The Twelve Olympians Read online

  Do not be afraid, Leto, that I am going to fight you. People who come to blows with Consorts of the Cloud-compeller Zeus seem to have uphill work. No; you can boast to your heart’s content and tell the gods that you got the better of me by brute strength.{44}

  Although Hermes had so rich a mythology, and although he was a god much loved and of great importance in many places, there seems to have been only one great and prosperous Greek city—Ainos on the Thracian coast—in which he was the chief and dominant deity.{45} But there were shrines and statues and ‘Herms’ of him all over the civilised world for many centuries, and it is diverting to recall the story that the great oratorical gifts of the Apostle Paul caused him on one occasion{46} to be paid the highest compliment in a Greek city of Asia Minor when he was taken for the god Hermes. His violent rebuttal of the intended compliment raised some trouble, and the Apostle came near to becoming himself submerged in a stone-heap.

  In the Western world the god had a great vogue under his mercantile name of Mercury, being especially popular in Gaul, where he was the most important god of all. The same applies to those small parts of Germany which came under Roman influence, for in them Hermes-Mercury was identified with the great Teutonic god Wodanaɀ (Norse, Odinn; Old English, Wōden), and his name-day is therefore Wednesday. At the eastern end of the Roman Empire another transformation occurred. Because earlier Greeks had once equated the Egyptian god of letters, Thoth, with Hermes, certain Gnostic writers of the third century A.D. with a mystical devotion to Thoth invented for him the title of ‘Thrice-great Hermes’, which had, however, no true association whatsoever with the humorous, kindly Greek deity, messenger of Olympian Zeus, herald, guide of souls and of the lonely traveller, guardian of the home—perhaps the most loved of them all.

  VI—APHRODITE

  IN the introductory chapter reference was made to the effort required by modern men and women to adjust themselves to the Greek point of view in order to sense the reality of ancient Greek belief in personal deities. For many of us, at certain periods of our lives, when we find or have found our whole beings obsessed, to the exclusion of all else, with passionate and unfulfilled desire for the bodily presence of another, it has seemed as though some external daimonic force held us in thrall. It is then that we hesitate to ascribe the erotic enslavement of our minds to an Almighty and All-merciful God, perhaps because we still sense within us some of the happier Paganism of our own remote ancestors. Therefore we may resort to symbolic allusions concerning the bow of Cupid or the arrows of Eros, or—employing her Latin name—to the unconquerable power of his mother, Venus. In fact, many of us, for at least some periods of our lives, still believe in Aphrodite, though hardly with that intensity known to the ancient Greeks.

  There will be something to say a little later about her origin, but for the moment it is important to set on record the dual meaning of her name, which can conveniently be expressed by the manner of spelling it either with a capital or with a small initial. A Greek got the meaning from the context; but for us it is useful to write ‘Aphrodite’ when the goddess is intended, and aphrodite when we mean sexual union, the word having been employed in both senses by the Greeks.

  Of all the Twelve Olympians she is the most alarming and the most alluring, so much so that many writers have tended to edge away from a discussion of her. It is not that people write against Aphrodite, but rather that they avoid her as a topic, as though there were fear in their hearts of offending. But in this present time, when Western civilisation is witnessing great changes in the conventional attitude to the relations of the sexes, when the Registrar-General’s Statistical Review showed as long ago as 1939 that one bride in every six was pregnant on her wedding-day—in such a time as this present age it is far easier to write naturally about aphrodite and to achieve some understanding of the ancient Greeks’ attitude to the powerful goddess. Today we are free to recognise the reality which informs all that she stands for, free to recall that, while most men can remember acts of folly and of careless hurt performed in her service, most men and women have likewise been made aware of mystical experiences in the deeds of love. Some there are who have learnt that the deepest pleasures are those which are both subjective and objective at the same moment. This moment is then timeless and appertains to eternity. The only true rewards are imagination merged in reality and, simultaneously, reality merged in imagination. These are the mystical things of the body—as well as of the soul—which Aphrodite has to offer. Indeed, the view is tenable that only one who has in youth and maturity known temperate experience of aphrodite and who has always looked on pleasure as something to be given to another is qualified to write of the mystical splendour of love, even as in his old age Pindar, the greatest lyric poet of his day, once wrote when celebrating the gentle votaries of the goddess in ancient Corinth.{47} By the fifth century B.C. some such attitude to aphrodite had been adopted by many Greeks. But it is not to be forgotten that their concern with sex was moderate and occasional, and that since it was not mixed up in their minds with ideas of sin, they were less preoccupied therewith than were people in subsequent ages. For Greeks in this context self-denial was as much of a perversion as self-indulgence, since both are evidence of excess.

