Aphrodite: A Greek Mythology Sleep Story

Full transcript

The sea off Cythera turned white, where something fell into it out of the sky, and out of that white water came Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty and desire, whom the Romans would afterward call Venus. The foam did not scatter as foam does. It held and thickened and kept its shape against the swell, and within it, her form began to grow, shoulders and a crowned brow and a mouth already bent in a small unhurried curve, as though she had heard the beginning of a promise and had decided not to repeat it.

Whatever had fallen was gone under, and the water never gave it back. Only she came up out of it. If these ancient stories help you rest, subscribe, so the next story can find you at bedtime. The waves carried her south and east to the pale shore of Paphos on the island of Cyprus, and she stepped out of the water full grown, with doves turning in slow circles above her head. That gentle picture of her rising is only the half of her the painters cared to keep. The same goddess adored with roses and myr tle stood armed in the temples of Sparta, an old image of dark wood with a spear across her arms and fetters upon her feet, and she carried names that do not sound like love at all.

The dark one, the killer of men, the gravedigger. Those names were not flung at her by her enemies. They were cut into stone by the same peo ple who brought her doves and honey cakes in cities that had watched what desire could do to a household and to a fleet, and who found nothing strange in laying myrtle upon an altar that also knew the weight of iron. For that armed and shadowed self does not announce itself here. It waits inside her stillness, the way a strong current waits beneath a smooth surface, unseen until something is drawn under and does not come back.

Watch her a moment longer upon the water, the foam still clinging to her shoulders, the doves not yet settled to her hands, and a single quiet question rises with the spray, asked of no one, drifting like sea mist over the pale stones. How can one goddess be born from a wound in the sea and yet hold within her both the tenderness of desire and the cold edge of a drawn blade? Let the shore be quiet for a while, and let the story come in as the tide comes in, slowly, without hurry, one long fold of water after another.

Return then to that first morning at Paphos and look more closely at what the water carries. The foam is thick and luminous, white shading toward a soft gold where the low sun touches it, and it clings to the great ridged shell as though it does not wish to let its burden go. The doves that wheel above are her creatures already, drawn to her before she has taken a single breath of mortal air. Sparrows follow them, and further out, a pair of swans rides the swell, lifting and settling with the long, slow rhythm of the open sea.

Along the tide line, the sand is fine and warm, and where her foot will fall, the myrtle grows close to the water, dark-leaved and heavy with a fragrance that the sea wind lifts and spreads across the shallows. There is no sound at all but water, the small collapse of one wave and then another, and the dry rattle of the shingle drawing back. She does not arrive as an infant, wrapped and helpless. She arrives whole, a woman full grown, crowned with a pale sea light that seems to rise from the water rather than to fall upon it from the sky.

Her hair is wet and heavy with salt. Her eyes are already accustomed to being looked at, and upon her lips there rests that small unhurried curve which will follow her through every tale to come, whether she blesses or destroys. This is the image that painters and carvers held to for a thousand years, the goddess unclothed and unashamed, beautiful past the measure of mortal women, stepping from the sea into the world of the gods. Her colors are three, and the old images keep returning to them.

There is the white of the foam that bore her, and the red of the roses and the anemone, and the gold of the light and the fated apple. White, red, and gold, the innocence, the blood, and the prize. Only the white is present on this morning, thick and gl- cooling on her shoulders. The red is still lying in a Cyprian thicket with a boar standing over it, and the gold is still a small unremarkable fruit in a hand that has not yet been refused an invitation. To understand the foam itself, the oldest of the poets turn the eye away from the bright shore and back toward an older darkness.

In the Theogony of Hesiod, the birth of the goddess of love begins not in tenderness, but in a wound, and the poet does not soften it. In the first ages of the world, before the Olympians ruled, the sky lay heavy and close upon the earth. Uranus, the wide heaven, pressed down upon Gaia, the earth, and the children she carried could find no room to be born. He hated them from the beginning, the poet says, and as each came into being, he hid it away in the hollow places of the earth and would not let it up into the light.

Gaia groaned within, crowded and straining, and out of her pain she shaped a great sickle of gray flint jagged along its inner edge, and she called her children together and set the thing before them and asked which of them would act. They were terrified, every one, and none of them would speak. Only the youngest and boldest of the Titans, Cronus, took the blade into his hand and said he would do it and did not fear his father. His mother hid him in ambush and put the sickle in his grip and taught him the whole of the trick.

What follows is told plainly by Hesiod, and it may be told here with the same quiet distance the ages have laid upon it. When the sky came down again to the earth, trailing the night behind him, Cronus reached out from his hiding place and struck and severed the generative parts of his father, Uranus, and flung them away behind him without once looking back. Some of the blood fell upon the ground, and out of the earth where it soaked in, there came the Furies with their unforgiving eyes, and the Giants in their armor, and the Nymphs of the ash trees, whose lives are as long as the trees themselves.

But the rest of it fell far out beyond the coast of Cythera and into the wide sea, and there the salt water closed over it. Around that fallen thing, a white foam began to spread and thicken, the foam the Greeks called Aphros. Within it, slowly, over an ageless while, a living form took shape, and out of the sea she rose, and the waves carried her first past Cythera and then to Paphos on Cyprus, where she stepped at last onto the land. Grass grew where the blood struck the earth. A goddess grew where the rest of it sank.

Hesiod draws the name and the birth into one knot as he tells it, calling her the Foam-born, leaning her very name toward that word for the white water, and giving her besides the titles Cytherea and Cyprogenes for the two islands that received her. He does not pause over the strangeness of what he has said, that the sweetest of all the powers came into being out of a mutilation in the same hour and by the same stroke that gave the Furies to the earth. And he says one thing more that the later painters forgot.

Two figures walked beside her from the moment she came ashore and have walked beside her ever since. Eros went with her and Himeros, which is longing, and the poet says they attended her when she was born and when she went up into the company of the gods, and they have never once left her side. To her, from the first, was portioned out a share of the world, and Hesiod lists it without embarrassment in a line that holds both her sweetness and her cunning together. Hers are the whisperings of girls and smiles and deceptions and sweet delight and love and gentleness.

Deception stands in the middle of that list as though it belonged there between the smiles and the delight, and the poet does not apologize for it. Hesiod does more than name her foam-born. He reads her origin into two of her oldest titles, and they sit strangely together with the roses and the doves. One he interprets as genital-loving, tracing it back to the manner of her birth from the severed flesh of Uranus, and the Greek ear could hear that word and another almost as one, so close are they in sound.

The other, the one that clings to her most closely across the centuries, he gives as smile-loving. That title has often been rendered as laughter-loving, as though she were merely merry, but the older and better sense is the smile, the faint and knowing curve of the lips she wears from her first moment in the foam. It is an expression with something withheld inside it, an amusement that has not decided yet whether it is kind. It can promise delight, and it can promise ruin, and in the tales to come it will do both, sometimes within the same hour and to the same man.

Set this dark and stony birth beside a second lineage, gentler and quieter, and do not try to fold the two into one. Homer, in the Iliad, does not speak of foam or of any wound in the sea. For him, Aphrodite is simply the daughter of Zeus, king of the gods, and of the goddess Dione, and this is the version that the poet Sap pho also followed on the island of Lesbos in one of the earliest poems to the goddess that has come down to us nearly whole. In this telling, she is no orphan risen alone from the salt water.

She is a child of Olympus, born into the great family of the gods, with a father whose name every mortal knew and a mother beside her. Sappho's poem asks to be read slowly, because it is the only place in all the early writing where the goddess speaks directly to a woman who names herself. The poet calls her child of Zeus, weaver of wiles, and begs her not to break her heart with sorrows, and then asks her to come down as she has come before. And the goddess comes, in a chariot of gold, drawn through the middle air by sparrows, their wings beating thick and fast, whirling down out of heaven through the bright sky to the black earth.

And when she arrives, she is smiling. She asks, with that smile upon her immortal face, what is the matter this time? What the poet wants? Who has wronged her now? And she promises that the one who flees will soon pursue, that the one who refuses gifts will soon give them, that the one who does not love will love, even against her will. It is a tender poem, and also a slightly alarming one. The goddess is affectionate, familiar, faintly amused at the recurrence of the trouble, and entirely certain that another person's heart can be turned around like a boat in a channel.

Dione herself is a shadowed figure, little more than a name and a title, an older goddess whose worship faded as her daughters grew. Her name is scarcely more than the feminine of the name of Zeus, as though she were once simply the goddess who stood beside the god, and she has an old sanctuary at Dodona, among the oaks where the leaves were listened to for prophecy. Yet in the Iliad, she plays one tender scene that lingers. When Aphrodite is wounded upon the field at Troy, of which more will be told in its place, she flees weeping back to Olympus, and it is Dione who receives her and draws the ichor from her hand and comforts her as a mother comforts a hurt child, reminding her that gods have suffered at mortal hands before and endured.

