This brief survey of classical and archaic texts is more than a mere excursion into literature. The imagery found there gives access to a religious thinking which is found at work in the religious lives of Greek communities. Without making any claim to producing an exhaustive overview of the cults offered to Aphrodite and Eros here (Pirenne-Delforge 1994, 1998), it will be our task to trace out the lines of force that display the echoes between ‘‘myth’’ and ‘‘cult’’ in relation to aphrodisia (cf. Pironti 2005a).
The common thread that runs through the worship accorded to Aphrodite in the Greek cities is her patronage of the sphere of sexuality, in all the complexity that Hesiod already identified for it. At any rate, the relationships of the worshipers who turn towards her are modulated by their age-group and social status. Thus the matrimonial prerogatives staged in tragedies, mentioned above, are well attested at the level of cult. For example, the epithet Nymphia that the goddess takes on at Troezen makes her the protectress of the nympho, which denotes both the young woman of marriageable age and the young wife prior to the birth of her first child (it is significant that the term also denotes ‘‘clitoris’’; cf. Winkler 1990a). At Hermione, every woman on the point of making a union with a man, whatever her age, had to offer a sacrifice to the goddess. At Naupactus, in a cave outside the city, the widows prayed to the goddess that they might contract a new marriage (Pausanias 2.32.7, 2.37.2,10.38.12). At Athens Aphrodite Urania was honored in a similar context. The local etiology told that King Aegeus had founded her sanctuary in the Agora. This is how he had won the goddess’ support for his desire for a child, and how he had attempted to appease the divine anger directed against his sisters Procne and Philomela (Pausanias 1.14.7). The central values of marriage are perverted in the horrible story of these two women: the rape of Philomela by her brother-in-law Tereus induced the sisters to put the couple’s legitimate child to death and to offer him to his father as a meal. This catalog of horrors rendered the marriage of Procne and Tereus a ‘‘union without charis’’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses6.428-32). The mythical context of the sanctuary's foundation allows us to specify Aphrodite Urania's sphere of intervention, and this has been confirmed by a striking piece of evidence. A thosauros from the beginning of the fourth century BC bears an inscription which associates it with the offering of a drachma for the goddess for ‘‘the commencement of marriage’’ (SEG 41.182). This object was located not in the Agora, but in the little sanctuary that Aphrodite ‘‘of the Gardens’’ shared with Eros on the north slope of the Acropolis. The inscription confirms that the goddess bore the epithet Urania there too. The reference of this epithet to the primordial figure of Uranus is obvious. Now, Proclus refers to the obligation at Athens to honor the primordial couple Uranus-Gaia at the beginning of a marriage (Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus 40): the monolog that Aeschylus (fr. 44 TrGF, quoted above) puts into Aphrodite’s mouth is accordingly rooted both in Hesiod’s cosmic vision and at the same time in local cult practice (Pirenne-Delforge 2006).
But Aphrodite does not wait for marriage to assert her power. From the moment that the beauty of a young person becomes a charis, an active grace, Aphrodite is present (by contrast, a boy or girl who is too young is acharis. Sappho fr. 49 Voigt). The girls’ choruses, the integrative function of which has been demonstrated by Claude Calame (1977), are one of the places in which Aphrodite and Eros appear, weaving the distinctly homoerotic first threads between young people en route to social integration. Two Athenian traditions suggest that the cults of Aphrodite equally welcomed young men as they emerged from childhood. Thus, the sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos (‘‘of all the people’’) had been founded by Solon with the money accumulated from brothel-keepers. The tradition may have been simply comic (or polemical: Petre 1992-4) and may just have made the obvious connection between Aphrodite and prostitution. However, the fragment that preserves it specifies that Solon had set up female slaves in the brothels ‘‘because of the vigor of the young men’’ (Nicander FGrH 271 frr. 9-10). It is therefore the sexuality, vigorous and still uncontrolled, of young men as much as it is the activity of female prostitutes that is connected with Aphrodite in this etiology. Along similar lines, Plutarch (Theseus 18) tells how Apollo advised Theseus to make Aphrodite his guide for his expedition to Crete: as he offered her a nanny-goat on the shore, the young man saw it transformed into a billy-goat, a vision that prefigured his own sexual maturation under Aphrodite’s auspices. The Aphrodite concerned here bore the epithet Epitragia, according to Plutarch. Her cult is very well attested in the imperial period (IG ii2 5115, 5148) and the account in the Theseus invites us to locate it in the old port of Phalerum. The sanctuary of Pandemos stood on the southwest slope of the Acropolis: according to Pausanias (1.22.3; cf. IG ii2 659 = LSCG 39), the goddess was worshiped there alongside Peitho, and the cult had been founded by Theseus. Plutarch (Theseus24.2, 25.1) specifies that he had brought together ‘‘all the people’’ (pandemos) by virtue of his ‘‘persuasion’’ (peitho). Even if the image of the money from the brothels is probably derived from a comedy (Philemon fr. 3 K-A), the etiology recorded by Plutarch attests that the vigorous desire of adolescent males fell within the goddess’ sphere of influence. The fact of Pandemos’ worship as a guarantor of the unity of ‘‘all the people’’ does not detract from her core concern with sexuality: it is precisely because she is the deity of mixis, of the ‘‘mixing’’ between creatures, that she is called upon to intervene in the cohesion of the ‘‘body’’ politic.