  Leaving the fifth century, we may now move back to contemplate a remoter past and to consider what is known about the origins of Aphrodite.

  Long before the Olympians were established in the affections of the Greeks, an older religion, based on a society of a very different kind, had centred on the worship of a Great Goddess{48} whose cult existed in Iran, Babylonia, Anatolia, Syria, and Cyprus as well as in Greek lands. Her name took various forms such as Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Astarte, and her spouse was addressed as Bel or Baal, meaning ‘Lord’. A feminine form of that title was Baalath, Bilit, or Milit, meaning ‘Lady’, which came into Greek as ‘Mylitta’, about whom the historian Herodotus had much to say. In Babylon it was a social rule that every girl once in her life must go to the temple of the goddess and whatever her status must sit down with the other women.

  And there are always many women there; for some come, as others go. And thoroughfares marked with the line extend in every direction among the women, along which the strangers pass and make their choice. And whensoever a woman sitteth down there, she departeth not home before a stranger cast money in her lap and lie with her inside the temple. And as he casteth in the money, needs must he say this much: I adjure thee by the goddess Mylitta. And the money is of any amount; for a woman will never reject it; (for that is not allowed her for the money is sacred;) but she followeth him that first casteth money in her lap, despising no man. But when he hath lain with her, she hath performed her duty to the goddess, and departeth home; and thereafter thou canst not give her anything so great as will entice her.{49}

  What is, from the Greek point of view, important here is that Herodotus goes on with the remark: “Now there is a custom very like this in some parts of Cyprus also.”

  Aphrodite was ‘the Cyprian’; she was ‘the Paphian’, named after the famous city of Paphos, where she—the foam-born goddess—first landed from the sea. Primitive images there showed her naked like the images in Babylon of Ishtar, and in Syria of Astarte, and the girls of Cyprus performed the same duty in her honour. The dove—most amorous of creatures—was her sacred bird. From the flourishing, part-Semitic, part-Greek island of Cyprus her worship was transferred, certainly by Phoenicians, to Cythera, an island off Southern Peloponnesus. In the Iliad Aphrodite is called ‘Cypris’; in the Odyssey a little later ‘Cytherea’; and at last her cult was established in one of the greatest and most flourishing of Greek states, Corinth, perhaps as late as the eighth century B.C. Long before, in the Bronze Age, the early Greeks had some knowledge of a goddess of similar type derived from Astarte, for in a shaft-grave at Mycenæ little gold repoussé images made about 1500 B.C. were found representing a naked goddess with doves.{50} But the introduction to a Dorian Greek city-state like Corinth of a specialised—though
modified—kind of fertility religion was something unique and probably rather sudden; and though the precise circumstances of the introduction are not known, there can be little doubt that the peculiar religious practice came from a partly Phoenician place like Cyprus. It involved a dedicating of aphrodite in honour of Aphrodite, goddess of procreation, supreme deity in the state of Corinth. This special form of devotion and duty done to the goddess once by every girl in Babylon and in Paphos was something which could not be fitted into the Greek social pattern, rooted in the family and patriarchal in type. Nevertheless, the character of the goddess—and men would never dare to thwart her primæval nature—required feminine dedication and self-abnegation. Aphrodite needed her ‘religious’, her servants who ‘professed’ their devotion; and a girl might find her happiness as a mystical handmaid of the goddess. For what happened was that the Corinthian State handed over the cult-duty to ‘professionals’ who lived for long years in the precinct of Aphrodite, high up on the splendid summit of Acrocorinthus, not down in the city itself. If their profession automatically involved unchastity, they none the less practised ‘poverty’, since what they earned went into the coffers of their ‘Order’. For that reason the girls of Corinthian Aphrodite were not despised among the ancient Greeks, who were prone to the same heartless and flippant attitude towards ordinary prostitutes which has been the mark of ancient Roman, medieval, and modern men.