Here, the goddess of love is not the untouchable power stepping from the sea. She is a daughter running home to her mother, and the immortal world for a moment feels like a household with a fire in it. The two births do not agree, and the ancients knew it. One is a birth from a wound, from severed flesh cast into the sea, with no mother at all and only the foam to bear her. The other is a birth from the union of Zeus and Dione, a child among the Olympians. They cannot both be the literal beginning of a single goddess, and the wiser course then and now is not to force them together, but to let them stand as two answers the Greeks gave to the same mystery.

A myth is not a record. It is many voices telling the same great truth in different keys, and where the voices differ, the difference is itself part of what they mean. The one birth says that desire is older than the gods and came into the world through violence. The other says that desire has a father and a mother and a place at the table. Both are things people have believed about love, and often the same people, and often on the same day. There was one thinker who turned that disagreement into a teaching.

In The Symposium of Plato, at a drinking party where each guest rises in turn to praise the god of love, a speaker named Pausanias takes up the two births and does something clever with them. He does not choose between them. He says instead that there must be two goddesses because there are two kinds of love, and each birth belongs to one of them. The elder he calls Aphrodite Urania, the heavenly, and she is the one sprung from the sea foam of Uranus, born of no mother, older and purer, her very name reaching back to the wide heaven from which the fallen thing came.

The younger he calls Aphrodite Pandemos, the common, the one born of Zeus and Dione, younger and more of the Earth, whose name means something like for all the folk. To each goddess, Pausanias gives her own province of desire. The heavenly Aphrodite in his speech inspires the higher and more disciplined love, the devoted bond he associates with the tutelage of young men, a love he presents as reaching beyond the body toward the mind. The common Aphrodite governs the ordinary desire shared by all people alike, the love of the many drawn toward the body and the moment.

With this second goddess, he links Peitho, persuasion, that soft and dangerous power by which one will bends another, the whisper that talks the reluctant heart into yielding. It is worth remembering that this division is the argument of one character at one banquet, a piece of clever speaking rather than settled doctrine, and that the other guests that evening give quite different accounts, one of them tracing love back to a time when human beings were round and doubled and were cut apart, and another putting the whole teaching int o the mouth of a wise woman from Mantinea.

But the division caught the imagination of later ages, and the two names, Urania and Pandemos, the heavenly and the common, were carved on real altars and spoken in real prayers by people who had never read a word of philosophy. Another thinker, older than Plato and stranger, took her further still. Empedocles of Acragas in Sicily wrote his philosophy in verse, and he taught that the whole world is worked upon by two powers only, which mingle and separate the four roots of all things. One is strife, which drives apart.

The other he named love, and he named her also Cypris, which is to say Aphrodite of Cyprus, and he set her at the center of the making of the world. It is she in his poem who fits limb to limb and binds the elements into bone and leaf and eye, who fastens the parts of living things together with the invisible rivets of affection so that a body is not a heap but a shape. He says that mortals do not see her plainly, though she is native among them, and he asks the reader to look at her with the mind and not with the wondering eye.

And he adds a detail that shows how deeply he had thought about her older self, that in the age when Cypris was queen, there were no altars wet with the blood of bulls, but her worship was made of painted images and perfumes and myrrh and honey poured out. It is one philosopher's vision and not a creed, and it sits oddly beside the roses and the little clay doves. Somebody in the fifth century before the common era looked at the goddess of desire and saw in her the force that holds matter together and gave the whole cohesion of the world her island name.

The hymn singers, meanwhile, were less interested in her parentage than in what happened to her in the first hour after she came ashore, and one short Homeric hymn keeps that hour with great care. It tells how the Horai received her on Cyprus, the seasons with their gold headbands, the powers that open and close the year. They came down to the tideline and took her out of the wind. They clothed her in immortal raiment and set a worked crown of gold upon her head, and in her pierced ears they hung flowers of gold and of that bright alloy the old poets call mountain copper, and about her soft throat and her breast they laid chains of gold of the kind the seasons themselves wear when they go to the dances of the gods in their father's house.

They dressed her, in short, as a bride is dressed. Every ornament that a Greek household would fasten on a daughter before leading her out of the door was fastened on the newborn goddess by the hands of the seasons on a beach before she had spoken a word. There is something quietly determined in the scene. She had come out of the sea belonging to no one, and within the hour she had been made ready to be given away. Then they led her up. The foam that bore her thinned and slipped back into the water.

The doves rose higher, and the light that crowned her drew itself out into a road across the sea toward the cloud-wound heights of Olympus. The hymn says the immortals greeted her when they saw her, that they took her hand and welcomed her among themselves, and that each of them, looking at her, prayed to lead her home and make her his wedded wife, marveling at her as she came. Picture that arrival for a moment as the hymn leaves it, the whole assembly rising, the wine forgotten in the cups, every face turned one way.

Out of all that wishing, one marriage was in fact arranged, and it went not to the tallest of the suitors, nor the swiftest, nor the most golden, but to the one Olympian least like her, the lame smith who works the fire beneath the mountains. Yet before we take up the marriage that waits at the end of that road, there is one small thing she keeps back from us, a secret carried in the very sound of her name. For all that the poets tell, the word Aphrodite has never yielded its meaning cleanly.

Hesiod, who gave us the foam, believed he had solved it. He heard in the first part of the name the Greek word aphros, the foam, and so he read the whole as she who rose from the foam, and the birth and the name locked together like a key in a ward. It is a beautiful reading, and for many ages it was believed without question, and the painters painted it. But most who study these words now regard it as a folk etymology, a later explanation laid gently over an older word whose true root had already been forgotten.

The name, they think, is older than the story told to explain it. Which is to say that the foam may have been invented to account for the name rather than the name given to record the foam, and that somewhere behind the whole radiant scene there stands an unknown word carried into Greek from elsewhere, meaning something no one now remembers. What lies beneath, no one can say for certain. Scholars have turned the word over as one turns a worn coin, tilting it to the light, trying to read the faded stamp.

One proposal hears in it a phrase from the Cyprian speech of the Canaanites, and renders it, she of the villages, the goddess of the settled places, where people marry and quarrel and mourn. Another reading, drawn from Phoenician, would make the name mean something like the unique, the excellent, the sublime, a word of pure praise with no story in it at all. Older guesses read the second part of the name as the wanderer, the one who moves and is not fixed, or else as the bright one, the shining.

Each of these has its defenders and its doubters, and none has won the field. There is no inscription that settles it, no bilingual stone on which a scribe wrote the same name twice in two tongues and solved the matter forever. What most who weigh these things agree upon is only the direction from which the answer is likely to come. A Semitic root seems probable, some word carried west from the coasts of the Levant, worn smooth by Greek mouths until its origin was lost. But probable is not certain, and the honest scholar sets the proposals side by side and leaves them open, unresolved.

There were bolder theories once that traced her name to a distant goddess of the dawn, kin to the eastern ushers and the Greek Eos, but her nature sits ill with the dawn, and most have set that reading aside. So the name remains a lamp with the flame behind frosted glass. We see that it burns, we cannot quite see its shape, and there is a fittingness in that for a goddess who was always more than one thing to keep even her name a little veiled. The uncertainty of the name opens onto a wider uncertainty about where she came from at all.

And here, an old traveler can be our guide. Pausanias, who walked the roads of Greece in the second century after the common era and wrote down what he saw and what the local people told him, kept a kind of ledger of her worship. He recorded a tradition that traced her cult backward, hand to hand, along the shores of the Eastern Sea. "The Assyrians," he wrote, "were the first among peoples to establish her worship. After the Assyrians came the people of Paphos on Cyprus, and the Phoenicians who dwelt at Ascalon in the land of Palestine." And it was these Phoenicians, in his telling, who carried the worship to the island of Cythera and taught it to the people there.

So the reverence moved westward across the water like a lamp passed from door to door in the dark, from the great river valleys toward the Greek islands, where the foam was said to have borne her. Modern reconstruction has tried to draw the same line with different tools, and it arrives at a family of goddesses standing behind her. She is set beside the Phoenician Astarte, a great goddess of the coastal cities. Astarte, in turn, is understood as a cognate of the East Semitic Ishtar, the Queen of Heaven, worshipped in Assyria and Babylon.

And Ishtar herself reaches back to the Sumerian Inanna, oldest of them all, whose hymns were sung in the first cities of the world. In this reconstruction, the influence flows into Greece during what is called an Orientalizing Age, a period in the eighth century before the common era when Greek art and story drank deeply from the East, taking in its monsters and its patterns, and some think its goddess of love. This is careful inference, a shape assembled from resemblances and trade routes and shared attributes.

It is offered as the best guess of learned people, not as a thing witnessed or written plainly in any single source. The threads run east into the deep past and thin as they go, and where they vanish, the scholars mark the place and go no further. Still, those older goddesses have voices of their own, and they explain much that the Greek stories leave unexplained. Inanna of Sumer was the lady of love and the lady of battle both, and the same hymns that praise her sweetness praise her as the one who makes the mountains tremble.

There is a long poem about her going down alive into the country of the dead, passing through seven gates and surrendering at each one some ornament of her power, a crown, a rod of measurement, a necklace of lapis, until she stood before the throne of her elder sister, stripped of every emblem of her office. The judges of that country pronounced against her, and she was made a corpse, and her body remained in the great hall below three days and three nights, while in the world above the flocks did not couple and the fields went unsown.

