HYLAS  , in

Greek legend, son of Theiodamas, king of the Dryopians in Thessaly, the favourite of Heracles and his companion on the Argonautic expedition . Having gone ashore at Kios in Mysia to fetch water, he was carried off by the nymphs of the spring in which he dipped his pitcher . Heracles sought him in vain, and the answer of Hylas to his thrice-repeated cry was lost in the depths of the water . Ever afterwards, in memory of the threat of Heracles to ravage the land if Hylas were not found, the inhabitants of Kios every year on a stated day roamed the mountains, shouting aloud for Hylas (Apollonius Rhodius i . 1207; Theocritus xiii.; Strabo xii . 564; Propertius 20; Virgil, Ecl. vi . 43) . But, although the legend is first told in Alexandrian times, the " cry of Hylas " occurs long before as the " Mysian cry " in Aeschylus (Persae, 1054), and in Aristophanes (Plutus, 1127) " to cry Hylas " is used proverbially of seeking something in vain . Hylas, like Adonis and Hyacinthus, represents the fresh vegetation of spring, or the water of a fountain, which dries up under the heat of summer . It is suggested that Hylas was a harvest deity and that the ceremony gone through by the Kians was a harvest festival, at which the figure of a boy was thrown into the water, signifying the dying vegetation-spirit of the year . See G . Turk in Breslauer Philologische Abhandlungen, vii .

(1895) ; W . Mannhardt, Mythologische Forschungen (1884) .