Aphrodite and Adonis

Author: Pseudo-Apollodorus; Ovid

Time Period: 999 BCE–1 BCE; 1 CE–500 CE

Country or Culture: Greek; Roman

Genre: Myth

Overview

Among the best-known Greek myths is the tragic affair of Aphrodite and Adonis, the story of the goddess of love’s thwarted passion for the uncommonly beautiful man Adonis, who is transformed into the anemone flower upon his death. With its themes of beauty, sexual desire, loss, and rebirth, the tale has inspired artistic renderings, including sculptures, paintings, and dramatic and poetic works, for more than two millennia.

The story originates in ancient Greece and is mentioned by various writers. Apollodorus (also known as Pseudo-Apollodorus), believed to be a grammarian who lived sometime after the mid first century BCE, provides in his Bibliotheca (The Library) several accounts of Adonis’s origin and a brief description of Aphrodite’s love for him. In one account, Adonis results from an incestuous union between King Theias of the Assyrians and his daughter Smyrna. When Adonis is born, Aphrodite is so taken by the boy’s extraordinary beauty that she hides him, entrusting his care to Persephone, goddess of the underworld. However, when Persephone refuses to return the child to Aphrodite, Zeus settles the dispute by commanding Adonis to spend one-third of the year with Persephone, one-third with Aphrodite, and the remaining one-third alone. Adonis then adds his portion of the year to his time with Aphrodite. According to Apollodorus, Adonis dies while hunting a boar that mortally wounds him.

Time glides in secret and his wings deceive; / Nothing is swifter than the years. That son, / Child of his sister and his grandfather, / So lately bark-enswathed, so lately born, / Then a most lovely infant, then a youth, / And now a man more lovely than the boy, / Was Venus’ darling (Venus’!) and avenged / His mother’s passion.

Metamorphoses 10:516–23

The Romans inherited and greatly elaborated this myth, which became the story of Venus and Adonis (Venus was originally a separate Roman goddess who eventually assimilated many qualities of the Greek Aphrodite). The Roman poet Ovid, who lived in the first century BCE, offers the version that became most popular. He expands the story in his Metamorphoses (8 CE; English translation, 1567), a poetic masterpiece of astonishing energy that represents the cycles of creation and transformation in a continuous narrative flow. Ovid adds descriptive details and links Adonis’s death to the suffering of his mother; Adonis dies after failing to heed Venus’s warning against hunting wild animals, and his death is said to avenge his mother’s passion, which Ovid recounts in great and horrific detail.

Most important, Ovid focuses the story on the psychology of the characters. This feature can be best understood through an analysis of the frame structure of tales-within-tales that comprise book 10 of Metamorphoses (Met.). Ovid’s Venus warns Adonis against hunting by narrating the love story of Atalanta and Hippomenes, and the Venus and Adonis episode itself is the final story in a series told by the character Orpheus after he suffers the loss of his beloved Eurydice. Examining the structure of this series shows that “Venus and Adonis” is far more than a romantic tragedy and flower myth. In fact, the tale represents deeper themes of punishment and vengeance as Orpheus narrates in response to his own grief and anger at Venus. His grief drives his portrayal of female desire as illicit, a portrayal that Ovid himself may well reject. The subtle emphasis on characters’ motives and reactions is unique to Ovid’s version and is partly why his sophisticated and ironic treatment of the myth, and of Metamorphoses as a whole, has inspired readers for millennia.

Summary

Ovid’s version of the Venus and Adonis myth is the final story of Metamorphoses book 10, which focuses on tales of lost love, beginning with the famous tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. The marriage of the renowned bard Orpheus and Eurydice ends quickly when Eurydice is mortally wounded by a snake. Devastated, Orpheus dares to venture into the underworld to win back his love. In a song so moving that “all the bloodless spirits wept to hear” (Met. 10:43), Orpheus successfully entreats Pluto and Persephone, king and queen of the underworld, to allow Eurydice to return with him. There is one condition, however: On the return journey, Orpheus must not look back at Eurydice, or he will lose her forever. As the couple approaches the upper world, Orpheus cannot resist glancing behind him. Eurydice is immediately returned to Hades. Mad with grief and denied another chance to rescue her, Orpheus retreats to Rhodope, rejecting the love of women and celebrating the love of boys.