She was brought back, but the dead demanded a life in exchange, and the life she gave them was that of her own young husband, Dumuzid the shepherd, whom she found seated on his throne in fine clothes and not mourning her, and upon whom she fixed the eye of death. His sister took half his sentence so that he was below for half the year and above for the other half, and the reeds and the sheepfolds mourned him when he went down. The shape of that story does not stay in Sumer. A goddess of love, a beautiful young man, a division of the year between the world above and the world below, and a season of ritual weeping.

The same shape comes around again on a Cyprian hillside under a Greek name. Her later self, Ishtar of Babylon and Assyria, kept the same doubleness and sharpened it. In the great poem of Gilgamesh, she looks down from her temple upon the king of Uruk when he has washed and put on clean clothes, and she asks him to be her husband and offers him a chariot of lapis and gold and kings kneeling to him, and he refuses her, and the refusal is a catalog. He recites her lovers and what became of them.

The shepherd who whom she turned into a wolf so that his own boys drove him off with sticks. The gardener who displeased her and was made into a creeping thing. The stallion she loved and then set spur and whip and seven leagues of hard riding upon. The bird whose wing she broke so that it stands in the grove crying its own injury. "Love me," he says, "and you will use me as you used them." Ishtar goes up to her father in a fury and demands the bull of heaven, and the bull comes down and the pits open in the earth and hundreds of young men fall into them.

The scholars are careful, and rightly careful, about how much of this passed into Greek hands. But the pattern is already whole in the older poem. A goddess of desire whose refusal costs a city its young men, worshiped in a house where the ornaments of love and the instruments of war hang on the same wall. Whatever her distant origin, by the time the Greeks knew her, she had drawn about herself a whole household of signs, and these are easier to hold in the hand than the riddle of her name.

The tradition dresses her in a wardrobe of symbols, each one a small door into her nature. The scallop shell is hers, the ridged fan of the sea that recalls the wave from which she came. The myrtle is hers, that dark and fragrant shrub, and the rose, and the apple, round and sweet and heavy, with a meaning that later stories would make much of. Among the birds, the dove belongs to her above all, soft-voiced and quick to pair, and with the dove, the sparrow and the swan and sometimes the goose.

She is given the mirror in which beauty regards itself and is not displeased. Pomegranates are brought to her, and small clay doves, and lamps. And hers above all is the embroidered girdle, the woven band she wore, bound about her breast, into which were worked all the enticements of the world, longing and desire, and the soft, beguiling speech that unstrings the wits even of the wise, so that whoever she lent it to could not be refused. That girdle has its own story, and it is one of the strangest hours in the Iliad.

Hera, wanting to draw the eyes of Zeus away from the fighting at Troy so that the Greeks might have their way for an afternoon, went to Aphrodite and asked to borrow it, and did not tell her why. She invented a gentle errand instead, saying she meant to go to the ends of the earth and reconcile Oceanus and Tethys, the old parents of the waters, who had long ago stopped speaking and stopped sharing a bed. It was a lie fitted exactly to the listener, a request for help in mending a marriage, and Aphrodite, who was on the Trojan side and therefore no ally of Hera in that war, unfastened the band from her breast and put it into the hands of her enemy without a moment's suspicion.

Hera carried it away, laid it in her own bosom, and went up the shoulder of Mount Ida. And when Zeus saw her coming, the desire wrapped itself about his mind like mist, and he forgot the war entirely, and the earth beneath the two of them put forth clover and crocus and hyacinth, thick and soft, and a golden cloud closed over them, and sleep went running down to the ships with the news. It is a comic scene and also a demonstration. The goddess of love had been outwitted by a story about love, which is perhaps the only way she can be outwitted at all, and her borrowed band could stop a war for as long as an afternoon lasts.

Beside her, in image after image, flutters a small winged figure, Eros, sometimes named her son and sometimes an elder power older than any parentage. He is desire given wings and a bow, the sudden arrow that no one asks for and no one can refuse. And where the mother goes, the child is seldom far. With him come the lesser powers of her retinue, Himeros, who is longing, and Pothos, who is the ache for what is absent, and Peitho, who is persuasion, and often the three Graces, who attend her at the bath and weave her robes and dance where she dances.

The tradition gives her children besides. By Ares, she is said to have borne Harmonia, who married Cadmus of Thebes and received at her wedding a necklace made by Hephaestus that brought ruin upon every woman who afterward wore it. And by the same god, she bore Deimos and Phobos, Terror and Rout, who yoke their father's horses and go before him into the fighting. By Hermes, she is named the mother of Hermaphroditus, and by Dionysus of another god of the gardens, and by a mortal of the hero who gave his name to a mountain in Sicily where she had a famous shrine.

Consider what that household amounts to. The goddess of desire is the mother of Harmony and the mother of Panic, and both of them by the god of war. In the sculpture and the painted plaster of the classical world, she is most often shown unclothed, her beauty presented without covering, and the carvers labored hardest of all upon her mouth. In the oldest of the stone figures, the stiff archaic ones with their braided hair and their forward set feet, the corners of the lips are lifted in a set expression the workshops used for gods and for the dead alike, and it looks on those early faces less like happiness than like patience.

In her case, the workshops kept it long after they had abandoned it elsewhere, and refined it until in the finest of the later marbles there is a warmth at the corner of the mouth so slight that the eye keeps returning to check whether it is there. It is the sign by which she is known when every other token is stripped away, when the doves are broken off, and the girdle is worn to nothing, a mouth that promises and conceals in a single line so that a block of cold stone could be made to look as though it were on the point of speaking and had thought better of it.

The most famous of all those statues was carved by Praxiteles for the people of Cnidos, and the story of it says a great deal about how the Greeks felt in her presence. He made two figures, it was said, one clothed and one bare, and offered them at the same price. The people of Cos, who had first choice, took the clothed one, judging it the sober and seemly purchase. The Cnidians took the other, and it made their city famous. They set her in a small round shrine open on every side so that she could be walked around and looked at from behind as well as before, standing as though she had just laid her garment on the water jar beside her and had heard a step on the path.

Travelers sailed to Cnidos for no other purpose than to see her. A king of Bithynia is said to have offered to discharge the whole public debt of the city in exchange for the statue. And the Cnidians, who owed a great deal, refused him and kept her. And there was a darker tale attached of a man who hid in the shrine at night out of a love he could not govern and left a mark upon the marble that could still be pointed out. The Greeks told that story with a shudder and did not doubt it, because they understood what it meant to look too long at what she was.

She was numbered among the great divinities of Olympus, one of the ruling powers, and her worship had its strongholds. Four places above others are named as the chief seats of her cult, the island of Cythera off the southern cape, the island of Cyprus with its sanctuary at Paphos, the wealthy city of Corinth upon its isthmus, and Athens, city of the olive. Into this brightness, the old marriage now brings its strange shadow. Among the ordered ranks of Olympus, the goddess of desire was given as wife to Hephaestus, the god of fire and of the forge, the divine smith and craftsman of the immortals.

He was the maker among the gods, the one whose hands shaped the thunderbolts and the palaces and the wonderful things that moved as though alive, tripods that rolled of themselves into the assembly of the gods, and golden attendants with sense and speech in them who held up his arm as he walked. There was no equal to his skill in all the heavens, yet he was also the lame one, the god whose legs were crooked and whose gait rolled and dragged, marked among the flawless Olympians by an imperfection they did not share.

The stories of how he came by it do not agree. In one, he was flung from heaven for taking his mother's part in a quarrel and fell a whole day and struck the island of Lemnos at evening. And in another, his mother herself, ashamed of a child born imperfect, threw him from the height into the sea, where sea nymphs hid him in a cave for nine years, and he learned his trade at a hidden forge with the water sounding outside. In that second telling, he took his revenge as a craftsman does by sending up a golden throne of his own making as a gift, which closed upon his mother and held her, and no god could free her, and he would not come to release her until Dionysus made him drunk and led him back to Olympus on the back of a mule.

Some said the marriage itself was the price of that release, the fairest of the goddesses handed over to buy the queen of heaven out of a chair. Beauty at the anvil, the loveliest given to the smith of the smoky cave. The old poems do not even agree that she was his wife. In the Iliad, his consort is one of the Graces, and in Hesiod, another, and it is chiefly the Odyssey and the tellers who came after it that put the goddess of love in the smith's house. Yet that is the version the world remembered because it is the one with the story in it.

She did not keep faith within that union, and the sources do not hide it. Again and again, they speak of her wandering affections, of a heart that would not be held to one hearth, of loves taken among gods and among mortals both. There is no single villain in the way the old poets frame this, and no long moralizing. It is told rather as a fact of her nature, as one might say that fire rises or that water seeks the low places. She was the goddess of desire, and desire does not sit quietly by the forge while the hammer falls.

The marriage was a cage of gold, and the bird within it sang for others. The most famous of these wanderings, and the one the poets could not resist, was her love for Ares, the god of war. Here were the two most restless powers of Olympus drawn together, the goddess who unmakes reason through longing and the god who unmakes order through slaughter, and their meeting is preserved in one of the oldest and most vivid of the tales, sung in the hall of the Odyssey by a blind bard to a listening court.

