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Aphrodite: Gods
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Most beloved by Aphrodite was Adonis, the Syrian god killed by a wild boar. Born of an incestuous relationship between a king and his twelve-year-old daughter—possibly the King of Lebanon who was deceived by Princess Myrrha—Adonis was so handsome that Aphrodite and Persephone, the queen of the dead, quarrelled over his possession. Their violent dispute was brought before Zeus, who ruled that for a third part of the year Adonis was to dwell by himself; for a third part with Persephone; and for a third part with Aphrodite. Thus the Syrian god died and revived annually, while his guilty mother was turned into a tree that wept a spicy gum: myrrh.
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Aphrodite is of an older generation than Zeus. Iliad (Book V) expresses another version of her origin, by which she was considered a daughter of Dione, who was the original oracular goddess ("Dione" being simply "the goddess, the feminine form of Δíος, "Dios", the genitive of Zeus) at Dodona. In Homer, Aphrodite, venturing into battle to protect her son, Aeneas, is wounded by Diomedes and returns to her mother, to sink down at her knee and be comforted. "Dione" seems to be an equivalent of Rhea, the Earth Mother, whom Homer has relocated to Olympus, and refers back to a hypothesized original Proto-Indo-European pantheon, with the chief male god (Di-) represented by the sky and thunder, and the chief female god (feminine form of Di-) represented as the earth or fertile soil. Aphrodite herself was sometimes referred to as "Dione". Once the worship of Zeus had usurped the oak-grove oracle at Dodona, some poets made him out to be the father of Aphrodite.
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It was as if everyone recognized that Aphrodite had one gift and one gift only . . . to make love. And that one gift was so special that no one seemed to resent it. While all the other gods and goddesses had lengthy lists of divine duties to perform, the goddess Aphrodite was assigned only one . . . to bring love into the world.
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During the Trojan war, Aphrodite, the mother of Aeneas, who had been declared the most beautiful of all the goddesses by a Trojan prince, naturally sided with the Trojans. She saved Paris from his contest with Menelaus (Il. iii. 380), but when she endeavoured to rescue her darling Aeneas from the fight, she was pursued by Diomedes, who wounded her in her hand. In her fright she abandoned her son, and was carried by Iris in the chariot of Ares to Olympus, where she complained of her misfortune to her mother Dione, but was laughed at by Hera and Athena. (Il.
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Once Adonis was born, Aphrodite took him under her wing, seducing him with the help of Helene, her friend, and was entranced by his unearthly beauty. She gave him to Persephone to watch over, but Persephone was ... amazed at his beauty and refused to give him back. The argument between the two goddess' was settled either by Zeus or Calliope, with Adonis spending four months with Aphrodite, four months with Persephone and four months of the years with whomever he chose. He always chose Aphrodite because Persephone was the cold, unfeeling goddess of the underworld.
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This oriental Aphrodite was worshipped as the bestower of all animal and vegetable fruitfulness, and under this aspect especially as a goddess of women. This worship was degraded by repulsive practices (e.g. religious prostitution, self-mutilation), which subsequently made their way to centres of Phoenician influence, such as Corinth and Mount Eryx in Sicily. In this connexion may be mentioned the idea of a divinity, half male, half female, uniting in itself the active and passive functions of creation, a symbol of luxuriant growth and productivity. Such was the bearded Aphrodite of Cyprus, called Aphroditos by Aristophanes according to Macrobius, who mentions a statue of the androgynous divinity in his Saturnalia (iii. 8.2; see ... Hermaphroditus).
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