Aphrodite and Eros

Aphrodite Urania. We know that Aphrodite arose amidst the foam (aphros) from the severed genitals of Uranus that were cast upon the sea. Hesiod’s account of her birth allegorizes the powerful sexuality of her nature. Yet this APHRODITE URANIA, born from the male alone and not as the result of sexual union, came to be characterized as the goddess of pure love that has as its end not physical satisfaction but spiritual gratification. The sensual Aphrodite Urania, sprung from Uranus, god of the heavens, became the HEAVENLY APHRODITE of philosophy and religion.

Aphrodite Pandemos. In stark contrast to celestial Aphrodite, another Aphrodite was identified, the daughter of Zeus and his mate Dione, about whom we know little. Their daughter was APHRODITE PANDEMOS (“Aphrodite of the people” or “common Aphrodite”), the goddess of sex and the procreation of children, whose concerns are of the body and not of the mind, the spirit, or the soul.

--This duality in Aphrodite’s nature came to be described as sacred and profane love, the most universal of all archetypal conceptions.

--Aphrodite received two epithets in connection with her birth on the sea, CYTHEREA and CYPRIS, since she was brought first to the island of Cythera and then Cyprus, the latter especially associated with her worship.

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APHRODITE AND ADONIS

The classic version of this myth is by Ovid. KINYRAS (the son of Paphos), had a daughter named MYRRHA, who fell in love with her father. The faithful nurse of guilty Myrrha prevented her from committing suicide by convincing her to satisfy her passion. So Myrrha carried on an incestuous relationship with her father, who was unaware of her identity. When Cinyras found out, he pursued his daughter, who fled from his rage. In answer to her prayers, Myrrha was turned into a myrrh tree. She had become pregnant by her father and from the tree was born ADONIS, who became a most handsome youth and keen hunter.

Aphrodite fell desperately in love with Adonis and warned him of the dangers of the hunt, but to no avail. While he was hunting a wild boar, it buried its deep tusk into his groin and Adonis died in the arms of a grief-stricken Aphrodite. The goddess ordained that from his blood a flower, the anemone, should arise. Here is allegorized the important recurrent theme of the Great Mother and her lover, who dies as vegetation dies and comes back to life again.

This motif of death and resurrection becomes even clearer in the following variation. When Adonis was an infant, Aphrodite put him in a chest for PERSEPHONE, the queen of the Underworld, to keep. But Persephone looked upon the child’s beauty and refused to give him back. It was agreed that Adonis would spend one part of the year below with Persephone and one part in the upper world with Aphrodite. Celebrations honoring the dead and risen Adonis share similarities with Easter celebrations for the dead and risen Christ.

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APHRODITE AND ANCHISES

The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells us there are only three hearts that the great goddess of love is unable to sway: those of Athena, Artemis, and Hestia. All others, both gods and goddesses, she can bend to her will So great Zeus put into the heart of Aphrodite an overwhelming desire for the mortal Trojan ANCHISES, because he did not want her to continue her boasts that she in her power had joined the immortal gods and goddesses in love with mortals to beget mortal children but had experienced no such humiliating coupling herself.

Using all her wiles, Aphrodite seduced Anchises by tricking him into believing that she was a mortal. Discovering that he had slept with a goddess, he was terribly afraid that he would be enfeebled, “for no man retains his full strength who sleeps with an immortal goddess.” Here is yet again the eternal theme of the Great Mother and the castration of her lover, only in a more muted form. The son of Aphrodite and Anchises was AENEAS, the great hero of the Romans.

EROS

As with Aphrodite, there are various facets to the character of EROS (CUPID). He came out of Chaos, and he attended Aphrodite after she was born from the sea-foam. He was said to be the son of Aphrodite and Ares. Eros was a young, handsome god of love and desire in general, but by the fifth century B.C. he had become very much the god of male homosexuality.

THE SYMPOSIUM OF PLATO

Plato’s dialogue presents a profound analysis of love, the topic of this famous dinner party. Two of the speeches are particularly illuminating.

The Speech of Aristophanes. Since this speech is by the famous writer of Greek Old Comedy, not surprisingly, it is both amusing and wise. Aristophanes explains that originally there were not just two sexes but a third, an androgynous sex, both male and female. These creatures (all three sexes) were round; they had four hands and feet, one head with two faces exactly alike but each looking in opposite directions, a double set of genitals, and so on. They were very strong and they dared to attack the gods.

Zeus, in order to weaken them, decided to cut them in two. So all those who were originally of the androgynous sex became heterosexual beings, men who love women, and women who love men. Those of the female sex who were cut in half became lesbians and pursued women; those bisected from the male became male homosexuals who pursue males. Thus, like our ancestors, according to our own nature, we pursue our other half in a longing to become whole once again. Eros is the yearning desire of lover and beloved to become one person not only in life but also in death.