It was the son who ruined them, the story goes. Helios, who drives across the sky all day and sees everything that happens beneath him and keeps nothing to himself. He looked down and saw them together and went straight to Hephaestus with what he had seen. And the smith, when he had heard it out, did not answer the wrong with shouting or with blows. He went down to his workshop with a great grief in his heart and set his anvil on its block and answered it with his art. There he forged a snare finer than any spider ever spun, a mesh of chains so slender that no eye could catch them, so strong that no strength could break them.

Thin as breath and hard as adamant, they hung from nothing and clung to everything. These he draped above and around the bed where the lovers met, letting them fall like a net of woven air, and then he made a show of going away, announcing loudly that he was bound for the island of Lemnos, which of all lands was dearest to him. Ares had been watching the house and saw him go, and came at once and took her by the hand and said the smith was away among the rough-spoken folk of the north, and the two lay down together, and the invisible chains dropped over them and drew tight.

They could not rise. They could not part. They were held fast in the very posture of their love, caught as a fisherman catches two fish in one cast. And then the smith returned, for he had never truly left, and he stood in his own doorway on the bronze threshold with a black rage on him and called out. He summoned the gods, the whole bright company of Olympus, and he bade them come and look upon what he had caught, and he cried out that he was lame and slow, and that this was why he was despised, and that the two of them might lie there until his wife's father gave back every gift he had paid for a shameless bride.

They came, and they looked, though not all of them. The goddesses stayed away, each of them keeping to her own house for shame, and so it was the male gods who crowded the doorway and stood about the snared bed and gazed down at what the net held. What the poet gives them is not horror, but a kind of rueful, rolling wonder, the laughter of the blessed ones at a thing both shameful and comic, and among them the murmur passed that the slow smith had, by his craft, overtaken the swift god of battle, that patient skill had trapped raw speed, and that ill deeds do not prosper.

Apollo turned to Hermes and asked him whether he would care to lie bound in chains like those, if it meant lying where Ares lay, and Hermes answered without hesitating tha t he would take three times as many bonds, and let every god and goddess in heaven stand and stare, and count it a bargain. The laughter went round again at that. Only Poseidon did not laugh. He pressed the smith to let them go, and when Hephaestus refused, saying that a worthless debtor cannot be held by a worthless pledge, the lord of the sea stood surety himself for the fine, and on that promise the maker at last drew back his chains.

The old tellers noticed that Poseidon alone had wanted the net opened, and they drew their own conclusions about why. When the mesh was loosed, the lovers sprang apart, Ares away to Thrace where the war god was at home, and Aphrodite to Cyprus, to Paphos, back to the island of her cult and her sea. There, the poet says, the Graces bathed her and anointed her wi th the oil that shines upon the immortals and clothed her in loveliness again, as though the whole indignity might be washed away by returning to the shore that first received her. And that, in the poem, is where the song ends and the harp is set down, for the whole tale is one a bard sings for entertainment in a king's hall by the sea, to a company at their wine and to one weeping stranger among them who has not yet given his name.

The Greeks kept it as a comedy. They also kept, without ever quite saying so, the picture at its center, the fairest and the fiercest bound in one mesh, the yielding and the striking held in a single frame where no one could look at either without seeing the other. And this, the tale of the net, is only the first of her loves that the poets chose to remember. There were others among the immortals, and each left a name behind it. Of Hermes she was said to have borne the child in whom both natures met, who was raised in the caves of Ida by mountain nymphs, and who came, growing, to a still pool in Caria where a water nymph called Salmacis saw him bathing and wound herself about him and prayed to the gods that they might never be divided, and the gods heard the prayer exactly as it was spoken, and the two became one body that was neither and both.

Of Dionysus she was said to have borne the guardian of orchards and vineyards whom the country people set up rough-carved at the end of the rows. And beyond the gods there were mortals whom her glance fell upon, shepherds and princes and beautiful youths, and each of those loves opened its own long road of consequence, roads that ran down from the heights of Olympus into the dust of the mortal world, into the herding grounds beneath a mountain and the hunting forests where a young man would bleed into the flowers.

The road that ran down soonest and steepest led to a slope beneath Mount Ida, where the herds of Troy grazed in the long grass and a young man walked among them with a staff in his hand. His name was Anchises, and he was of the royal house of Troy, a prince by blood who kept to the hills like any hired herdsman, content among the beasts and the wind and the far gray line of the sea. The first Homeric hymn to Aphrodite tells how the gaze of the goddess fell upon him there. Yet the hymn is careful to say that this love was not entirely her own choosing.

Zeus, who had so often watched her set his heart and the hearts of the other gods upon mortal women, and who had endured the boasting of it, turned her own power back upon her and placed in her breast a sweet longing for a man who would age and die. The goddess who bent the immortals to desire was made, this once, to feel what she inflicted, and there is a note in the hymn of something like justice being quietly done at her expense. The hymn pauses first to name the three who were beyond her reach, the three upon whom the persuasion of desire has never once worked.

There is Athena, who cares for war and for the crafts of the loom and the bronze, and turns her mind away. There is Artemis, who loves the bow and the hunting cry, and the dances in the shadow of the hills. And there is Hestia, the eldest and gentlest, who swore upon the head of Zeus that she would never marry, and who sits still at the center of every house where a fire is kept. Over everything else that breathes, the poem says, over all the gods and all mortals and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish in the sea, she has her way.

So the picture is drawn before the story begins. Three doors shut against her, and every other door in the world standing open, and now the god above her arranging that one of those open doors should be her own. She did not come to him as herself. To stand before a mortal in the full weight of her divinity would have been to break him, as too near a flame breaks the moth, and so she veiled her glory. First she went to Paphos and shut herself in her fragrant chamber, and the Graces bathed her and anointed her with the immortal oil, and she dressed with great care, as any woman dresses who intends to be seen.

Then she came down through the air to Ida, and the gray wolves and the lions and the bears and the leopards came fawning about her as she passed, and she put desire into all of them as she went, so that they turned aside in pairs into the shadowed hollows of the mountain. She made herself a young woman, unwed, the daughter of a Phrygian king, and she came to the herding grounds in garments that shone softer than firelight, in robes brighter than the flame, with spiral bracelets upon her arms and blossoms of gold at her throat.

Anchises was alone at the huts, the others being out with the cattle, and he was walking up and down playing the lyre. He looked up and saw her standing there and did not know her. He knew only that no shepherd's daughter had ever looked so, and a fear moved in him even as wonder did, the old mortal fear that comes when the divine draws near in a shape too fair for the fields. He greeted her with reverence, half suspecting that she was one of the blessed ones, and he ran through the names of the goddesses aloud, and vowed an altar upon a height and offerings through all the seasons if she would be gracious to him, and asked in the same breath for a long life and children and prosperity.

She answered with a woven falsehood, calm and sweet. She was no goddess, she told him, but a mortal maiden, born of a mortal mother. Her father was Otreus, a king of the Phrygians, and she had been carried off from a dancing floor of Artemis by the swift guide of souls, who had set her down here upon this hillside and told her that she was to be the wedded wife of Anchises and bear him splendid children. She said she understood the speech of Troy because a Trojan nurse had raised her from a child.

She asked him to show her untouched to his father and mother, and to send word to her own kin, who would send back gold and woven stuff for her dowry. Every word was a thread in the disguise, and the threads were laid so carefully that the whole of it looked like an ordinary marriage that any family in the district might have arranged. And Anchises, hearing what he most wished to hear, put off his fear and took her hands. They lay down together in the shepherd's dwelling, upon a bed spread with the skins of bears and lions that he himself had killed in the high country, and a mortal man slept the sleep of love beside the goddess of love, and did not know whom he had held.

She let him sleep, and then she put her disguise away. She rose to the full of her stature and let her immortal beauty return, and the low roof of the herdsman's hut was filled with a light that had no source, the shining of a divinity no longer hidden. Her head touched the roof beam; the loveliness of the deathless ones burned upon her cheeks. She woke him, and he opened his eyes upon a radiance he could not bear, and he turned his face away and hid his eyes in the bedding and begged her to have mercy, saying he had known from the first sight of her that she was no daughter of any king, for he understood at last what he had done.

He had lain with one of the immortals, and every mortal tale he had ever heard warned him that a man who shares the bed of a goddess does not walk away from it whole. She calmed him and told him not to fear, that no harm would come to him from her, and then, before she spoke of the child, she spoke to him at length about mortality, and it is the most unexpected passage in the whole hymn. She told him of Ganymede, the beautiful boy of his own Trojan line whom Zeus caught up into heaven to pour the wine of the gods, and how his father grieved until Zeus sent word by the messenger god and gave him a gift of storm-footed horses in exchange, and the father was comforted because the boy would be deathless and ageless forever.

And then she told him of Tithonus, another of that house, whom the dawn loved and carried away, and for whom the dawn asked immortality of Zeus and received it and forgot in her haste to ask for youth along with it. So he lived and lived, and the loathsome age came upon him and pressed him down until he could not lift a limb, and the goddess who had loved him laid him in a chamber and shut the shining doors upon him, and there his voice runs on endlessly, and there is no strength left in him at all.

