So I've talked about a lot of Greek myths on this channel
and I don't know if you guys have noticed but Aphrodite kind of shows up in a lot of them.
It's actually a little weird if you think about it.
She's this fickle, temperamental force that just kind of shows up and causes chaos.
She's a bit of a ditz who would literally murder people to maintain her OTPs and NOTPs.
She's a doting mother,
an unfaithful spouse,
a benevolent boon granter,
and a really sadistic punisher of perceived slights.
She's confusing is what she is.
What the heck is her deal?
So before we go trekking through historical context to try and figure out why she's like this,
let's put together everything we know about Aphrodite at this point.
(BABYYYY)
Aphrodite's most well-known birth story involves her spontaneously arising
fully formed from the sea foam kicked up by Ouranos' castrated balls
and drifting ashore on to the island of Kythera which she then made her home.
It's generally agreed on that Aphrodite was never a child
as she represents adult love and sexuality.
So, she just spontaneously appears all grown up
which is good because the alternative is pretty gross.
Grosser than the balls thing.
Now first off, Aphrodite has a big role in the Iliad
as she's almost single-handedly responsible for kicking off the Trojan War.
For those unfamiliar with the premise,
Eris, the goddess of discord, gets pissed when she's not invited to Achilles' parents' wedding,
so she hucks a golden apple at the Olympians and says it's for the hottest goddess.
Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena got all hung up on the competition and,
recognizing that there was no safe answer to that particular question,
Zeus fobs the responsibility off on this random Trojan kid, Paris.
The three goddesses appeared Paris and tell him to choose which of them is the fairest.
And to sweeten the deal each goddess also offers him a gift/bribe.
Hera offers to make him the ruler of all of Europe and Asia,
Athena offers him wisdom and hecking sweet battle tactics,
and Aphrodite says she'll give him the most beautiful woman in the world.
Paris picks the hot lady option, Aphrodite claims her prize, and gives Paris what she promised him:
Helen of Troy, who happens to be married already, to the volatile Spartan King Menelaus,
and is additionally the subject of a giant treaty ordering pretty much every Greek king under the Sun
to side with her husband if anything bad happens.
So this divine kidnapping unsurprisingly kicks off the Trojan War
and puts Hera and Athena firmly on the opposing side from Paris
which, let's be real, having the goddesses of rulership and battle tactics opposing you in a war is not a good thing.
So at this point Aphrodite has claimed a hottest trophy by throwing a cute couple together
with no regard for the potential repercussions
and kicked off a war as the direct result.
Great.
This portrays her as flighty and impulsive with a general disregard for consequence.
Aphrodite plays a major role again in the Aeneid
where she serves as a source of regular divine intervention for her son Aeneas,
but is at one point goaded by Hera into setting up Aeneas with Queen Dido
and distracting him from his divine Rome founding quests in the process.
Zeus intervenes, Aeneas leaves Dido, and Dido kills herself as a result.
In this story, Aphrodite demonstrates an unrelenting loyalty to her son
but ends up self sabotaging when her shipping reflexes get too strong and she sets off a romantic subplot.
Aphrodite's protective mother side comes into focus again in the myth of Eros and Psyche
where her son Eros falls in love with the ludicrously beautiful Psyche,
and Aphrodite gets super huffy about it.
First sheltering and then imprisoning Eros in her palace
and putting Psyche through deadly trials to try and get rid of her.
This Aphrodite is both jealous and ruthless. Her initial dislike of Psyche is prompted by the fact that
Psyche's beauty has prompted some locals to start worshipping Psyche instead of Aphrodite.
And her many tasks for Psyche seems less "prove yourself" and more "just die already".
Aphrodite may be a protective mother, but she's far from a loyal spouse.
Though technically married to Hephaestus in most myths,
she has a well known habit of sleeping with Ares
because Hephaestus is all grody from having been thrown off Olympus
and hitting every branch on the ugly tree on the way down.
So Aphrodite is not big on marital responsibilities.
She also has a habit of taking mortal lovers she thinks are cute, which is how Aeneas happens.
Aphrodite is terrible at managing her own relationships
but she does like helping other people with theirs.
In the myths of both Pygmalion and Atalanta,
Aphrodite responds to the prayers of a pining dude unlucky in love and blesses him with something to help him.
In Atalanta's case, she gives Hippomenes the enchanted golden apples he uses to win the race,
and in Pygmalion's case, she brings his statue waifu Galatea to life.
But on the flip side
Aphrodite is really unhappy when people actively avoid relationships,
which shows up most strongly in the myth of Hippolytus,
a rare male hunter of Artemis who did the classic-Artemis-hunter thing
of staying single and refusing to mingle.
