Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth

by Natalie Haynes

But these storms push him over the edge. His anger is finally roused and he hangs Hera in chains from Mount Olympus as a punishment.

This is clearly intended both to injure and to humiliate.

And chaining her up is intrinsically degrading – this is the kind of punishment that might be meted out to a slave, a criminal. Hera is queen of the gods, and she finds herself being treated in this way for her attitude to a mortal man.

Hera is punished for cruelty towards a mortal man, but one suspects that going behind Zeus’s back is again the real crime.

It is a misogynist narrative as old as time itself, and never out of fashion: the real problem in any bad family dynamic isn’t the irascible, lecherous patriarch, but his patience-sapped wife. So it makes perfect sense to say that it’s Hera who sends the snakes to kill baby Heracles, because that’s exactly the kind of thing she would do.

Zeus’s bullying of his wife doesn’t seem any more reasonable to the gods who witness it than it seems to me, reading about it now.

The undeniable truth about the marriage of Zeus and Hera is that it is neither a match of equals nor a meeting of minds.

He desired Hera, says Pseudo-Apollodorus, so he tried to take her by force.42 Pindar considers this an act of hubris – shameful pride.43 Hera tells her husband that Ixion has assaulted her and Zeus decides he should test the truth of her words.

Christ.

But this story must come relatively early in their relationship, and it is hard to imagine a worse response a husband could give to his assaulted wife than to suggest he needs to check whether a murderer is also capable of being a rapist, or whether she’s just making it up.

I always get the strong impression that Hera’s mood would improve considerably if Zeus were being tied to a wheel as well.

Agreed.

Killing or harming suppliants in sacred spaces is always a shocking moment in Greek myth: Priam, king of Troy, is killed in similar circumstances when his city is destroyed.

It is interesting therefore that Hera – so often presumed to be the most spiteful and vengeful of goddesses – does not take her revenge on Pelias for his profanation of her sacred space. Not only does she not do this in the film, she doesn’t do it in the Argonautica either.

Pelias is destined to die at the hands of a one-sandaled man, and (though he doesn’t know it yet) this will be Jason.

Jason is now a grown man, who leaps into water to rescue a drowning stranger. The stranger is Pelias, of course, and his near-death experience is caused by Hera, who knocks him off his feet and holds him underwater.

So again, it is Zeus who decrees how much Hera can or cannot do to help a young hero. But it is the intensity of Hera’s desire to help that decides who gets the divine intervention.

Hera can’t or doesn’t save Briseis, but she does grant the young woman’s prayer, and once she has committed to a cause or a person, she is as unswerving in her devotion as she is when her anger is roused.

Yet Hera is – perhaps more than any other goddess or god in the Olympian pantheon – a representative of her constituency: married women.

Her status depends on her husband – whose wandering eye is of literally mythical proportions – retaining his interest in her. No wonder she’s intolerant.

And we lose track of the interests of such a woman, because she wouldn’t be as funny if she were a fully rounded person. So we forget about Hera’s passion to help heroes, to defend Greeks at all costs during a conflict, and to protect married women.

The statue was famously beautiful from every angle, and it was displayed in a shrine that was open on all sides.

Aphrodite is often presented to us wet – fresh from the sea, or from bathing – which means she is usually naked.

It is a source of ongoing irritation to me that the words we use to describe female genitalia become more misogynistic the more apparently neutral they are: pudenda, something to be ashamed of; vagina, a sheath for holding a sword. It makes me long for some brisk monosyllables.

But if these goddesses can be traced back to the Middle East, we might be wondering exactly where Aphrodite comes from.

For Hesiod, Aphrodite doesn’t have a mother, and her father is accidental.

But Ouranos fears his children will overthrow him, so he keeps them hidden away in a recess in the earth, refusing to let them out into the world.

The precise topography of their encounter is not made explicit by Hesiod, but Kronos is presumably still inside Gaia’s womb when he takes the blade to Ouranos’s genitals.

Would he then burst the womb?

The spume coalesces around the sperm (sometimes I write these sentences just to see if my editor still has a red pen), and Aphrodite forms from this frothing white aftermath of violence.