She would not wish that, she said, for Anchises. She could not ask it. He would be held by the pitiless old age that waits for every mortal, wearying and grievous, hated even by the gods, and she would carry among the immortals the reproach of having lain with a man who dies. It is a remarkable thing to find in a hymn of praise a goddess speaking plainly about aging and about shame and about the difference that cannot be crossed. Then she gave him the word he would carry the rest of his life.

She would bear him a son, she said, and the child would rule among the Trojans, and children would be born to his children through all the ages to come. The boy would be called Aeneas, a name touched with the ache she felt at having lain with a mortal man. She would give the infant to the mountain nymphs to nurse, the long-lived spirits of the pines and the high pastures, who are neither mortal nor immortal, who dance with the immortals and live a great length of years, and whose lives are bound to the trees that rise with them.

And when the appointed hour comes, the tree stands dry, and the bark falls away, and the timber comes down, and at that moment the soul of the nymph leaves the light of the sun. When the child had grown, she said, she would bring him down to Anchises to look upon, and in the fifth year she would come again, leading his son by the hand. Out of that promise, made in a hut on a hillside, came a line whose descendants the Romans would one day claim as the root of their whole people. But before she left him, she set a guard upon his tongue, and here the sweetness of the story turns cool and grave.

He must never boast of this. If any man asked him who had borne his splendid son, he was to answer with some other name, the name of a nymph of the meadows, and never once let slip that the mother was the goddess herself. For the anger of Zeus was a real and waiting thing, and if Anchises spoke the truth in pride, the father of the gods would strike him with the smoking thunderbolt. She said it plainly, without softening it, and then she rose into the air and was gone, back to the winds and the heights, leaving a mortal man alone in his hut with a secret heavier than any burden his shoulders had carried up the mountain.

For a while, the sources suggest, he kept it. Yet a wonder that great is a hard thing to hold behind the teeth. Consider the difficulty of it, year upon year, among men who had known him all his life, with the boy growing up plainly finer than the other children on the mountain, and everyone remarking upon it. The tale that comes down to us says that in the end he could not, that in some hour of wine or pride or careless company, the truth escaped him, that he named the goddess as the mother of his boy, and the bolt fell.

What the old accounts will not agree upon is what the bolt did to him. Some say it killed him where he stood, that the fire from the sky ended the herdsman who had loved a goddess and could not keep still about it. Others say it did not kill but only maimed, that it took the strength from his limbs or the sight from his eyes, that the flash left him blind or lame, a broken man who lived on in the ruin of what he had been. The sources hold both endings out and choose neither, and so the memory keeps them both, the death and the maiming, side by side like two versions of the same warning.

Yet whether blinded or crippled, in the tellings where he lived, he lived long, on into the last days of his city. For when the years had run their whole length and Troy was burning, when the walls that Poseidon and Apollo had raised were falling into fire and the Greeks were loose in the streets, it was the son of that hillside union who did not leave his father behind. Aeneas, the child the goddess had promised in a shepherd's hut, lifted the aged Anchises onto his own shoulders and bore him out through the smoke and the falling timbers.

An old man carried like a burden that was also an honor, out of the dying city and toward whatever shore the gods still meant for him. The image of it endured for centuries, painted on jars and cut into gems and set up in bronze, the strong son with the frail father upon his back and a small child holding his hand and hurrying to keep up. And at the root of that image, far back before the war and the wooden horse and the long siege, stood a goddess in a shepherd's hut and a secret she had told a mortal not to tell.

She had loved a man who grew old. Now the tale turns to a youth who never did, to a beauty so bright and so brief that it left a flower behind it. The birth of Adonis was itself a grief, and the goddess is in it from the beginning. The story goes that a king of Cyprus had a daughter named Myrrha, and that either the girl's mother boasted of her beauty above the goddess's own, or the goddess had some older quarrel with the house, and Aphrodite punished the boast by putting into the girl a desire that no one should have to carry, a longing for her own father.

The nurse helped her to it in the dark of a festival when the wives were kept apart from their husbands, and for three nights, the king did not know who came to him. When he learned it, he took up a sword, and she fled through the country, ashamed and heavy with child, and prayed to be neither among the living nor among the dead, and the gods took the prayer as she had made it. Her feet went down into the ground as roots. The bark climbed her body and closed over her face while she was still weeping, and it has never stopped weeping.

The fragrant The gum that runs from the myrrh tree is her tears, and it is burned as incense upon altars, including the altars of the goddess who began the whole thing. When the time came, the tree split, and the infant was lifted out of the wood, and he was so beautiful that the goddess who had ruined his mother could not leave him alone. She hid him in a chest and took him down to the underworld and gave him to Persephone to keep. So the two goddesses contended, the one who dwelt in the light and the one who dwelt in the shadow, each claiming the same beautiful youth.

Persephone, the dread queen beneath the earth, opened the chest and would not give him back. It is a strange thing to picture, the goddess of love and the queen of the dead pulling at the two ends of a single mortal life. The dispute was settled, as such disputes among the gods often were, by division, though the accounts differ on who made the ruling and how the portions fell. One telling puts the case before Zeus, who would not weigh it himself and handed it to the muse Calliope, and she cut the year into three, one part for Persephone below, one part for Aphrodite above, and one part left to the boy himself to spend as he chose, though it is said he gave his own portion to the goddess of love and so lived two-thirds of the year in the light.

Other tellings speak only of halves, half the turning year in the dim halls beneath the world and half in the sun and the myrtle. Either way, the shape is the same. He went down, and he came up again, and for the season that was hers, she kept him near her and would not let him wander far. She followed him through the woods, with her skirts caught up like a huntress. The poet said she who had never cared for the hunt, and she warned him against the beasts that do not run away, the boar and the wolf and the lion, and told him to be brave only against creatures that flee.

He listened and did not heed her. Yet the thing about a beauty like his was that it seemed always to be borrowed, always to be owed back, and the tale settles the debt in the plainest currency the Greek world knew, a hunting accident in the hills. Adonis loved the hunt, as beautiful young men in the old stories so often do, and one day he went out into the forests of the island after the wild game, and the dogs put up a great boar out of the thickets, and the boar turned. The accounts give the injury without ornament, as they give the death of any mortal whom a god has loved, a wound driven into the thigh or the groin by the tusk, the bright blood upon the leaves, the young body sinking down among the roots and the ferns.

Some say the beast was sent, that Ares in his jealousy, or Artemis in her grievance, put it in the thicket for him to find. And others say it was only a boar, and that the woods of Cyprus held boars as the woods anywhere do. Aphrodite heard him, or knew somehow, and turned her swan-drawn car in the middle of the air and came down running. And she came only in time to hold him as he died. She took him into her arms and wept over him, the goddess who had made so many others weep now weeping herself, tearing her hair and beating her breast like any woman in any village of the island.

And her tears fell upon his face and his wound and mingled there with his blood. And out of that mingling, where the tears of the goddess ran together with the blood of the dying youth and soaked into the ground, a flower came up. It was the anemone, the wind flower, red as the blood that made it. A small, bright bloom that opens quickly and is torn apart quickly by the wind that gives it its name, so that it seemed to carry in its very brevity the whole meaning of the life it had sprung from. Here was the second of her three colors, and it had been paid for out of a body.

Every spring it would return, red upon the hillsides of the island and the lands around the eastern sea. And every spring it would fall, and the people who saw it would remember the youth who died in the arms of love. Some told it otherwise and said the rose was hers from that hour, that she ran barefoot through the thorns to reach him, and that the white rose took its red from her heel, so that even the whiteness she was born out of was overwritten in the same hour. Either way, the lesson the flowers carry is the same, that in her stories, the beautiful thing and the wound are usually the same thing seen from two sides.

Those who have studied these things say the pattern in the story is very old, older than the Greek names laid over it. Most scholars trace the shape of it, the goddess and her beautiful dying youth, back across the sea to the east, to the Levant and to Mesopotamia, to the far older myths of Inanna and Dumuzid, of Ishtar and Tammuz, in which a great goddess of love loved a shepherd or a young lord who went down into the land of the dead and was mourned with the turning of the year. The name Adonis itself carries the east within it, close kin to a Semitic word for lord, so that the youth of the Greek story is called, in the oldest layer of his own name, simply the Lord, as a worshiper would address him rather than as a friend would.

The Greeks received the story from older peoples, the reckoning goes, and gave it their own island and their own goddess, and kept the ancient ache at the center of it unchanged, the ache of the deathless one who loves what must die. And because the ache was real, it was not left to the poets alone. It was kept in the calendar in a festival of women. Each year at the height of summer, the women of the Greek cities remembered Adonis in the rite called the Adonia, and the strange, beautiful heart of that rite was a kind of gardening.

They took small pots and shallow potsherds and baskets and filled them with earth and sowed in them the seeds of fast-growing things, lettuce and fennel and wheat and barley, and they carried these little gardens up onto the flat rooftops of their houses and set them out in the fierce midsummer sun. The seeds, quickened by the heat, sprang up with astonishing speed, green and eager in a matter of days. And then, having no depth of soil and no shelter from the burning sky, they wilted just as swiftly, scorched and drooping, and died.