This pissed off Aphrodite so much that she made Hippolytus' stepmother, Phaedra, fall in love with him
and when he rejected her advances, she told his father, Theseus, he'd assaulted her, then killed herself.
Theseus calls in a favor from Poseidon and has Hippolytus killed in retribution.
It's a really nasty situation.
Now there's a ton of myths about Aphrodite I haven't talked about
but they all generally fall into one of these categories:
Aphrodite sleeps around,
Aphrodite gets pissed and ruins someone's life,
Aphrodite thinks the ship is cute and makes it canon no matter the consequences,
and Aphrodite is a very overprotective mother.
So now that we've got something of a concrete feel
for where Aphrodite's character was at by the time of classical Greece,
let's start talking about how she got that way.
(epic music)
Now like I talked about in the Dionysus video, before ancient Greece got going around the 700s BC,
there were two major historical intervals that are relevant to this kind of thing.
Mycenaean Greece, between the 1600s and 1100s BC,
and the post Bronze Age collapse Greek Dark Ages filling in the centuries in between.
We don't have any written records from the Dark Ages,
but in that intervening period, all the gods got shuffled around,
Poseidon got demoted from head god and Zeus got to be in charge,
and the Mycenaean syllabic script, Linear B was replaced by the basically Phoenician Greek alphabet.
Linear B only got properly translated in the last few decades,
but using that we've been able to find written records of a lot of the Hellenistic gods from Mycenaean Greece
like Zeus, Dionysus, Persephone, etc, meaning they predated ancient Greece
and were worshipped in the precursor culture of Mycenaean Greece
and carried over through the Dark Ages.
Again, like I mentioned in the Dionysus video,
Mycenaean Greece was the ancient Greece of ancient Greece.
Ancient Greek culture deliberately presented itself as a successor to Mycenaean Greece,
with the Iliad and the Odyssey codified in the 700s BC in ancient Greece but set in Mycenaean Greece.
There was a lot of rollover and, as we discussed, Dionysus was one of the rollover gods.
He was worshipped in an obscure cult capacity in Mycenaean Greece
and carried on through the Dark Ages into Ancient Greece proper.
But if we go looking for Aphrodite's name in ye olde Mycenaean inscriptions, we come up empty.
Aphrodite is not a Mycenaean goddess.
So, where did she come from?
Since Aphrodite isn't Mycenaean but is very relevant in the Iliad, one of the oldest ancient Greek texts we have,
this gives us a concrete interval to look in for when she first showed up
and/or when she became an established member of the Pantheon.
She can't have been very relevant before the 1100s and she can't be newer than 700.
Honestly, she really can't be newer than 900 as Homer didn't write the Iliad, he just wrote it down.
It'd most likely already been codified in oral tradition for a century or two.
So let's put a pin in this for a minute and talk about the Phoenician goddess, Astarte.
(Dangerous Woman~)
Astarte is a Phoenician goddess of fertility, sex, war, and the planet Venus.
References to her name first appear in the port city of Ugarit between 1450 and 1200 BC,
and there's evidence that her cult moved out along Phoenician trade routes,
which reached the eastern tip of Crete.
There was also a Phoenician settlement on the island of Kythera sometime in the 1400s BC.
And if the name Kythera is ringing any bells,
it's the mythological realm of Aphrodite and the home to her oldest temple,
as well as the place she supposedly first came to shore after being born from sea foam,
making it a very simple leap to suppose that this is a mythological representation of her cult
coming from across the sea and making landfall there.
Also, like I mentioned right at the beginning,
the Phoenician alphabet was brought to Greece sometime around the Dark Ages.
And it's not so unreasonable that the Phoenicians might have brought some other info with them,
like a nifty cult for example.
So the general consensus is that the Phoenician cult of Astarte came to Greece,
specifically Kythera, most likely in the 1400s.
Astarte became Aphrodite, and in the intervening centuries, her worship spread
until by the time the Iliad was being taught, she'd been firmly emplaced as a member of the Pantheon.
Sure, that's cool.
Um, Astarte is also Ishtar.
(YEAH-YEAH!)
Ishtar is the Mesopotamian goddess of love, sex, fertility,
beauty, war, justice, political power, the planet Venus, and a bunch of other stuff.
She was worshipped from 4000 BC onward and saw a major jump in popularity around 2300 BC.
You may remember her from her appearance in the Underworld Myths video
where she quests into the underworld to retrieve her boyfriend, Tammuz,
and comes into conflict with Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld.
So it might fascinate you to know that Aphrodite has a very similar myth.
In the story of Adonis,
Aphrodite finds the orphaned infant Adonis and gives him to Persephone to be raised in the underworld.
That part is pretty unique, but when Adonis grows up to be super hot,
Aphrodite and Persephone end up getting into a fight over who gets to keep him.
And while Persephone has no relation to Ereshkigal,
her status as queen of the underworld slots her into the appropriate mythological role perfectly.
