Cosmogony and theogony: Hesiod
After the long preamble that enthrones Hesiod in his role as a poet inspired by the Muses, Hesiod’s cosmogonical treatise witnesses the rise of Chaos, Gaia, and Eros (Theogony 115-20). The world is only just coming into existence, but Eros is already present with a divine status and a specific function: ‘‘the most beautiful of the immortal gods, Eros slackens the limbs and tames the mind and the wise counsel in the breasts of all gods and all men’’ (122-3). The power of Eros, his creative force, is accordingly required from the first to activate the birth of the first cosmic entities and to deploy their powers in turn. The entities that then arise are still intimately associated with the primordial physical universe: Earth, Sky, Sea, River/Ocean. But Uranus pushes back into Earth’s womb the formidable children he has sired in coupling with her: the action of Eros closes down upon itself and the genealogical process comes to a halt. The solution to this cosmic problem is radical and bloody: Kronos castrates his father Uranus and throws his severed genitals into the salt sea (173-82). The act of castration separates the Sky and the Earth, whilst at the same time releasing the gods. This unblocking is accompanied by a redefinition of Eros’ creative power. Thus a kourl, a ‘‘girl,’’ is formed in the white foam produced by Uranus’ genitals of as they fall into the sea. The verb trephein that is applied to this unusual generative process was to be used subsequently in the corpus of medical writing to denote the formation of the fetus within the womb (Demont 1978). This exceptional birth witnesses the appearance of the first anthromorphic female form in the cosmos. The birth of her ‘‘whom the gods and men call Aphrodite’’ (195-7) accordingly inaugurates a new mode of divine existence for the world: we have passed from cosmogony to theogony. Furthermore, from the beginnings of the world, cosmic Eros is fitted together with her (omartein) and forms her retinue, alongside Himeros, ‘‘Desire’’ (201). Henceforth he will be the powerful goddess’ agent (Rudhardt 1986). Accordingly, Aphrodite is the first deity to be given a timfi, a sphere of honor, and this is associated with the long account of her birth and the ‘‘portion she was allocated amongst humans and the immortal gods.’’ The moira of the goddess is composed of virgins’ whisperings, smiles, deceits (exapatai), pleasure (terpsis), and loving relationship (philotls), terms which we must qualify with ‘‘sexual’’ (204-6; cf. Pironti 2005b, contra Calame 1996:55-8). The deep ambivalence of sexuality, expressed as ‘‘works of Aphrodite,’’ is completely condensed in the description of her sudden epiphany, a subtle mixture of desire and violence, tension and appeasement (Pirenne-Delforge 2001b; Pironti 2005a, 2005b).
The first mentions of humans in the work are associated with cosmic Eros and Aphrodite: they share with the gods a common capacity to unite themselves (122, 204). However, the Theogony does not offer an anthropogony in the strict sense. The poet proceeds to the progressive definition of the human condition, the crisis of which is constituted by the episode of the Promethean crisis (Leclerc 1993:157). The final point of this crisis between gods and men, represented by Prometheus, is the creation of the first woman. Now, the narrative of the manufacturing of the woman (anonymous here, but named Pandora in the Works and Days) converges at numerous points with that of the formation of Aphrodite (Pirenne-Delforge 2001a): the goddess is the fruit of the vengeance of Kronos, armed by Gaia, while Pandora is the product of the vengeance of Zeus; they are both abnormal products, emanating from male origins (heavenly ‘‘foam’’ and sea; clay modeled by Hephaestus at Zeus’ behest); Aphrodite is the first female divine form, while Pandora is the first female human form (590: ‘‘the race of female women’’ originates from her); they are both ‘‘beautiful,’’ with that irresistible beauty conferred by charis; Aphrodite presides over the union between sexually differentiated beings, whereas Pandora, the nubile parthenos, makes a male out of the man whose partner she becomes (Vernant 1996). Furthermore, the episode of Pandora’s creation crystallizes the time of Aphrodite in the human sphere: human life will be an inextricable mixture of goods and ills, mirroring the ambivalence of the goddess’ powers. Sexuality is just one aspect of this human condition, which also includes the requirements to work to live and to honor the gods, but it constitutes one of the privileged places of this alternation between goods and ills designed by Zeus himself.
Power, victory, or love? Choosing Aphrodite and Helen
Like Pandora, the beautiful evil ( kalon kakon), the beautiful Helen is a great bane for humans (mega pema), and she is intimately associated with Aphrodite and her works. The judgment of Paris is the locus classicus for a specific schematic division of roles between the goddesses: Paris does not seem to have hesitated long between Hera with power, Athene with victory, and Aphrodite with the love of Helen. But the choice of Helen’s love was a choice subsidiary to that of war, and epic made great play with the two images (Rousseau 1998). The evils that erotic desire inflicts upon the life of an individual man, for Hesiod as he tussles with first woman, in epic become the massacre of thousands.
