1140: 2P

Notes on Aphrodite

I. Sex is different for everyone

A. We call her the goddess of love, but she’s actually the goddess of sex. If we

want to understand Aphrodite, we have to understand:

1. The way that sex myth works across cultures

2. The way that Ancient Greek sex worked

B. Sex is so universal that it’s very easy for us to forget that it’s also not

universal at all, but practiced in particular ways in particular cultures

1. Two practices from Ancient Greece, which we would call

homoerotic but which differ in important ways from what we call

homosexuality, illustrate this point

2. Sappho’s wonderful Prayer to Aphrodite comes from her circle of

young women, who practiced the worship of Aphrodite

a) They were also married, and some of Sappho’s songs are

wedding-songs for them

3. In Athens, ta paidika was a practice in which older men chased

younger men and had sex with them, giving them presents

a) By modern standards, it was clearly child abuse

b) In the circles in which it was approved of (notably including

Socrates, Plato, and their friends) it was thought of as an educational

relationship

c) In the circles in which it was disapproved of, it was seen as

shameful to be the passive partner (eromenos) but not nearly as

shameful to be the active one (erastes)

d) There was no expectation that men who practiced ta paidika

would not also engage in erotic practices with women

II. Aphrodite the syncretic

A. The simultaneous universality and particularity of Aphrodite makes her

to my mind the most syncretic of mythic figures

1. (remember that “syncretism” means, for our purposes: “the

harmonizing of different mythic traditions”)

2. since everyone has sex, everyone recognizes that the sex-goddess

must be the same across cultures

3. but since everyone has sex differently, there’s a ton of

conflicting material to resolve syncretically

B. The callipygian (“having a beautiful bottom”)

1. One of the most famous images of Aphrodite, the beautiful naked

woman, which is technically called the callipygian Aphrodite, originates

in an artistic syncretism

2. An ancient, naked, pudgy figure combines with

3. A clothed royal one

4. Into a naked royal figure, as sculpted by the famous Praxiteles at

the end of the 5 th Century BCE (400’s)

C. The Eastern connection

1. It’s very clear that some important parts of Aphrodite’s myth

come from Near-Eastern traditions associated with goddesses like

Cybele and Ishtar-Astarte

2. Above all, the figure of Adonis, whose name is the same as

Semitic Adonai (“lord”) links Greek myth to Near-Eastern

3. Aphrodite’s sea-born origin, whether she comes ashore on

Cythera or Cyprus, shows that she is thought to have arrived from the

East but to be a Greek goddess

III. The homeric hymn to Aphrodite

A. The hymn is about the power women have in sex

1. Zeus tries to even the score with Aphrodite by making her fall in

lust, the same way she (since she’s the embodiment of sex) is always

doing to him.

2. Which in the end just goes to show how powerful Aphrodite is

B. Anchises is terribly anxious about what happens to those who sleep with

a goddess

1. this anxiety reflects the truth-value that men are (at least in

their imaginations) both at their most powerful in sexual practice and,

right afterward, at their weakest and most vulnerable

2. That weakness exposes an anxiety one can find in our culture in a

movie like Spielberg’s “AI,” where a man kills his wife because she is

sleeping with a “mecha” (robot): men are always anxious that they

don’t know how to satisfy women

C. Women thus have much more power through Aphrodite than it would

seem

1. Unfortunately, it’s a power that depends on masculine desire

2. but at least it provides a counterpoint to the terrible misogyny of

a great deal of Greek myth