Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video, we’re going to discuss Adonis:
one of the most - if not the most - handsome man in Greek mythology, a man who was born from
a sappy womb encased in the trunk of a tree, a man with whom Aphrodite was infatuated, a man
doomed to fall well before grey flecked his hair or the lines left by long years etched his skin.
Let’s get into it.
Adonis’ name has become synonymous with male beauty, but despite this and despite the fact
that he had goddesses fighting over him, his life was one more so characterised by tragedy
than by favour and fortune. His story can basically be boiled-down to three parts:
his conception, his birth and his death. In short, his mother, after being impregnated by her father,
is transformed into a tree; Adonis then emerges from her bark-crusted body,
only to live a short while before a hunting mishap costs him his life. This, of course,
is terribly truncated, but it does provide the bare bones and
should function as a sort of guiding star for the longer version to come.
Adonis was the son of the princess Smyrna, the beautiful daughter of king Theias,
who ruled Assyria. Many suitors lined up in hopes of winning Smyrna’s heart, but for one reason
or another, none of them could. Rejection after rejection ensued, and they mounded up like love
letters crumbled and discarded by some pining soul severed from its other half. They accumulated and
then culminated - not in the finding of a husband - but in provoking Aphrodite’s Wrath. You see,
as the goddess of love, each rejection was an affront to her very being, and eventually, after
so many suitors had been turned away, the goddess could not help but lash out, feeling so deeply
scorned as she was. She cast a spell of love on Smyrna’s mind, and in an especially cruel turn,
it was none other than king Theias who was made the object of his own daughter’s lustful love.
Smyrna surreptitiously slipped into her father’s chambers during the night,
using the cover of darkness to hide her identity. Then, because the thought of his own daughter
sneaking into his own room to seduce him was so outlandish that it never crossed his mind,
the king unwittingly took to bed and impregnated his own daughter. In another version, Smyrna,
unable to bear the shame of lusting after her own father, attempted to hang herself,
but her nursemaid walked in on her, stopped her, and then, after discovering what the problem was,
actually helped Smyrna trick and bed her own father. Regardless of the version, the fallout
of the incestuous encounter precipitated a chain of events that forced Smyrna to flee her home.
Once the sin she perpetrated became known, taking flight with the greatest of haste was
all she could do to escape the murderous rage that had consumed her father’s mind.
Racing away from the city, Smyrna was haunted by what she had done.
The perversion of it was such that she felt like a stain that needed to be scoured.
She begged the gods to grant her salvation and end her suffering. In response,
the gods offered succour in an unconventional manner: they transformed her into a tree,
in which form she constantly wept tears of resin. Though she was now of root and trunk and branch,
a life still grew inside her, a life implanted by the loins of her own father, so after months
of gestation, a son, infant Adonis, emerged from the bark-clad bosom in which he had grown like
a secret seed. In other versions it was either the thrust of a knife by Smyrna’s father or the
piercing tusks of a boar that released Adonis from the tree, each of them like some crude C-section.
Either because she was guilt-ridden for striking out with too sharp a punishment,
or because she was enamoured with Adonis from the moment he emerged from his mother’s sappy womb,
Aphrodite swaddled the infant boy and delivered him to Persephone, queen of the underworld,
to shelter him, but to Aphrodite’s dismay, Persephone also became infatuated with Adonis
upon first sight so that she refused to give the boy up when Aphrodite returned to claim him.
A third party had to step in and arbitrate how custody would be shared,
and depending on the version, it was either Zeus or Calliope, one of the nine Muses,
who sat in judgement. It was decided that Adonis would spend a third of his time with Persephone,
a third of his time with Aphrodite, and retain a third of his time to spend how he wished.
Aphrodite was so smitten with Adonis that she left the comforts of her lavish life behind,
deciding instead to accompany Adonis into the wilds. She tried to keep her lover safe, but alas,
she could not. Despite being warned of myriad dangers - of fang, tusk, and claw - Adonis still
set his prowess as a hunter against the fierce beasts that abounded in the surrounding wilds.
On one excursion, his one spear thrust wasn’t enough to stop the boar that charged him.
He was gored by the tusks that lanced towards him. The wounds were so grievous
that he perished only a short time afterwards. Not even Aphrodite’s healing could save him.
While many of the details from many of the versions weren’t included in this video,
let’s spend a moment covering the array of accounts that explain how and why Adonis died.
The simplest, which is the one just covered, is that he was overcome by a fierce and feral animal,
as has happened each year since the dawn of man. The other versions, though,
all have Adonis’ result from the contrivances of one god or another. Ares and Artemis are
each responsible for Adonis’ death in other versions. Ares, who was Aphrodite’s lover,
was filled with jealousy over all of the attention Adonis was receiving, so he transformed himself
into a boar and eviscerated Adonis, impaling him with the razor-sharp tusks that jutted from
his maw like cruel spears. Artemis, on the other hand, wasn’t driven by jealousy, but by revenge.
In the playwright Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus, Aphrodite bewitched Theseus’ wife, Phaedra,
so that she became enamoured with Theseus’ son, Hippolytus, who was a chaste hunter devoted to
Artemis. Phaedra made an advance, but was rejected, as Hippolytus was loyal to both
his father and his goddess. Out of shame, Phaedra killed herself, but not before she wrote a letter,
explaining that it was actually Hippolytus who made an advance on her, even though what she wrote
was patently false and was sure to sow enmity between father and son. Theseus read the letter,
took the words as gospel, and then invoked his father, Poseidon, to set his divine wrath against
Hippolytus. Later, while Hippolytus was driving his chariot along the shore, a bull emerged from
the waves and startled his horses. Hippolytus was thrown, dragged, and fatally injured.
An interesting aspect of Adonis’ myth is that it was the origin story for
many plants. These included the Myrrh tree, red roses, and the poppy anemone. The myrrh tree was
the tree Adonis’ mother was transformed into, and in some versions her name isn’t Smyrna, but
Myrrha, making her the tree’s namesake. Roses, which were previously white,
were said to have been dyed red by the droplets of blood that fell from Aphrodite’s foot after
a thicket of thorns pricked her as she ran to the side of wounded Adonis. Aphrodite,
to no avail, attempted to treat Adonis’ wounds with perfumed nectar. His life wasn’t saved,
but the combination of his blood and the nectar created the poppy anemone, a red poppy, one with
a beautiful, yet ephemeral, bloom, paralleling the fleeting burst that was Adonis’ own life.
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