Volume II Part 25 (2/2)

** Paus., vi. 262.

*** Ibid., iv. 34, 6.

**** Roscher, in his Lexikon, s.v. aegis, with his arguments there. Compare, on this subject of Athene as the G.o.ddess of a goat-stock. Robertson Smith on ”Sacrifice” in the Encycl. Brit. Aphrodite.

Athene's maiden character is stainless in story, despite the brutal love of Hephaestus. This characteristic perhaps is another proof that she neither was in her origin nor became in men's minds one of the amorous deities of natural phenomena. In any case, it is well to maintain a sceptical att.i.tude towards explanations of her myth, which only agree in the determination to make Athene a ”nature power” at all costs, and which differ destructively from each other as to whether she was dawn, storm, or clear heaven. Where opinions are so radically divided and so slenderly supported, suspension of belief is natural and necessary.

No polytheism is likely to be without a G.o.ddess of love, and love is the chief, if not the original, department of Aphrodite in the Greek Olympus. In the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ and the Homeric Hymn she is already the queen of desire, with the beauty and the softness of the laughter-loving dame. Her cestus or girdle holds all the magic of pa.s.sion, and is borrowed even by Hera when she wishes to win her fickle lord. She disturbs the society of the G.o.ds by her famous amours with Ares, deceiving her husband, Hephaestus, the lord of fire; and she even stoops to the embraces of mortals, as of Anchises. In the Homeric poems the charm of ”Golden Aphrodite” does not prevent the singer from hinting a quiet contempt for her softness and luxury. But in this oldest Greek literature the G.o.ddess is already thoroughly Greek, nor did later ages make any essential changes in her character. Concerning her birth Homer and Hesiod are not in the same tale; for while Homer makes her a daughter of Zeus, Hesiod prefers, as usual, the more repulsive, and probably older story, which tells how she sprang from the sea-foam and the mutilated portions of Cronus.*

* Iliad, v. 312; Theog., 188-206.

But even in the Hesiodic myth it is remarkable that the foam-born G.o.ddess first landed at Cythera, or again ”was born in wave-washed Cyprus”. Her ancient names--the Cyprian and the Cytherean--with her favoured seats in Paphos, Idalia and the Phoenician settlement of Eryx in Sicily, combine with historical traditions to show that the Greek Aphrodite was, to some extent, of Oriental character and origin. It is probable, or rather certain, that even without foreign influence the polytheism of Greece must have developed a deity of love, as did the Mexican and Scandinavian polytheisms. But it is equally certain that portions of the wors.h.i.+p and elements in the myth of Aphrodite are derived from the ritual and the legends of the Oriental queen of heaven, adored from old Babylon to Cyprus and on many other coasts and isles of the Grecian seas. The Greeks themselves recognised Asiatic influence.

Pausanias speaks of the temple of heavenly Aphrodite in Cythera as the holiest and most ancient of all her shrines among the h.e.l.lenes.*

Herodotus, again, calls the fane of the G.o.ddess in Askalon of the Philistines ”the oldest of all, and the place whence her wors.h.i.+p travelled to Cyprus,” as the Cyprians say, and the Phoenicians planted it in Cythera, being themselves emigrants from Syria. The Semitic element in this Greek G.o.ddess and her cult first demand attention.

Among the Semitic races with whose G.o.ddess of love Aphrodite was thus connected the deity had many names. She was regarded as at once the patroness of the moon, and of fertility in plants beasts, and women.

Among the Phoenicians her t.i.tle is Astarte among the a.s.syrians she was Istar; among the Syrians, Aschera; in Babylon, Mylitta.** Common practices in the ritual of the Eastern and Western G.o.ddesses were the licence of the temple-girls, the sacrifices of animals supposed to be peculiarly amorous (sparrows, doves, he-goats), and, above all, the festivals and fasts for Adonis.

* Paus., Hi. 28, 1.

** So Roscher, Ausfuhr. Lexik., pp. 391, 647. See also Astarte, p. 656.

There can scarcely be a doubt that Adonis--the young hunter beloved by Aphrodite, slain by the boar, and mourned by his mistress--is a symbol of the young season, the _renouveau_, and of the spring vegetation, ruined by the extreme heats, and pa.s.sing the rest of the year in the underworld. Adonis was already known to Hesiod, who called him, with obvious meaning, the son of _Phoenix_ and Alphesiboea, while Pausanias attributed to him, with equal significance, a.s.syrian descent.* The name of Adonis is manifestly a form of the Phoenician Adon, ”Lord”.

The nature of his wors.h.i.+p among the Greeks is most familiar from the fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, with its lively picture of dead Adonis lying in state, of the wailing for him by Aphrodite, of the little ”gardens” of quickly-growing flowers which personified him, and with the beautiful nuptial hymn for his resurrection and reunion to Aphrodite.

Similar rites were customary at Athens.** Mannhardt gives the main points in the ritual of the Adonis-feast thus: The fresh vegetation is personified as a fair young man, who in ritual is represented by a kind of idol, and also by the plants of the ”Adonis-gardens”. The youth comes in spring, the bridegroom to the bride, the vernal year is their honeymoon. In the heat of summer the bridegroom perishes for the nonce, and pa.s.ses the winter in the land of the dead. His burial is bewailed, his resurrection is rejoiced in. The occasions of the rite are spring and midsummer. The idol and the plants are finally cast into the sea, or into well-water.

* Apollod., _Bibliothec_, iii. 14, 4.

** Aristoph., _Lysistrata_, 389; Mannhardt, _Feld und Wold Kultus_, ii. 276.

The union of the divine lovers is represented by pairing of men and maidens in bonds of a kindly sentimental sort,--the flowery bonds of valentines.

The Oriental influence in all these rites has now been recognised; it is perfectly attested both by the Phoenican settlements, whence Aphrodite-wors.h.i.+p spread, and by the very name of her lover, the spring.

But all this may probably be regarded as little more than the Semitic colouring of a ritual and a belief which exist among Indo-European peoples, quite apart from Phoenican influence. Mannhardt traces the various points in the Aphrodite cult already enumerated through the folk-lore of the German peasants. The young lover, the spring, is the Maikonig or Laubmann; his effigy is a clothed and crowned idol or puppet, or the Maibaum. The figure is thrown into the water and bewailed in Russia, or buried or burned with lamentations.* He is wakened and kissed by a maiden, who acts as the bride.** Finally, we have the ”May-pairs,” a kind of valentines united in a nominal troth.

* i. 418; ii. 287.

** i 436.

The probable conclusion seems to be that the Adonis ritual expresses certain natural human ways of regarding the vernal year. It is not unlikely that the ancestors of the Greeks possessed these forms of folk-lore previous to their contact with the Semitic races, and their borrowing of the very marked Semitic features in the festivals.

For the rest, the concern of Aphrodite with the pa.s.sion of love in men and with general productiveness in nature is a commonplace of Greek literature.

It would be waste of s.p.a.ce to recount the numerous and familiar fables in which she inspires a happy or an ill-fated affection in G.o.ds or mortals. Like most other mythical figures, Aphrodite has been recognised by Mr. Max Muller as the dawn; but the suggestion has not been generally accepted.* If Aphrodite retains any traces of an elemental origin, they show chiefly in that part of her legend which is peculiarly Semitic in colour. For the rest, though she, like Hermes, gives good luck in general, she is a recognised personification of pa.s.sion and the queen of love.

* Roscher, Lexikon, p. 406.

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