I'm not crazy, by the way.
Tammuz had his own cult and it got imported to Greece under the name Adonis.
This is a legit connection.
So Aphrodite, a goddess of sex, love, beauty, and the planet Venus,
comes from Astarte, a goddess of all of the above plus war,
and Astarte comes from Ishtar, a goddess of all of the above plus justice and power.
That's not too crazy.
Astarte makes landfall in Kythera when her cult travels up along trade routes.
At this point, we've got a couple questions presenting themselves to us.
Where did her cult go next?
And if Ishtar and Astarte are so strongly war goddesses,
then why is Aphrodite totally not a war goddess?
I'll answer both those questions at once.
The next place she went was Sparta,
and she was absolutely a war goddess.
(war music)
So Kythera is this little island right about here-ish.
Sparta is about here-ish.
Unsurprisingly, given their proximity, Sparta had a habit of intermittently claiming Kythera as a territory,
and equally unsurprisingly,
some of that OG Phoenician cult attitude seems to have leaked through
whenever Sparta was in the area.
Sparta is also one of the oldest cities in ancient Greece.
So when you put that all together,
you get the fact that Sparta pretty much got the first good look at this brand new goddess,
and judging by the statues they carved and the way she was worshipped,
Aphrodite was a full-on war god back when she first made landfall.
Now unsurprisingly, a goddess of beauty and sex simultaneously being a goddess of war
was unlikely to bother the Spartans because you know, Spartans.
But the rest of Greece didn't seem too keen on the concept.
Apparently it was considered an inherent contradiction in values.
The warlike Aphrodite is found almost exclusively on Kythera and in Sparta.
And it's worth noting that in the Iliad, Zeus explicitly tells Aphrodite that she doesn't belong on the battlefield,
which is the kind of overt character interaction that contemporary writers like to use
to make firm political statements on controversial subjects.
The fact that it needed to be stated at all implies it might have been something of a debate at the time.
Anyway, this warlike Aphrodite, while probably the oldest Aphrodite,
isn't the most popular Aphrodite in ancient Greece.
As her worship spread, her image changed, which wasn't uncommon but is still very interesting.
But before we go further in that direction to explore how she was worshipped,
we got to talk about two things: mythological inconsistencies and divine epithets.
(( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)) (Kiss with a fist is better than none~)
See, here's this problem: Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries
and they both wrote about Aphrodite's birth.
But their accounts are contradictory.
In the Iliad, Homer says Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and the Titaness Dione.
But in Hesiod's Theogony, Aphrodite is supposedly the motherless child of Ouranos
born from the sea foam around his severed testicles after Kronos overthrows and castrates him.
Also, fun fact,
this is an adaption of another Ishtar myth,
wherein one Hittite story of her birth,
the god Kumarbi overthrows his father, the sky god Anu,
and bites off his testicles,
then becomes pregnant with and gives birth to Ishtar.
Amazingly, the bath bomb ball sack is the less disturbing version of the legend.
Anyway, obviously these birth stories disagree,
so what's an ancient Greek philosopher to do to resolve the conflict?
Well,
if you're Socrates, Plato, or Xenophon philosophizing in the 300 to 400 BC,
you solve the problem by codifying two distinct Aphrodite's.
This is where the epithets come in.
( A little bit of Monika in my li- :D)
Now most gods have epithets.
Pallas Athena and Phoebus Apollo are well-known examples.
And most gods also had regional epithets,
where in specific areas they'd have these epithets appended to the deity's name
to describe what capacity they were being worshipped in.
Consider Hera Alexandros, an epithet meaning defender of men,
only used in Sicyon that reflects a side of Hera that's very rarely seen in the general narrative.
Anyway, in Aphrodite's case,
she had three major epithets that, instead of being regional variants,
almost got treated as three distinct gods.
The first of those is Aphrodite Areia, the warlike Aphrodite worshipped in Sparta,
and, to a certain extent, Kythera.
The others are two of a pair.
Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos.
See, that whole contradictory Aphrodite birth story things seems like it should be a real pain in the butt
but it actually lent itself well to an elegant solution to a few problems with Aphrodite.
As we've already covered, Aphrodite is not the most internally consistent character personality-wise.
Sometimes she's benevolent and kind.
Sometimes she's petty and cruel.
This is not unexpected from a divine representation
of something as fickle and potentially both amazing and thoroughly miserable as love,
but a lot of fifth and fourth century BC philosophers
weren't content with Aphrodite being a sort of nebulous, internally inconsistent entity.
They wanted something concrete,
so they split her in half.
( romantic music )
The benevolent more, quote-unquote, "divine" half of her character went to Aphrodite Urania,
who also got the motherless child of Ouranos birth story.
