APHRODITE (a-fro-DYE-tee;
Roman name Venus) was the
goddess of love, beauty and fertility.
She was also a protectress of sailors.
The poet Hesiod said that Aphrodite
was born from sea-foam. Homer, on
the other hand, said that she was the
daughter of Zeus and Dione.
When the Trojan prince Paris was
asked to judge which of three
Olympian goddesses was the most
beautiful, he chose Aphrodite over
Hera and Athena. The latter two had
hoped to bribe him with power and
victory in battle, but Aphrodite
offered the love of the most beautiful
woman in the world.
This was Helen of Sparta, who
became infamous as Helen of Troy
when Paris subsequently eloped with
her. In the ensuing Trojan War, Hera
and Athena were implacable enemies
of Troy while Aphrodite was loyal to
Paris and the Trojans.
IN HOMER
In his epic of the Trojan War, Homer
tells how Aphrodite intervened in
battle to save her son Aeneas, a
Trojan ally. The Greek hero
Diomedes, who had been on the
verge of killing Aeneas, attacked the
goddess herself, wounding her on the
wrist with his spear and causing the
ichor to flow. (Ichor is what
immortals have in the place of
blood.)
Aphrodite promptly dropped
Aeneas, who was rescued by
Apollo, another Olympian sponsor of
the Trojans. In pain she sought out
her brother Ares, the god of war
who stood nearby admiring the
carnage, and borrowed his chariot so
that she might fly up to Olympus.
There she goes crying to her mother
Dione, who soothes her and cures
her wound. Her father Zeus tells her
to leave war to the likes of Ares and
Athena, while devoting herself to the
business of marriage.
Elsewhere in Homer's Iliad ,
Aphrodite saves Paris when he is
about to be killed in single combat by
Menelaus. The goddess wraps him in
a mist and spirits him away, setting
him down in his own bedroom in
Troy. She then appears to Helen in
the guise of an elderly handmaiden
and tells her that Paris is waiting for
her.
Helen recognizes the goddess in
disguise and asks if she is being led
once more to ruin. For Aphrodite
had bewitched her into leaving her
husband Menelaus to run off with
Paris. She dares to suggest that
Aphrodite go to Paris herself.
Suddenly furious, the goddess warns
Helen not to go too far, lest she be
abandoned to the hatred of Greeks
and Trojans alike. "I'll hate you," says
the mercurial goddess, "as much as I
love you now."
Even though Zeus's queen Hera and
Aphrodite are on different sides in
the Trojan War, the goddess of love
loans Hera her magical girdle in order
to distract Zeus from the fray. This
garment has the property of causing
men (and gods) to fall hopelessly in
love with whomever is wearing it.
Homer calls Aphrodite "the Cyprian",
and many of her attributes may have
come from Asia via Cyprus (and
Cythera) in Mycenaean times. These
almost certainly mixed with a
preexisting Hellenic or Aegean
goddess. The ancient Greeks
themselves felt that Aphrodite was
both Greek and foreign.
JASON
Aphrodite involved herself on other
occasions in the affairs of mortal
heroes. When Jason asked
permission of the king of Colchis to
remove the Golden Fleece from the
grove in which it hung, the king was
clearly unwilling. So the goddess
Hera, who sponsored Jason's quest,
asked her fellow-Olympian
Aphrodite to intervene. The love
goddess made the king's daughter
Medea fall in love with Jason, and
Medea proved instrumental in
Jason's success.
AENEAS
Another time, Zeus punished
Aphrodite for beguiling her fellow
gods into inappropriate romances.
He caused her to become infatuated
with the mortal Anchises. That's how
she came to be the mother of
Aeneas. She protected this hero
during the Trojan War and its
aftermath, when Aeneas quested to
Italy and became the mythological
founder of a line of Roman emperors.
A minor Italic goddess named Venus
became identified with Aphrodite,
and that's how she got her Roman
name. It is as Venus that she appears
in the Aeneiad , the poet Virgil's epic
of the founding of Rome.
And on still another occasion,
HEPHAESTUS
The love goddess was married to the
homely craftsman-god Hephaestus.
She was unfaithful to him with Ares,
and Homer relates in the Odyssey
how Hephaestus had his revenge.
IN ART
Elsewhere in classical art she has no
distinctive attributes other than her
beauty. Flowers and vegetation
motifs suggest her connection to
fertility.
Aphrodite was associated with the
dove. Another of her sacred birds
was the goose, on which she is seen
to ride in a vase painting from
antiquity.
Hesiod's reference to Aphrodite's
having been born from the sea
inspired the Renaissance artist
Botticelli's famous painting of the
goddess on a giant scallop shell.
Equally if not better known is the
Venus de Milo, a statue which lost its
arms in ancient times.
WAR GODDESS?
The ancient travel writer Pausanias
describes a number of statues of
Aphrodite dressed for battle, many
of them in Sparta. Given the manner
in which the militaristic Spartans
raised their girls, it is not surprising
that they conceived of a female
goddess in military attire. She also
would have donned armaments to
defend cities, such as Corinth, who
adopted her as their patroness. This
is not to say that she was a war
goddess, although some have seen
her as such and find significance in
her pairing with the war god Ares in
mythology and worship.
The two most recent editions of "The
Oxford Classical Dictionary" are at
variance over this aspect of the
goddess. The 1970 edition sees her
as a goddess of war and traces this
to her Oriental roots. It is true that
she has resemblances to Astarte,
who is a goddess of war as well as
fertility.
The 1996 edition of "The Oxford
Classical Dictionary", on the other
hand, offers several
counterarguments. It sees her being
paired with Ares, for instance, not
because they are similarly warlike but
precisely because love and war are
opposites.
In any case, Aphrodite's primary
function was to preside over
reproduction, since this was essential
for the survival of the community.