  The large numbers of girls who lived on Acrocorinthus were not slaves, for slavery, it seems, was frowned on anyhow, since Periander, despot of Corinth about 600 B.C., passed a law against it. Some were of the free-citizen class, like certain girls mentioned by Athenæus,{51} others, who had been purchased by donors, were automatically freed by being given to the goddess, whose ministers they became. Those who found a protector might leave the ‘Order’, exchanging security for adventure. Nowadays women, even more than men, quest after both security and happiness. Yet these states of mind cannot co-exist, save for a very brief period. Security soon entails boredom, a major form of unhappiness; happiness calls for excitement and adventure—things incompatible with security. But one thing the girls of Aphrodite did receive, and that was honour, being hymned by very great poets. Whenever in a grave crisis the city of Corinth ordered a national day of prayer to the goddess the Government would invite as many of these girls as possible to join in with their petitions, adding their supplications and being present at the sacrifices. Accordingly, when the great invasion of the Persians occurred, threatening to enslave all Greece, the Corinthian girls entered the temple of Aphrodite and prayed for the salvation of the Greeks. Hence, when the Corinthians dedicated in honour of the goddess a bronze tablet on Acrocorinthus, they inscribed upon it the name of every girl who had made supplication upon that day, and the great Simonides wrote them an epigram:

  For the Greeks and for their hard-fighting armies

  These girls stood forth to pray to the Lady Cypris.

  And Aphrodite willed that none should betray

  To Persian archers this Citadel of Hellas.

  Not long after this an even more famous poet, Pindar, wrote an ode{52} for a number of Corinthian girls, when in 464 B.C. a rich citizen named Xenophon won two events at the Olympic Games after having promised his city-goddess a present of twenty-five girls should he be successful. It is an enchanting little poem, deep in its knowledge of love’s fragility, light in its gentle mockery of his solemn self in unaccustomed role, and in the conceit of five and twenty girls as a hundred limbs for aphrodite.

  Young hospitable girls, beguiling creatures in wealthy Corinth,

  You who burn the amber tears of fresh frankincense

  Full often soaring upward in your souls to Aphrodite,

  Heavenly Mother of loves;

  To you, girls, she has granted

  Blamelessly upon lovely beds

  To cull the blossom of delicate bloom;

  For under love’s necessity all things are fine.

  Yet I wonder whatever the lords of Corinth will be saying

  Of me——!

  Devising as I am a prelude to sweet song

  All for the pleasure of anybody’s girls!

  But we’ve tested their gold with a pure touchstone.

  O Lady of Cyprus! Hither to your sanctuary.

  Xenophon has brought fillies—

  A hundred limbs of girls—

  Glad for the fulfilment of his vows.

  Within the orbit of Hellenic influence there was another sanctuary which seems to have had much in common with that of Acrocorinthus. It was on a mountain named Eryx in Western Sicily. From Lechaion, seaport of Corinth, to Aphrodite’s sanctuary on the summit, 1,886 feet above sea-level, is nearly two-and-a-half hours’ walk; and from the ancient Sicilian port of Drepanon to the top of Mount Eryx, 2,465 feet over sea-level, the ascent takes a good three hours. A temple on the summit and a great sanctuary peopled by professional girls completed the parallel, though the goddess was variously named according to the race of people in control of Western Sicily. At first, when Carthaginians held it, she was called Astarte; in the fifth century B.C., when a Greek coinage was minted there and Greeks possessed Eryx, she was named Aphrodite; lastly, when Sicily became a Roman Province she was known as Venus Erycina, whom the Romans, despite their strong taint of puritanism, greatly respected.