These were the gardens of Adonis, and they were made in order to die, for that was the whole point of them. The little gardens lived their entire lives in the span of a week, rising and withering under the summer sun. And in their rushing green rise and their quick brown death, the women read the life of the youth himself, the beauty that came up bright and was cut down before its season. When the gardens had failed, the women mourned. They mourned openly and without restraint, in the way the old world permitted grief to be shown, tearing at their garments and beating their breasts upon the rooftops, lifting up the ritual lament for the boy who had lived so briefly and been so loved.

The little pots of dead seedlings stood among them like beers, and the wailing rose over the hot roofs of the city in the long light of the summer evening, a grief performed on purpose year upon year so that the sorrow at the center of the story would never be allowed to fade. It was a festival that no magistrate ordered and no city treasury paid for. The women arranged it among themselves, and it went on in the upper air of the town above the streets where the men's business was done. There is a story that shows exactly how it sounded from below.

In the year that Athens sent its great fleet to Sicily, the ships lying ready and the whole city down at the harbor, the Adonia fell at the same season, and everywhere in the town there were little images laid out for burial and women beating their breasts and singing the lament for the dead boy over the rooftops. Those who were uneasy about the expedition remembered it afterward and said it had been a sign that the city had launched its army to the sound of women mourning a beautiful young man who went out and did not come back.

The fleet was destroyed, and the memory of that summer kept the two things joined. It is a small thing, but it shows that this was not a quaint custom in a corner. It was loud enough to be heard across a city on the most important morning of its history. In the great cities of a later age, the rite grew richer without losing its ending. At Alexandria, the women of the court laid the two figures, the goddess and the youth, upon a silver couch under a bower of green, with the little gardens set in silver baskets about them, and fruit and honey cakes and small flasks of scent, and a singer stood beside the couch through the first day and sang how love had found him and how the wild thing in the wood had taken him.

Then at dawn on the second day, they lifted him up and carried him out through the streets with their hair loosened and their robes hanging free down to the edge of the water and gave him and his withered gardens to the sea. The whole festival was built to be undone. It was a house of green branches raised in the evening and pulled apart in the morning, and the women went home from the shore in the early light with the salt still on their hands and waited a year and did it all again. The morning on the rooftops belongs to summer.

There is another company told of her, and it too begins at a wedding, though this wedding was meant for joy. High among the gods, the marriage of Peleus and Thetis was being celebrated. She was a sea nymph, and there had been an old prophecy about her, that whatever son she bore would grow greater than his father. And when Zeus and Poseidon heard it, they both drew back from her at once and hurriedly arranged that she should be given to a mortal man so that the danger might be spent harmlessly upon the earth.

So a goddess of the sea was married to Peleus, king of the Myrmidons, and the son she bore was Achilles. To that wedding, the deathless ones were summoned in their glory, seated at the long tables with the wine poured out and the songs going up, and the muses sang, and gifts were brought, a spear of ash and immortal horses. Every power of Olympus had its place there, every god and goddess called by name and welcomed through the door. Every one, that is, but a single figure who had been left off the list of guests on purpose because her presence was thought to spoil any gladness she came near.

That figure was Eris, whose name means strife, the goddess of discord, sister to the din of quarrels and the bitterness that turns friends against one another. She was not invited, and she knew why she was not invited, and the knowing sat in her like a coal. She came all the same, unseen at first, slipping in at the edges of the light where the laughter was loudest. She carried no weapon and raised no voice. She carried only a single apple of pure gold, small and round and heavy in her hand, and upon it, a few words had been cut into the bright metal.

"To the fairest one," the apple read. Here at last was the third of the colors, the gold, and of the three it would prove the most expensive. And into the midst of the seated goddesses, without a word of her own, Eris let it fall and rolled it gleaming across the floor, and then she was gone, and the mischief was left to do its work alone. It is the most economical act of vengeance in all the old stories. She did not curse the bride or blight the feast. She wrote three words on a piece of fruit and let the guests do the rest.

For a moment, perhaps, it was only a curious thing, a golden fruit spinning to rest on the marble among the feet of the immortals. Then the words were read aloud, "To the fairest," and the peace of the wedding was quietly and completely undone. Three of the great goddesses reached for the apple, and each was certain the writing meant herself. There was Hera, queen of the gods and wife of Zeus, first among the women of heaven. There was Athena, gray-eyed and clear-minded, goddess of wisdom and of skillful war.

And there was Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, whose whole nature was loveliness itself, and who must have thought the matter beyond argument. Each claimed the apple, and none would yield it, and what had begun as a single quiet word swelled into a dispute that no seat at the table could settle and no elder voice could calm. The quarrel could not be resolved on Olympus, and this was the deepest part of the trouble. Zeus himself would not judge it, for whichever goddess he named, the other two would be his enemies ever after, and one of them was his wife and another his daughter.

So the father of the gods turned the matter away from heaven and down toward the earth, and he called upon Hermes, the messenger, the god of the swift feet and the golden staff, to be the guide. Hermes was to lead the three goddesses down from the high air to a mortal man, and that man, knowing nothing of the storm he was being handed, would be made the judge of the fairest among the powers of the sky. This was a scene the old world loved and remembered. Centuries afterward, it stood carved upon the chest of Cypselus at Olympia, a famous coffer of cedar wrought with ivory and gold, on which Hermes could be seen leading the three goddesses to the judgment, the whole quarrel fixed forever in the small, bright figures of the craftsman's art.

The man to whom Hermes brought them was Paris, a prince of Troy, and there was already a shadow on him before ever the goddesses arrived. Before his birth, his mother had dreamed that she carried a burning torch that set the whole city alight, and the readers of dreams had told the king that the child would be the ruin of Troy, and so the infant was carried out and left upon the mountain to die. He did not die. A her- herdsman found him and raised him, and he grew up on Ida, tall and famous among the shepherds for his beauty and for his fairness in settling disputes over cattle, which is perhaps why the gods thought of him.

He had a wife there, too, a nymph of the mountain called Oenone, who knew the healing use of every root and leaf on the slopes and who loved him and who would be left behind without much ceremony when the great world called. So he looked up from his flocks and his hillside to find the messenger of the gods before him and three goddesses waiting to be weighed one against another, and the golden apple placed into his mortal hands to give as he saw fit. It was a gift no man should have been asked to give.

Each of the three, understanding that his choice was open, came to him not only in her beauty but with an offering, a bribe laid quietly before the judge to sway the verdict her way. Hera, the queen, offered him power. She would make him a lord of kingdoms, ruler over wide lands, the greatest of kings, if only he would name her the fairest. Athena offered him wisdom and victory. She would make him unbeaten in war, wise in counsel, a champion whom no enemy could throw down if the apple came to her.

And Aphrodite offered him neither thrones nor triumphs but love. She promised him the most beautiful mortal woman in all the world for his own, and that woman was Helen of Sparta, whose loveliness was spoken of across the seas and who was already the wife of another man, a fact the promise did not trouble itself to mention. Paris weighed the three gifts as a young man weighs them, and he set aside the crown and set aside the spear, and he gave the golden apple to Aphrodite and chose the promise of Helen above the rest.

Two goddesses went back up into the air with a grudge that would last ten years and cost a city its walls, and one went away to arrange a voyage. The prize was granted on the mountain, and it was collected at sea. Helen was already a wife, married to Menelaus, King of Sparta, and no promise of a goddess could make her freely Paris' own. He crossed the water and came to Sparta as a guest and was received as guests were received in that world, washed and feasted and given a place at the hearth under the oldest law the Greeks kept, the law that binds a host and a stranger and puts them both under the eye of Zeus.

Then Menelaus was called away over the sea to Crete, to the burial rites of his mother's father, and the house stood open, and when he returned, his wife and much of his treasure had gone with the Trojan across the water. It was not only a theft of a woman. It was the breaking of the hearth oath, the one crime the Greek world could not overlook without unmaking itself. And there was a second oath waiting behind it, for when Helen had been a girl with too many suitors, every lord who courted her had been made to swear that he would stand by whichever man won her and would take arms against anyone who stole her away.

So the ships came out of every harbor, bound by a promise made years before at the door of a house in Sparta. Out of that came the great war, the thousand ships, and the ten long years, the siege of Troy that the poets would sing of ever after. Where exactly the war began is told in more than one way. Some lay the whole cause at the apple, the vanity of three goddesses and the choice of one shepherd prince. Others trace it further back to the slight at the feast, to Eris left off the list of guests so that the true first cause was not the golden fruit at all, but the discord of the goddess who had been shut outside the door.

Either way, the road ran to the same walls and to the same fire at the end of it. In the war that followed, Aphrodite did not stand apart. She had promised Paris his prize, and she took his side, and she took the side of Aeneas, her own son by the shepherd Anchises, who fought among the defenders of the city. And in the third book of the Iliad, there is an hour that shows her more clearly than any temple statue ever did. Paris had gone out to meet Menelaus in single combat, the two of them fighting for Helen before both armies while the fighting stopped to watch.

