Commentary Purg IX 25-27

The protagonist's thought within his dream is striking.  Since, within the dream, Dante is 'thinking like Ganymede,' his thought refers to a place elevated from the normal, e.g., on this mountain near Troy.  (Some commentators want to keep the usual imperial valence of the eagle by associating this Mount Ida with Troy and thus empire; however, the point would rather seem to be that the place is elevated, not that it is Trojan.)  And thus Dante would be thinking that only such extraordinary, i.e., 'higher,'  mortals like Ganymede and Dante Alighieri are chosen by the gods for their delight.  And this thought, perfectly in accord with what we will find out on the first terrace of purgatory proper, associates Dante with the sin of Pride.  Once again, however, the 'reality' tells a different story: the true God is not interested in Dante's curly locks, but in his Christian soul; and He will pluck Dante up from the mount of purgatory for reasons better than those that motivated Jove.

      The issue of Jove's homosexual desire for Ganymede is mainly avoided in the commentaries.  It is, nonetheless, noteworthy that, of the many myths available to Dante that might have expressed the love of the gods for a particular mortal, he has chosen this one.  For the question of Dante's attitudes toward homosexuality see Hollander (Holl.1996.1).  Durling (Durl.1996.1), pp. 559-60, on the basis of no known evidence, is of the opinion that Dante was of homosexual predisposition but had never acted on his desires.  While that is probably more than can be shown to be true, the question of Dante's rather 'unmedieval' view of homosexuality (see the endnote to Inf. XVI in Holl.2000.3, p. 282) has generally not been dealt with as openly as it ought to be.