He adds an unexpected etymological pun. Aphrodite is also called philommēdea – laughter-loving – because she was created from mēdeōn – genitals.

And then he describes her moira in more detail. It is, he explains, the conversations of girls, and smiles, and deceits, delight, sweet love, and softness.

Are they the lovers, whispering about their beloveds? Or is it that the girls’ conversations make them desirable to men, to Hesiod? Are they merely the objects of affection? The all-powerful influence of Aphrodite implies that it is probably both.

This heart-studded depiction of Paphos – and of the influence Aphrodite has on those of us she happens to fix with her attention – is far more familiar to us than the violence of her origin, of severed genitalia landing in a roiling sea.

Love poets have a love-hate relationship with their patron goddess, just as they tend to with the objects of their affection. And none more so than Sappho. One of the longest pieces of her poetry to survive to us is addressed to poikilophrōn athanat’ – cunning immortal – Aphrodite.10 Poikilophrōn is usually translated as ‘sly’ or ‘wily’, but it literally means to have a mind that is multicoloured or spotted, which I think suggests beautifully the somewhat arbitrary nature of Aphrodite’s favours.

Aphrodite travels in a chariot pulled by (what must be a large number of) sparrows.

Those must be strong birds.

What is going on in Sappho’s mad heart: the word mainolai shares the same root as our word mania.

If she now runs away from you, Aphrodite promises, she’ll soon be chasing you. If she now refuses your gifts, she’ll soon be giving you presents. And if she doesn’t love you, she will, soonest. And then the real kicker: kōuk etheloisa – even if she doesn’t want to.

Aphrodite isn’t a metaphorical ally, she’s a literal one. Which is lucky, because when you’re in love, you’re at war.

Sappho here offers an early version of this theme, the notion that love can be fatal, that a beloved can be your greatest enemy.

Sappho’s prayer – and Aphrodite’s response – now seem to me to occupy similar territory.

Irritated by Aphrodite’s apparent immunity to lust for a human being, Zeus has implanted sweet desire for a mortal man into her heart.11 And so, Aphrodite finds herself in pursuit of Anchises, who is (somewhat confusingly, but the Trojans make a habit of this kind of thing) both a prince of Troy and a cowherd.

She appears to Anchises as a parthenos – a maiden – because she doesn’t want to scare him.14 But who is she kidding? Aphrodite is no mistress of disguise. The moment he lays eyes on her, Anchises tries to guess which goddess she might be:

When he sees her, he promptly hides his face behind his cloak, and pleads with her not to leave him impotent.18 Mortal men who have once shared a bed with a goddess have this problem, he says.

He is about to become a single parent, however, as she will give birth to Aeneas, so called because of the terrible pain it causes her to have had sex with a mortal (Aeneas is linked here to ainos, a Greek word meaning painful or terrible).

Aphrodite goes on to share the salutary story of Eos – Dawn – who falls for a mortal man named Tithonus and asks for him to be granted eternal life.

And if anyone then asks Anchises who his child’s mother is, he needs to say it’s a nymph.

Aeneas departs Troy on the night the city is sacked: his destiny is not to die there, like so many of his peers, but to set sail with a party of survivors and found a new Troy, eventually, in Italy.

Aeneas takes his son and his father with him, famously neglecting to keep track of his wife, Creusa, who is left behind and appears only as a ghost wishing him well with any future relationships.

So perhaps the moral of this story is that if a goddess tells you to keep your mouth shut on pain of meteorological revenge, you should.

But in the field of love and sex, things don’t go quite as well. We hear from various sources such as Pseudo-Apollodorus that his wife Aegialia betrays him with a man named Cometes.23 Perhaps he should have been a little less hasty to injure and insult a goddess who cajoles women.

But her son certainly lives to the end of the war and beyond it, to fulfil his destiny to found a new city, a second Troy. So Aphrodite’s refusal to stick to her moira, her allotted expertise – however much it aggravates Diomedes and his patron goddess, Athene – shapes the aftermath of the war.

Demodocus sings about the affair between Aphrodite (who is married to Hephaestus, the blacksmith god) and Ares, the god of war.

Lovely War by Julie Berry