  In other Greek states the worship of Aphrodite does not appear to have taken on the special character of the cults at Paphos, Corinth, and Eryx, but to have been more akin to the cults of goddesses like Hera and Athene, so that she might figure as a powerful protectress of cities. Even in Cyprus one statue of her held a spear; in Thebes, Sparta, and Smyrna she was armed, and in Argos dubbed ‘bringer of victory’. Her favourite title in Athens was Aphrodite Pandemos, whereby she was raised to the level of Zeus Pandemos with an honourable epithet meaning ‘of the whole people’, and it represented the highest political idea to which the goddess attained. Plato, in the Symposium,{53} put a philosophical interpretation upon this title, treating it as representing common love, which he wanted to contrast with another title of Aphrodite’s, Ourania, that was to symbolise intellectual love. Plato, who knew the facts as well as his listeners did, never intended this to be more than a jeu d’esprit; but when later readers took it in all seriousness some confusion ensued. The real origin of her name Ourania will emerge when the myths about the goddess are related.

  In art Aphrodite appears in early times as a naked goddess standing; or else draped, seated, and holding a dove; while in the fifth century sculptors amused themselves by representing her in thin transparent clothing. But in the fourth century B.C. a new and apparently sensational type was created by the famous sculptor Praxiteles, who showed the goddess naked, dropping her garment over a vase before taking her bath. This statue was the inspiration of many others in which the motif varied, and among them is a lovely bronze (Plate X) now in the city of Providence. But the original by Praxiteles elicited the highest praise of all from that industrious Roman polymath, the Elder Pliny.

  The Aphrodite, to see which many have sailed to Knidos, is the finest statue not only by Praxiteles, but in the whole world. He had made and was offering for sale two figures of Aphrodite, one whose form was draped, and which was therefore preferred by the people of Kos—to whom the choice of either figure was offered at the same price—as the more chaste and severe, while the other which they rejected was bought by the Knidians, and became immeasurably more celebrated. King Nikomedes wished to buy it from the Knidians, and offered to discharge the whole debt of the city, which was enormous: but they preferred to undergo the worst, and justly so, for by that statue Praxiteles made Knidos famous. The shrine which contains it is quite open, so that the image, made, as is believed, under the direct inspiration of the goddess, can be seen from all sides: and from all sides it is equally admired.{54}

  In the sculpture galleries of the Vatican a later but ancient copy of this celebrated figure is preserved, its nether limbs swathed in modern, m
etal, whitewashed drapes.

  The myths about Aphrodite are complicated by the fact that there is more than one story of her divine parentage. Some account has already been given in the chapter on Zeus{55} of a collection of grisly tales now known to derive from an ancient Hurrian and Hittite civilisation in Central Asia Minor and to have been composed by priestly theologians about 1500 B.C. Some of these tales got into Greek myth, and a dynasty of Hittite gods named Anu, Kumarbi, and Teshub was equated with the Greek Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus. Kumarbi attacked his father Anu and deprived him of his manhood, which, falling upon the goddess Earth, made her pregnant, and one of the children was a girl.{56} In the Greek variant the seed of Ouranos fell into the sea, causing foam—Greek aphros—from which Aphrodite was born, and she stepped on to land at Paphos in Cyprus. Thus, because she was sprung from Ouranos, who is the heavens, she was called Ourania or ‘Heavenly’ Aphrodite. This myth arose in Cyprus, an island part Phœnician, part Greek, and the Phœnicians had certainly derived much of their theology from their Hittite neighbours. From Cyprus it passed into Greek lore and was accepted by the poet Hesiod, who was better as a farmer than as an exponent of exalted notions of godhead.