An interesting parallel comes from the island of Kos. Two sequential inscriptions, from the beginning and the end of the second century BC, stipulate the rights and obligations of a priesthood of Aphrodite in the context of its sale (Parker and Obbink 2000; Segre 1993: ED 178). This unique priesthood presides over two cults: Aphrodite Pandemos and Aphrodite Euploia, worshiped, in all probability, on the sea shore, in a unique enclosure that included two twin temples (Parker 2002:144-5).
Pandemos seems to have been worshiped by all the demes of Kos on the same day in the month of Panamos (Segre 1993:178.26-31; LS 169A.12-13, 172.1-4), perhaps in connection with the synoecism that had taken place on the island in 366/5 BC. Furthermore, all the women of the island, whatever their social status, had to offer a sacrifice to the goddess in the year following their marriage (Segre 1993: ED 178.15-20; cf. Dillon 1999). Finally, the sailors who served on warships sacrificed to Aphrodite Pontia at the end of their expedition (Parker and Obbink 2000:5-9). This is a striking illustration of the complexity of divine figures in a polytheistic context. No simple, mechanical explanation can really account for it. However, we may note that Pandemos seems to incorporate at once a ‘‘political’’ dimension (synoecism, as at Athens) and a matrimonial one. The two fields to which the goddess’ powers are applied are not in conflict. The explanation is to be found in a mode of intervention unique to the goddess: her powerful ability to rouse up the vital impulse, to unite beings and to mingle their bodies. The example of Naucratis, where Aphrodite Pandemos is attested from the end of the archaic period, shows that the integrative significance of the epithet has a validity that goes beyond a strictly civil context: it is hardly appropriate in the case of an emporion (Scholtz 2003).
The sexual reference of the mixis can accordingly be connected with the imagery of social cohesion: the danger of stasis can similarly be associated with the grievous and passionate excesses the goddess inspires. Thus, an Aphrodite ‘‘Guide of the Demos,’’ associated with the Graces on an Athenian altar dating from the turn of the third and second centuries BC (IG ii2 2798), probably evokes the harmony between the citizens after the recovery of independence in 229 BC. Such a context would equally explain the honor the presiding magistrates give to Aphrodite, sometimes accompanied by Peitho (Pirenne-Delforge 1994:446-50). One example from among many: in the second century BC five Megarian damiourgoi made a dedication to the goddess (IG vii 41). Now, according to the evidence of Pausanias, there were at least two sanctuaries of Aphrodite at Megara. One, on the Karia, one of the city’s two acropoleis, housed the cult of the goddess Epistrophia, beside the temple of Dionysus Nyktelios and an oracular sanctuary of Night (Pausanias 1.40.6). The other, in the agora near the sanctuary of Dionysus Dasyllios and Patroos, housed an ancient ivory statue of Aphrodite Praxis. In the fourth century this ancestral object was joined by statues of Peitho, ‘‘Persuasion,’’ and Paregoros, ‘‘Consolation,’’ by Praxiteles, and the very coherent group of Eros, Himeros, ‘‘Desire,’’ and Pothos, ‘‘Yearning,’’ by Scopas (Pausanias 1.43.6). Pausanias does not comment on either of the epithets and leaves the reader to make his own interpretation. The goddess of the acropolis is ‘‘she who impels,’’ and the environment in which she is accommodated, with a nocturnal Dionysus and deified Night, leaves us in little doubt about the sexual connotations of this ‘‘impulsion.’’ The epithet of Praxis in the agora conveys the action in its actual accomplishment. The goddess thus described sponsors all speech and all action that ensues. The figures that make up her retinue orient her field of action in the erotic sphere, but the dedication by magistrates allows this field to be enlarged to embrace a public office in which persuasion is required. The proximity of a Dionysus ‘‘of the ancestors’’ thus suggests an inversion of the cultic configuration on the Karia.