Next, several tales illustrate male love between gods and mortals. After Ovid narrates the story of Cyparissus, a boy whom Apollo transforms into a cypress tree, Orpheus proclaims that he will sing “Of boys beloved of gods and girls bewitched / By lawless fires who paid the price of lust” (10:152–53). He briefly describes Jove’s love for the boy Ganymede, whom the god, disguised as an eagle, carries away and makes the cupbearer of heaven. His second story recounts Apollo’s love for the boy Hyacinth, who is accidentally killed by Apollo’s discus. Apollo transforms him into the hyacinth flower.

Orpheus mentions Venus for the first time in a transitional story that introduces the myth of Pygmalion. Venus transforms the people of Amathus into bulls for their barbaric practice of human sacrifice. When the people further deny her divinity, Venus makes them prostitutes. Orpheus then tells of Pygmalion, who is so horrified by these women’s behavior that he lives celibate. He carves a statue depicting a woman so lovely that he falls utterly in love with it. Pygmalion fervently prays to Venus to bring his statue to life, and she grants his wish; the two are married and produce a daughter named Paphos.

The birth of Paphos begins the story of Adonis’s lineage. Paphos produces a son named Cinyras, who, in Ovid’s version, is Adonis’s father. Ovid greatly embellishes Apollodorus’s brief account of the incestuous union leading to Adonis’s birth. The Greek writer states simply that Smyrna fails to worship Aphrodite, who consequently causes the girl to fall in love with her own father. With the help of her nurse, Smyrna succeeds in coupling with her father for twelve nights without his knowledge. When he discovers the crime, he attempts to kill her, but Smyrna prays to the gods, who transform her into a tree called the smyrna (better known as myrrh). The birth of Adonis causes the tree to split open. In contrast, Ovid’s version is the longest story in book 10 and among the most horrifying in the Metamorphoses. In his version, the daughter of Cinyras is Myrrha, and it is not Aphrodite but the Furies that drive her to lust. Orpheus describes at length Myrrha’s rejection of suitors, her anguish over her affliction, her confession to her nurse, their deception of Cinyras, his outrage, Myrrha’s wandering in Arabia, and her entreaty to the gods to escape both the living and the dead. After the gods transform her into a myrrh tree, the time for Adonis’s birth arrives. The goddess of childbirth, Lucina, takes pity on the tree, causing it to split open to release the child.

Ovid does not describe the goddesses’ dispute over Adonis. Instead, Orpheus recounts how Venus comes to love Adonis. He states that Venus’s son Cupid kisses her, accidentally wounding her with one of his love arrows, which causes her to love the mortal Adonis. Venus is so smitten that she abandons the towns and islands dedicated to her and instead hunts with Adonis. She rejects her formerly luxurious lifestyle and adopts the ways of Diana, the goddess of the hunt. However, Venus will hunt only safe animals such as deer and rabbits, and she urges Adonis to avoid wild beasts.

When Adonis asks her to explain, Venus tells the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes. Atalanta is a girl renowned equally for beauty and for defeating all men who compete with her in running. Consulting an oracle about a husband, Atalanta receives an ambiguous message suggesting that she should refuse all men but that she ultimately will lose herself. Appalled, she hides in the woods, rejects all suitors, and declares that the only man she will marry is the one who beats her in a race. Hippomenes scorns the men willing to lose their lives over a mere woman until he sees Atalanta and immediately falls in love. The great-grandson of Neptune, he presents himself to Atalanta as a worthy opponent. Finding herself attracted to Hippomenes and pitying his youth, Atalanta urges him not to risk his life, but her father and the townspeople insist that the race go on. Hippomenes prays to Venus for assistance, which the goddess grants by giving him three golden apples. During the race, Hippomenes throws the lovely apples to distract Atalanta, allowing him to win the race and her hand in marriage.

However, Hippomenes enrages Venus by failing to thank the goddess for her favor. When Hippomenes and Atalanta visit a sacred temple, the goddess fills him with lust, provoking them to desecrate the temple. The goddess Cybele punishes the couple by transforming them into tame lions.

Concluding her story, Venus departs in her swan-drawn chariot. Adonis immediately ignores her advice and proceeds to hunt a boar, which swiftly kills him. Venus hears his cries, grieves bitterly, and reproaches the Fates. She establishes an annual festival in honor of her lost love and declares that she will change his blood into a flower. She sprinkles nectar over his blood, and before an hour passes, the anemone flower emerges:

A blood-red flower arose, like the rich bloom

Of pomegranates which in a stubborn rind

Conceal their seeds; yet is its beauty brief,

So lightly cling its petals, fall so soon,

When the winds blow that give the flower its name. (10:735–39)

Bibliography

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