And Menelaus had him by the helmet strap and was dragging him choking across the ground toward the Greek line. Aphrodite broke the strap and covered her man in a thick mist and set him down in his own scented bedchamber inside the walls as easily as a woman lifts a cup from a table. Then she went for Helen. She found her on the tower with the old women of the city, and she took the shape of a wool worker Helen had known in Sparta, an aged woman who used to card the beautiful wool for her, and she plucked her by the robe and told her Paris was waiting in the bedchamber, shining and freshly dressed, looking not like a man who had just come from a fight, but like one going to a dance.

And Helen saw through it. She looked at the old woman's throat and breast and shining eyes and knew the goddess underneath, and something in her broke loose, and she answered with the most reckless speech any mortal makes to an immortal in the whole poem. "Why are you doing this?" she said. "Do you mean to carry me off to some other city further away, to some other favorite of yours? Go and sit by him yourself since you like him so much. Give up being a goddess. Stay away from Olympus forever.

Suffer for him and look after him until he makes you his wife or his slave. I will not go. It would be shameful, and every woman in Troy would blame me, and I have grief enough already." And the goddess of love answered her in a fury. "Do not provoke me," she said, "or I will let you go and hate you as much as I have loved you, and I will contrive bitter hatreds between the Trojans and the Greeks alike, and you will die miserably between them." Helen went. She wrapped her white robe about her and went silently down from the tower, unseen by the Trojan women, and the goddess walked in front of her and led the way and set a chair for her opposite Paris with her own hands.

That short scene holds the whole meaning of the dark names. There is no blade in it and no blood. There is only a woman being told courteously in her own house exactly what disobedience would cost. Upon the field itself, she was less formidable. She moved to shield the men she loved, folding them into the shining folds of her garment, lifting them out of the reach of the spear. Yet the battlefield was not her element, and it did not treat her as heaven did. Her son had gone down under a great stone cast by Diomedes of Argos, and she came through the press to carry him out, her white arms about him and the fold of her robe drawn over him as a screen against the missiles.

And Diomedes, with Athena's leave and Athena's urging, knew her for the coward among the gods, the one who does not belong among fighting men, and went after her through the crowd and drove the bronze at her. The spear point went through the robe the Graces themselves had woven and cut the skin at the wrist above the palm. The ichor welled out along her hand, that pale immortal fluid which is not blood; for the gods eat no bread and drink no wine, and so have nothing in them that could be called blood, and are called the bloodless ones because of it.

She cried aloud and let her son fall, and Apollo caught him up and hid him in a dark cloud, and Diomedes shouted after her to keep away from the fighting, and asked whether it was not enough for her to beguile weak women. Iris led her weeping out of the battle to where Ares sat at the left of the field with his spear leaning on a cloud, and she begged the horses of her brother and was carried up to Olympus in his chariot. The scene that met her there has already been touched upon, her mother Dione drawing out the ichor and closing the wound with a touch.

What Dione said as she worked was a kind of consolation by inventory. Others have suffered worse, she told her daughter, and named them. Ares himself had once been bound in a great bronze jar by two mortal brothers and held there thirteen months, and would have perished in it if a stepmother had not sent word to Hermes, who stole him out half dead. Hera had been shot through the breast with a three-barbed arrow by a mortal. Even the Lord of the Dead had been wounded by that same man at the gate of his own kingdom and had gone up to Olympus in pain to be healed with soothing herbs.

Endure, she said. These things happen, and they pass. And while she spoke, Athena and Hera stood by and made sport of the weeping goddess, saying she must have torn her soft hand on the golden brooch pin of some Achaean woman she was coaxing away to Troy. And Zeus, when he had heard the whole complaint, smiled and called her to him and gave her the ruling that closed the matter, that the works of war were not given to her, that she should leave the spear and the shouting to Ares and Athena and attend to the lovely works of marriage.

It is the only rebuke in the poem that sounds less like anger than like a father sending a daughter back to her own house, and she took it, and the fighting went on below without her. The tradition set down a great host of her workings besides, and not all of them ended in sorrow. There was the race run for Atalanta, the swift maiden who would marry no man who could not outrun her, and who put to death those who tried and failed. A youth named Hippomenes loved her and could not hope to match her speed, and so he prayed to Aphrodite, and the goddess gave him three apples of gold, taken, the poets say, from a field of hers on Cyprus, where one tree stood with golden leaves and golden fruit and rang faintly like beaten metal when the wind moved in it.

As they ran, he let the apples fall one by one in the maiden's path, and each time Atalanta turned aside and stooped for the shining fruit, and each time she lost a little of her lead until Hippomenes crossed the mark ahead of her and won her for his wife. The apples of the goddess, which had once undone a wedding, here made one. But the story has a tale to it that the tellers did not leave off. For Hippomenes, in his happiness, never once gave thanks nor burned incense to the power that had handed him the victory, and the goddess does not forget an unpaid debt.

She put such a longing on the pair of them as they passed a certain wooded shrine that they turned aside into the holy place itself, and for that offense, the goddess of that shrine took their voices and their shape from them and set them in harness to draw her chariot, two lions with the mane still shaking, who had been a man and a woman running in the sun. There was Pygmalion also, a sculptor of Cyprus who had seen the women of the island, who denied that Aphrodite was a goddess at all, and who were punished by being made to sell themselves in the street until the shame hardened them and they turned at last to flint, and who, having seen it, could find no living woman to love.

He carved instead the figure of a woman out of white ivory, so fair and so finely made that he loved the image as though it breathed. He brought it gifts as a suitor brings them, shells and smooth stones and small birds and beads of amber and lilies, and laid them in its hands and dressed the fingers with rings and laid the figure on a couch with a pillow beneath its head as if it might sleep. At the festival of Aphrodite, when the heifers with gilded horns had gone down and the altars smoked through the island, he stood at the altar and prayed, not daring to ask for the figure itself, only for a wife like his ivory maiden.

The goddess heard the wish beneath his words, and the flame on her altar leapt three times to tell him so. When he came home and kissed the carved lips, they grew warm under his mouth, and the ivory softened like wax in the sun and yielded to his touch and took the print of his fingers, and the maiden opened her eyes upon her maker and upon the daylight in the same moment. The prayer was answered, and the cold thing he had shaped was given breath, and the child born of that marriage gave her name to the city on the shore, where the goddess had come out of the sea.

Yet the same power that warmed the ivory could turn to ruin when it was scorned, and the tragedians knew it better than the hymn writers. There was Hippolytus, a young man of Trozen, who gave all his devotion to the chaste huntress Artemis and would have nothing to do with love, who walked past the goddess's image at his own gate each morning and greeted it with a bare word of courtesy and no more. In the play that bears his name, the goddess herself comes forward before anyone else has spoken and explains quite calmly what she intends.

She is great among mortals and not without a name in heaven, she says. She raises up those who reverence her and throws down those who think too much of themselves before her, and this young man has called her the worst of the divinities, and today he will pay. She worked against him through the heart of his father's wife, whom she had already set to burn for him, and the tangle of that forbidden passion, refused and hidden and betrayed by a servant's loyalty, brought a false accusation and a father's curse and a bull rising out of a calm sea to shatter a chariot on the shore road.

The young man died broken among the rocks, and the terrible thing about the play is not the death, but the prologue, the flat, courteous voice at the beginning saying that this is how she deals with contempt and that she has no more to say about it. Behind another long trial stood the goddess as well, the persecution of Psyche, a mortal maiden so beautiful that travelers began to come and stare at her and scatter flowers before her and say that a new Aphrodite had been born among men, so that the ships stopped putting in at Cythera, and the old altars stood cold, and the garlands rotted where they lay.

This the goddess would not bear. She sent her own winged son to make the girl fall in love with the most wretched creature he could find. And he saw her and forgot the errand and took her for himself, carrying her by the west wind to a hidden valley and a house with no doors and no servants, where a voice waited on her and a husband came to her only in the dark and forbade her to look at his face. Her sisters worked on her until she brought a lamp to the bed and saw him sleeping, the most beautiful of the gods, and a drop of hot oil fell on his shoulder, and he woke and was gone in a moment through the window.

Then she wandered and looked for him and came at last to the house of Aphrodite herself and was set a chain of hard and near impossible labors, to sort a great heap of mixed grain and beans and lentils in a single night, to bring back wool from a flock of murderous golden sheep that trample and gore in the heat of the day, to fill a jar from a black stream that falls from a cliff no mortal can climb. At the last to go down among the dead and ask the queen below for a portion of her beauty in a box and not to open it.

She was helped each time by the least likely helpers, a column of ants, a reed by the river, an eagle, a talking tower. And at the last, she opened the box after all because she wanted to be beautiful again for the husband she had lost. And what was in it was not beauty, but the sleep of the underworld, and it took her where she stood on the road. And it was the winged god himself, healed and escaped through a window of his own, who found her lying there and wiped the sleep from her and put it back in the box and carried the matter up to Zeus.

