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In classical mythology, Hylas () was a youth who served Heracles (Roman Hercules) as companion and servant. His abduction by was a theme of ancient art, and has been an enduring subject for Western art in the classical tradition.
Or that same daintie lad, which was so deare To great Alcides, that when as he dyde He wailed womanlike with many a teare, And every wood, and every valley wyde He fild with Hylas name; the Nymphes eke "Hylas" cryde.
Hylas is also mentioned in Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II: "Not Hylas was more mourned for of Hercules / Than thou hast been of me since thy exile" (Act I, Scene I, line 142-3).
Oscar Wilde mentions Hylas at least six times in his published works. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11: "...and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas." In his sonnet, Santa Decca, lamenting the death of gods: "Young Hylas seeks the water-springs no more;" In The Garden of Eros: "There are the flowers which mourning Herakles / Strewed on the tomb of Hylas". In Charmides:
In Canzonet:Some woodmen saw him lying by the stream And marvelled much that any lad so beautiful could seem, Nor deemed him born of mortals, and one said,
‘It is young Hylas, that false runawayWho with a Naiad now would make his bedForgetting Herakles,’
In Ravenna:Hylas is dead, Nor will he e’er divine Those little redRose-petalled lips of thine.
And in " De Profundis" Wilde wrote (to Lord Alfred Douglas), "I compare you to Hylas, or Hyacinth, Jonquil or Narcisse, or someone whom the great god of Poetry favoured, and honoured with his love."Wilde, Oscar, De Profundis quoted inLong time I watched, and surely hoped to see Some goat-foot Pan ... Or Hylas mirrored in the perfect stream.
Hylas is referred to in Chapter 18 of Charles Kingsley's novel Hypatia, when the Prefect Orontes, rescued by the Goths, is taken for safety into a house largely populated by women, and fancies himself as "A second Hylas".
"Hylas" is a poem by Madison Cawein, including the lines "Hylas, the Argonaut, the lad Beloved of Herakles, was I"
Hylas is the name of one of the two characters in George Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. He represents the materialist position against which Berkeley (through Philonous) argues. In this context, the name is derived from ὕλη, the classical Greek word for "matter." Stanisław Lem adopted these characters in his 1957 non-fiction, philosophical book Dialogi ( Dialogs).Dialogi#Struktura dzieła
Hylas is also mentioned in Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd: "He called again: the valleys and farthest hills resounded as when the sailors invoked the lost Hylas on the Mysian shore; but no sheep."
Hylas und die Nymphen (Switzerland, 2013) is an 11-minute short, based on the myth: "The body of a young man (Kai Albrecht) floats in a lily pond. Three young female suspects (Annina Euling, Lina Hoppe, Magdalena Neuhaus) are found and interrogated - the nymphs of our generation."
Hylas (USA, 2021) is a four-minute horror short with Benito Borjas-Fitzpatrick as Hylas and Dan O'Reilly as a Naiad.
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