Aristophanes by his creative humor has given a serious explanation through mythic truth of why some persons are heterosexual while others are homosexual; he also articulates a compelling definition of love, reiterated throughout the ages: Eros inspires that lonely and passionate search for the one person who alone can satisfy our longing for wholeness and completion.

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The Speech of Socrates. The great philosopher Socrates elucidates Platonic revelation about Eros. Socrates claims that his wisdom in the nature of love came from a woman from Mantinea named DIOTIMA. A new myth is told about the birth of Eros to explain his character. He is squalid and poor, not beautiful himself, but a lover of beauty and very resourceful, forever scheming and plotting to obtain what he desires passionately but does not himself already possess—beauty, goodness, and wisdom. This is the Eros who must inspire each of us to move from our love of physical beauty in the individual to a love of beauty in general, and to realize that beauty of the soul is more precious than that of the body. When two people have fallen in love with the beautiful soul of each other, they should proceed upward to pursue together a love of wisdom.

Platonic Eros is a love inspired in the beginning by the sexual attraction of physical beauty, which must be transmuted into a love of the beautiful pursuits of the mind and the soul. Although Socrates’ discourse dwells upon male homosexual attachments as his paradigm, his message transcends sexuality. Platonic lovers of both sexes, driven by Eros, must be capable of making the goal of their love not sexual satisfaction at all nor the procreation of children, but spiritual gratification from the procreation of ideas in their intellectual quest for beauty, goodness, and wisdom.

Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos. Many works of art have been inspired by Hesiod’s myth of the birth of Aphrodite from the sea. The alternate myth, which names Zeus and Dione as her parents, is alluded to in the east pediment of the Parthenon, where Dione is one of the seated goddesses receiving the news of Athena's birth. Aphrodite’s rule over the island of Cythera is exquisitely recalled in two paintings by Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (1717, now in Paris, and a second version, 1718, now in Berlin).
The duality of Aphrodite is continued in the postclassical (and especially Renaissance) theme of sacred and profane love. Urania is shown naked, Pandemos robed in luxurious clothing. The most famous such representation is Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (1514, now in Rome), a complex painting whose meaning is not fully known. The dual nature of Aphrodite extends also to the allegory of the Choice of Heracles: indeed, in Rubens’ design for the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi, a Cupid, accompanying Pleasure, is trying to pluck away the hero’s club and lion skin.

Pre-Greek sculptures from the Aegean islands, which emphasize female sexual attributes, are given the title "Aphrodite" or "Venus," which is an anachronism. In archaic Greek art Aphrodite is shown clothed, whether seated with other Olympians (as in the east pediment and inner frieze of the Parthenon at Athens) or standing or riding in a chariot or even (as on a red-figure vase from Cyprus, ca. 440 B.C., now in Oxford) on a swan. After about 400 she begins to be portrayed nude in statues, but not in vase-paintings. The most famous of these statues is the Venus of Cnidos by Praxiteles (mid-fourth century B.C.; copy in the Vatican), which is known, like other famous versions derived from it (the Medici Venus, etc.), from Roman marble copies from the second century A.D. onwards. A second type is a half-draped Venus; the most famous is the statue from Melos (Venus de Milo, now in Paris), the original of which might have been also by Praxiteles. A third type is a crouching nude statue, of which the bronze original may have been by Doidalsas (ca. 200 B.C.; Roman copy in Paris). All these types have been the inspiration of countless post-classical renditions.

Many paintings include a statue of Aphrodite as a reminder of her power to affect the action of the painting: this is the case in Watteau’s paintings mentioned above; another example is Rubens’ The Garden of Love (1633, now in the Prado), where the statue’s position and attributes reflect the urgency of the lovers in the garden. More subtle, and perhaps satirical, is John Singer Sargent’s Breakfast in the Loggia (1910, now in Washington), where behind the two elegantly dressed women at their meal is a statue of Aphrodite similar to the Venus de Milo. Of the countless representations of reclining Aphrodite it will be sufficient to mention Titian’s three masterpieces—Venus of Urbino (1538, in Florence); Venus at her Toilet with Two Cupids (1555, in Washington); Venus with an Organist (ca. 1550, in Madrid). In eighteenth-century France at the courts of Louis XIV and Louis XV, Venus was the subject of paintings, court ballets, and operas. François Boucher (1703-70) painted a large number of works which were variations on the theme of Venus: many of them, genuinely inspired by their classical origins, are masterpieces now in collections in Paris, London, New York, and many other cities; many, however, are superficial even if technically accomplished.

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