And the marriage was allowed at last in the presence of all the gods, and the daughter born of it was called Pleasure. So the goddess acquired the daughter-i n-law she had tried hardest to destroy, and the story ends with a wedding feast at which she is described as dancing. Nor were her punishments always aimed at a single life. On the island of Lemnos, the story runs, the women let her worship fall into neglect, and she answered by laying upon them an affliction of the body that made their husbands turn from them, and the husbands brought captive women home from across the strait, and the wives of Lemnos, cast out of their own houses, rose in a single night and killed every man on the island, and ruled it alone for years afterward with the plowing undone and the armor rusting in the halls.

And there was Glaucus of the horse pastures, who kept his mares from breeding to make them fiercer for the chariot, and so held her rites in contempt, and who was thrown at the funeral games of a king and torn to pieces and eaten by his own animals while the crowd looked on. And when Hera and Athena wanted Medea's heart turned toward Jason so that the Fleece might be won, it was to Aphrodite that they came, and she went and found her son playing at dice with the boy who pours the wine of the gods, and cheating him of every throw, and she bribed the child with the promise of a golden ball, banded with blue, to go down and shoot a princess of Colchis through the heart.

Everything that followed in that story, the drugged serpent and the flight and the murders at the end of it, came out of that small domestic bargain between a mother and a boy who did not want to put down his dice. What the worshipers made of all this can still be read in the titles they carved and spoke, and the list of them is a strange one to find beneath a single roof. At Sparta, that city of soldiers, the most ancient images of her showed her armed, and she was called there the Armed One and the Warlike, so that the goddess of love stood in the temple bearing weapons like a hoplite, and there was a shrine of her in that city with two stories, one above the other.

In the upper room, an old wooden image sat veiled with fetters upon her feet, and the Spartans said the fetters had been put there so that she would not leave the city and so that wives would stay faithful to their husbands. They named her also the Mistress, a title of high reverence, and She Who Postpones Old Age, the power that holds off the coming of the gray years for a while. And beside these there ran a set of darker names still, names that seem to belong to another goddess altogether.

She was called the Dark One and the Shadowed, and at Corinth they explained that title by saying only that lovers meet mostly at night. She was called the Killer of Men and the Gravedigger and She Who Sits Upon the Tombs, titles that press love up hard against death and name the destroying edge of desire without flinching from it. A people who had watched a city burn for the sake of one promise did not need those names explained to them. These names were carried through the year and rose to their height at her great festival, the Aphrodisia, kept in the warm middle of the summer, when her worshipers came to her shrines with their offerings and her rites filled the long bright days.

At Athens, the precinct was purified with the blood of a dove, the sacred bird of the goddess herself, and the altars were anointed, and the images were carried down and washed, and the doors and the doorposts were smeared with pitch, and everything was made clean for her. Her holy places were spread across the Greek world, at Cythera and at Corinth, where her sanctuary stood on the high rock above the city, with the sea visible on either side of the isthmus, and at Athens, where one of her altars carried doves carved upon it, and another stood in a garden below the citadel among running water and old olive trees.

Sailors kept her, too, in the harbor towns, calling her the goddess of fair voyage and of the deep and of the haven, and setting her small shrines where the ships came in, because the goddess who was born of the sea might be asked to give it back calm, and because men who have to cross open water have always understood that the same power can carry you home or hold you under. Above all there was Cyprus, the island of her landing, where she was honored as no other goddess was. The great sanctuary at Paphos kept a custom that would surprise anyone who came expecting a statue.

There was no human figure there at all. The holy thing was a smooth cone of dark stone, standing alone in the open, tapering upward, worn by hands and by weather, and the altar before it was never stained with blood. Only incense and prayer and pure flame were offered upon it. And the people of the place said, and travelers repeated, that although the altar stood beneath the open sky, the rain never fell upon it. Those who came to consult her there were given their answers, not in words, but by the reading of the smoke as it rose.

Also on Cyprus, at Amathus, there stood a stranger figure yet, called Aphroditus, a form of the deity shown as a bearded figure clothed in a woman's dress, both man and woman at once. And at that shrine, men and women were said to exchange their garments when they came to sacrifice. The worshipers looked upon this doubled shape as a bringer of good fortune, a sign to turn aside evil and draw down blessing. And in later ages, the storytellers wove this figure into the legends of the child of Hermes, in whom the two natures were joined in one body.

One thing must be set down plainly here, so that the old picture is not misread. The notion of an institutional sacred prostitution once attached to her temples, a thing repeated on the authority of a geographer who wrote of a thousand temple women at Corinth, is now generally regarded as an error, a misreading of the ancient world laid over the goddess by later hands, and not a truth of her worship. Her worshipers came then with doves and with myrtle and with little clay figures pressed from a mold, and with mirrors and pins and small cakes, and left them at the feet of a cone of stone in the sea wind, and went home to their houses.

And out of all of it there returns at last the question the story first raised, quietly, so that it may be answered now without haste. How can one goddess be born from a wound in the sea, and yet hold within her both the tenderness of desire and the cold edge of a drawn blade? The old accounts never hid the wound. In the telling of Hesiod, she rose from where the severed flesh of Uranus fell into the water, from the pale foam that thickened upon the waves off Cythera, and the very manner of her coming held violence and beauty pressed into a single moment.

She was not made from a calm sky. She was made from a cutting and a fall, from something torn and cast into the deep, and out of that ruin came the loveliest shape the world had yet seen. The origin was itself the answer, had anyone paused to read it. For love and war have always shared a border, and desire and death have never dwelt far apart. This is why the armed image at Sparta, with the fetters on its feet, and the myrtle wreath laid at Paphos, are not two different goddesses quarreling over one name.

They are two faces of one force, the force that draws bodies together and drives nations against each other, that raises cities and burns them, that plants the garden and lets it wither on the summer roof, that fastened the world together in the philosopher's poem and unfastened a marriage in the smith's house. The small curve of her mouth and the drawn blade beneath the shadowed names were never a contradiction to be explained away. They were the whole truth of longing, which is gentle and terrible at once, and which the people who honored her were wise enough never to divide.

And her three colors were all spent in their turn, each in its own hour. The white was the foam off Cythera, which was never innocence at all, but a wound in the water wearing the look of light. The red was the anemone in the Cyprian leaves and the rose that took its color from a torn heel, a beauty grown directly out of a body that had stopped. The gold was the small apple on the wedding floor, and the same gold went on shining through the judgment on Ida and the sails crossing to Sparta until it stood at last over a city with the roofs falling in.

White, red, and gold. Every one of them was lovely, and every one of them was paid for, and she carried all three at once without ever being asked to choose. Nothing more needs to be added to that, and the night is drawing on. So let the figures be named over once, quietly, the way an old panel is looked at a last time before the lamp is carried out of the room. Uranus, the wide heaven who would not let his children up into the light, and Cronus in the dark with the gray flint sickle, throwing without looking behind him.

Zeus, who put the whole quarrel of the apple into a herdsman's hands rather than settle it himself, and Dione drawing the ichor from her daughter's palm and saying that such things pass. Hephaestus at the anvil with the chains cooling on the block, and Ares taken in the mesh beside her, still working out how a slow man had caught a swift one. Anchises on the slope of Ida with the lyre across his knee and a secret he could not hold, and Aeneas, the son promised in that hut, going out of the fire with his father on his shoulders.

Adonis among the ferns, the boar ready gone crashing away downhill. Eris at the edge of the light with a little weight of gold in her hand. Paris holding the apple out, and Helen coming down from the tower without a word, the goddess walking ahead of her. And behind all of them, older than any, Astarte in the cities of the coast, Ishtar in the high temple above Uruk, and Inanna going down through seven gates and laying an ornament aside at each one. Let the names be said, and then let them go.

Now the lamp is lifted, and one by one the place is dim. The cone of dark stone at Paphos keeps the last warmth of the day and gives up the last thread of its smoke. The little pots on the rooftops go gray and quiet, and nobody is weeping over them anymore. The bronze threshold stands empty, the doorway clear. The voices that carried all of it, the poets and the old traveler and the scholars with their patient doubts, fall quiet in their turn, as a hall falls quiet when the singing is done and the harp is laid along the bench.

Now let the shore itself begin to move away. Imagine the foam-lit strand of Paphos far behind you, the place where she is said to have come up out of the sea, its white waves folding and unfolding along the sand under a fading sky, the myrtle dark along the tideline, the last light going off the water. Let the salt of that air grow faint, and let the longing that hangs over such a shore, the pull of love and the ache of it, no longer press upon your thoughts. It grows smaller and softer as you draw away from it, until it is only a pale line at the edge of the dark, and then not even that.

In your mind, reach back toward the goddess's realm, the temple and the myrtle and the armed stone, the whole bright and shadowed world of her, and find there an invisible door. Take it gently and close it. Feel it move on silent hinges, slow and smooth and without a sound, sealing love and war together behind it in calm and order, the yielding and the striking laid down side by side and at rest. The two edges of her power are shut away now, folded quietly into the same stillness, and nothing of them reaches across the threshold to trouble you.

Then, in the darkness before you, see a single candle, its flame steady and unwavering, a small and constant light with the whole night around it. Let your breathing slow to match its stillness, and when you are ready, with a slow, gentle breath, blow that candle out and let the last curl of light fade into the night. Rest well, sleep deeply, and let the ancient stories carry you into the night.