Furthermore, the impulse to war is also a form of eres: sex-drive and war-frenzy share that blinding of the senses that induces the human being to lose control (Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis 1264; cf. Pironti 2005b). When poetry and drunkenness cross paths with Aphrodite, it is notably in the form of the desire that they both arouse in those they possess. This is why melic poetry makes Eros the agent of the powerful Aphrodite when it takes up the theme of his destructive power (Calame 1996:23-52).
Tragic love
The typical theme of the tragic stage is the excess that drives the community to ask searching questions of itself. Here the power of Eros and Aphrodite is no longer deployed in the genealogical fashion of the Theogony, but more along the lines of the Fates in epic. Several choral prayers assert the power of these deities who drive humans to lose control if they do not submit themselves to love at the appropriate point of their development (Euripides, Hippolytus 443-50, 1268-81; Sophocles fr. 941 TrGFand Antigone 781-800).
The profile of the young Hippolytus is particularly significant. He is wholly devoted to the joys of the life of Artemis, and he despises Aphrodite and the female sex: his obsession with purity gives a clear signal of his rejection of sexuality. In so refusing to submit himself to the universal law sponsored by the goddess, he fails to respect her divine timl and brings a deadly vengeance down upon himself (Euripides, Hippolytus 1-22). The instrument of this vengeance is Phaedra, upon whom an irrepressible, violent, and grievous desire descends which can only be appeased by death. Hippolytus thus willfully holds himself back from the social status that his physical maturity imposes on him: a young man of marriageable age, he turns away from marriage by keeping himself in some sort of indeterminate virginal state sponsored by Artemis. The opening remarks of Aphrodite explain that one must respect the delicate balances between the Greek gods: the problem is not Hippolytus’ preference for Artemis, but rather his scorn for Aphrodite herself (20-2). For refusing to be ‘‘tamed’’ by the marriage yoke and submit himself to sexual union, he will be subjugated by his team of horses, maddened by Poseidon.
Other figures from tragedy, the Danaids, illustrate the same point on the female side. In Aeschylus’ Suppliants we encounter these girls fleeing from marriage with their cousins, the Aegyptiads. The lost parts of the trilogy brought this refusal to a fantastical climax with the murder of the young men immediately upon their marriage (Des Bouvrie 1990). As in the case of Hippolytus, the central problem of the plot is the refusal of the girls, now they have reached sexual maturity, to come to terms with their status and become wives and mothers. The conception of marriage in the classical period indissolubly embraced sexual union and reproduction. A famous Aeschylean fragment connected with the Danaid trilogy puts praise of her own power into Aphrodite’s mouth, and this attests the strength of the bond between sexuality and fertility (fr. 44 TrGF; cf. Euripides fr. 898 TrGF). ‘‘The sacred Sky feels a desire to penetrate the Earth, and the Earth is possessed by the desire to enjoy marriage. A shower comes to fertilize the Earth falling from her husband Sky. And this is how she brings forth for mortals the pasture of flocks, the living [bios] of Demeter and the mature fruit [opora] of the trees. All that exists is created from moist marriage. And it is I that am the cause of all that.’’ Herodotus attributes the foundation of the Thesmophoria to the Danaids after their arrival from Egypt (2.171). This tradition intersects the theme of submission to sexuality with that of the production of children to assure the survival of the community.
Platonic variations
The imagery that tragedy manipulates is so pregnant that it is found, in another context, in Plato’s remarks on the different varieties of madness. Erotic mania, the madness of love, enables one far more than poetic or Dionysiac mania to recall the appearance of true beauty through sight of beauty in this world. Hence, in the Symposium, Socrates, speaking through the priestess Diotima, defines the purpose of eros as ‘‘giving birth in beauty, whether in the form of a body or a soul’’ (206b). The figure of Eros is accordingly conceived of as a generative force, like the cosmogonic god of Hesiod. The Hesiodic god is ‘‘the most beautiful’’ (kallistos) and Plato explains the companionship of Eros and Aphrodite from the facts that Eros naturally loves the beautiful, and the goddess is beautiful (203c). And so the direct link that the philosopher establishes between generation - albeit completely spiritual generation - and immortality harmonizes with the vision of a form of immortality that humans achieve by means of their children (Halperin in Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1990:257-308).
World History