The notion of praxis suggests a more precise interpretation of the term aphrodisia, which most commonly refers to a male symposium at the conclusion of an enterprise, whether maritime, martial, or civic (Xenophon, Hellenica 5.4.4-7; Plutarch, Moralia 301f, 785e, 1097e). The name of the celebration pays homage to Aphrodite, albeit in the privacy of particular houses: the culmination of the enterprise and the releasing of the tension entailed could explain her role here, before the return to normality (Graf 1995).
On Kos, as we have seen, the marine dimension of Aphrodite’s prerogatives is conveyed by the epithet Pontia. She is also Euploia or Limenia in other contexts. Prominent on sea fronts, she responds alongside other gods, such as Poseidon or the Dioscuri, to the anxiety of sailors to reach a good port. This dimension is already present in the Hesiodic account of her birth which makes her a daughter of the foam (aphros) of the castrated sky and of the sea. Furthermore, in crossing from Cythera to Cyprus, Aphrodite immediately embarks upon a Mediterranean voyage. If one accepts, with
G. Pironti (2005b), that it is the narrative as a whole that establishes the time of the goddess, then these images offer an actual explanation of the powers of the goddess over the waves. It is by virtue of the fact that she is daughter of the sky and the sea that Aphrodite is worshiped by humans as overseeing their maritime enterprises. But the myth also speaks of sexual union: according to Dumezilian principle, the goddess’ mode ofaction should remain the stable element within her interventions, whatever the context in which they take place. So, assuming that the polytheist system is coherent, we may conjecture that the image of the calmness of the sky and the sea derives from the same representational complex that constructs from sex a metaphor for the harmony of the body politic (Pirenne-Delforge 1994:433-7, queried by Parker 2002).
The inscription from Kos specifies that it is the crews of warships who worship Aphrodite Pontia at the conclusion of their expeditions. The marine dimension is accordingly coupled with a martial dimension which constitutes one of the prerogatives of a goddess a priori with little concern for such matters. Now the field of battle is not unfamiliar with the power of Aphrodite, and her relationship with Ares is well attested in myth and cult alike. As in the case of maritime enterprises, marital enterprises pose the problem of the coherence of the figure of the deity engaged in improbable spheres of intervention, if one cleaves to the soothing image of the goddess of beauty and love. On the other hand, the scheme retains a certain coherence from the fact that one exploits martial imagery to describe the sexual union itself, and the tremendous impulse that it brings about in the human being. The complementarity of opposites ( oikos/war, female/male, eres/death) is insufficient to account for the relationship between Aphrodite and Ares (for which see Pirenne-Delforge 1994:450-4): the associations between Aphrodite and the world of the warrior lie at the heart of her own prerogatives and they are not hers merely by the virtue of her union with Ares (Pironti 2005a): this is particularly clear in the case of the cults that she received at Sparta (Pausanias 3.15.10-11, 3.17.5).
Finally, the goddess whom the poets describe as ‘‘golden’’ is also ‘‘black’’ in some of her cults (Pausanias 2.2.4, 8.6.5, 9.27.5). The vague concept of the ‘‘fertility goddess’’ presiding over ‘‘black earth’’ does not do justice to the complexity of the data bearing upon this Aphrodite, any more than the concepts of a ‘‘marine goddess’’ or a ‘‘warrior goddess’’ are useful in describing Aphrodite’s place in the Greek pantheon. Thus, when Pausanias tries to explain the epithet, he associates it with the nocturnal nature of sexual relations (8.6.5). Even if the explanation may seem a little superficial to us, we must note that a Greek was instinctively looking for the sexual dimension of the goddess’ prerogatives in her various cults. Such a concern on the part of an ‘‘insider’’ must form part of our own ‘‘external’’ investigation. Once again, the web of mythical imagery comes to support and enhance our investigation: fertilizing moisture, conceived on the model of the sexual union between the sky and the earth, may come distinctively under the competence of Aphrodite (cf. Aeschylus, above). The image of her nimble feet which cause the first plants of the world to shoot up (Hesiod, Theogony 194-5) is not merely poetic: it is truly ‘‘theogonic.’’ The birth of the goddess gives rise to a paradigmatic vital impulse that brings with it the fecundity of creatures and the fertility of the earth. Epic plays with the same theme in associating the sexual union between Zeus and Hera on Ida with the growth of vegetation (Iliad 14.346-51; Calame 1996:173-85; Motte 1973).
Therefore, even without sufficient evidence to reconstruct actual cult practice in connection with ‘‘black’’ Aphrodite, the mythical background allows us to assert the importance of her patronage of vital humors in this particular context.
The desiring impulse is the very image of life and of its drive, creative and potentially destructive. This impulse and its fulfillment in sexual union constitute the frame on which images and actions are woven, the imagery of the cults concerned with aphrodisia (on the various cults of Eros, cf. Pirenne-Delforge 1998).
World History
