizing river. Thus the divinity that distributed drink to the gods in heaven became the genius who presided over the due supply of water on earth.

Image & Source

Mythological Family Members & Associated Deities

ZEUS

APHRODITE

EROS

HERMES

HEBE

EOS

TITHONUS