Aphrodite Urania was presented as an embodiment of celestial love and beauty,
without all that icky physical attraction stuff lumped in with it.
Although take this description with a grain of salt
as it was partially codified by Christian interpreters who had a habit of distancing sex from divinity
and highlighting purity as a divine trade in contrast with profanity,
so it's not clear how much of this is the legit Greek angle
and how much is Christianity lumping her in with the Virgin Mary?
Which, yes, is a thing they did.
It seems a little more likely to me that any personality splitting Aphrodite Urania experienced
probably fell along Greek love lines like the separation between eros, storge, philia, mania, etc,
rather than distancing physical sexual attraction from pure divine love
but who knows? Aphrodite Urania was widely worshipped in various cults
but she almost never turns up in the mythology proper. There aren't really many stories about her.
The rest of her character went to Aphrodite Pandemos, almost literally the people's Aphrodite.
Aphrodite Pandemos was the child of Zeus and Dione,
and was ascribed the more physical side of love aka the more carnal and less pure kind.
Again, not necessarily a fully accurate description but it's kind of all we got.
This Aphrodite is flighty, petty, willful, and impulsive.
She does what she wants, when she wants, no matter the consequences.
This is the Aphrodite whose name turns up in the literature.
Now, here's a very interesting thing to consider when examining Aphrodite Pandemos.
It was actually very rare for an Olympian god to be worshipped by everybody.
Looking back on ancient Greece as though it were a cohesive unit,
it's easy to think that because it had a concrete Pantheon, everyone worshipped everyone.
But in practice, most of the gods were fairly specialized.
They'd be honored on their festival days obviously, but, well, for example, unless you're a blacksmith or craftsman
Hephaestus is unlikely to be super relevant to your everyday life.
Zeus is the major exception,
as evinced by his Panhellenios epithet denoting him as a god of the whole Hellenistic world.
But Aphrodite is pretty much the only other god who seems to have been relevant to almost everybody.
And it makes sense; there aren't many people for whom love, sex, and beauty don't matter.
So Aphrodite Pandemos is in this rare divine position of being directly relevant to nearly everybody
and this didn't go unnoticed by the greater Hellinistic world.
One of her explicit divine qualities was the ability to bring large groups of people together,
and if you think that seems like it could be a politically useful divine quality, you'd be right.
(Who run the world?~) (Beyonce?)
Aphrodite Pandemos' everyman appeal was mythically leverage by Theseus during the founding of Athens
as he used her influence to unite scattered and disconnected townships under one banner.
Aphrodite Pandemos was worshipped in Athens as a result,
but her pseudo-leadership position didn't end there.
See, around the 200s BC, a little something called the Roman Empire started getting really important,
and in case you forgot,
Aphrodite's son Aeneas was pretty instrumental to that whole debacle, mythically speaking.
And that means Aphrodite,
or Venus as the Romans called her, syncretizing her with a local small-time fertility goddess,
was from a certain perspective the mother of Rome itself, known as Venus Genetrix.
Julius Caesar was big into the cult of Venus, and even claimed to be descended from Aeneas himself.
So suddenly Venus has all this motherhood symbolism attached to her, along with a lot of political clout.
And this flowed backwards from Venus's characterization to Aphrodite,
who the Greeks began portraying with maternal symbolism
as well as rather more militaristic and political clout than she'd had before.
This is also around the time that Eros began to be portrayed as her son.
In earlier myths, he was one of her attendants
but they weren't outright related until it began to fit her new image.
Aphrodite's mythical role as protective mother was firmly established around this time,
and since Rome was also in the process of eating Egypt,
she was occasionally syncretized with Isis and Hathorne,
both goddesses with themes of motherhood fertility and political power.
Aphrodite ended up with a lot of political and military clout pretty much by accident.
A few centuries down the line in roughly the 300s AD, Rome decided it didn't like paganism anymore
and kind of threw Aphrodite and all her icky sex symbolism under the bus,
wrecking a few of her temples.
But you're not fooling me, Rome,
we both know Genetrix knows best.
Gotta say, I do think it's really interesting that
even though Aphrodite had her Ishtar based war connections
pretty aggressively stripped away when she arrived in Greece,
she still ended up kind of gaining them back through Rome.
And also made her debut in the first place by being directly responsible
for the biggest war in Greek mythos history.
I guess you can take the war out of the goddess,
but you can't take the goddess out of the war.
*singing* Jolene, Jolene,
Jolene, Jolene~
I'm begging of you. Please don't take my man.
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene~
Please don't take him just because you can.
Your beauty is beyond compare with flaming locks of auburn hair with ivory skin and eyes of emerald green.
Your smile is like a breath of spring,
your voice is soft like summer rain
and I cannot compete with you, Jolene~
[Dolly Parton - Jolene]