Aphrodite in Hesiod’s Theogony

More NATURE (GAIA) than CULTURE (Demeter)

Aphrodite in Homer

- Daughter of Zeus and Dione (feminine formation of “Zeus” - sky god)

- One of the Olympians

- Power here is more “tame”

Map of Eastern Mediterranean World

Paphos: Aphrodite’s chief cultic center on Cyprus is named after the child of PYGMALION (sculptor) and GALATEA (statue)

The power of eros: turns

cold ivory into living flesh

However… the power of Aphrodite/eros can go too far:the granddaughter of Paphos, MYRRHA, falls in love with her own father, Cinyras (king of Cyprus) and is turned into a myrrh tree to escape his revenge.

The positive and creative eros of Pygmalion turns into the negative and destructive eros in his great granddaughter, Myrrha and her

son, Adonis

• Myrrha: falls in love with her father, Cinyras

• Adonis: a precocious lover, seduces both Olympian Aphrodite and the queen of the Underworld, Persephone

Adonis dies driven through by a boar, and fails the test of manhood (he gets killed in the hunt). The precocious lover, born from the hot, aphrodisiac myrrh tree, will die in the cold and wet lettuce (which induces frigidity).

Adonis

ORIGINS DEATH

Myrrh/hot spice (seduction) Lettuce/cold wet plant (sterility)Product of Incest (father/daughter) Love of goddess of Love: Fatal

Loved by: Aphrodite (goddess of seduction, procreation) Persephone (goddess of the World of the Dead)

Characterized by: Precocious Sexual Potency Precocious Sexual Impotence

Athena: one of the three “virgin” goddesses

Artemis (Diana) patron goddess of young (marriageable) girls

Hestia: “Hearth” symbol of the home

• The hearth is the center of the oikos

• Just as the hearth cannot move so Hestia (she cannot follow a potential husband and leave her place at the center of the house)

• Hestia symbolizes the integrity of the home and, like all virgins , she will stay in her parents’ place.

Venus and AnchisesSir William Blake Richmond

Ganymede: son of Tros (founder of Troy) abducted by Zeus to be his lover

The forever youthful goddess of Dawn, Eos,

and her immortal, yet forever aging lover,

Tithonus