Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth

by Natalie Haynes

The blacksmith heads straight to his forge to hammer out chains that are both invisibly fine and unbreakably strong. Raging at Ares, he sets his trap, hanging the threadlike chains from the ceiling and wrapping them round the bed. Not even the immortal gods could see them, Demodocus explains.

Look at Aphrodite, he demands, always dishonouring me. She loves destructive Ares, because he is handsome and strong-footed. This may seem like an odd feature to mention, but it is clearly a painful point of contrast to Hephaestus, with his damaged foot, that Ares is gorgeous and his feet are perfect, so of course he would be the one Aphrodite prefers.

And hidden in there is a second layer of hurt and anger: Ares can only destroy; that is what war is about. Hephaestus doesn’t need to make the contrast any plainer.

He calls her kunōpidos – dog-faced – an insult which Helen of Sparta has thrown at herself in Homer’s Iliad. We might well wonder what the specific meaning of this insult is, since it is used of the most beautiful woman and the most beautiful goddess in these poems. It obviously cannot contain connotations of ugliness, at least not physical ugliness, which we would probably mean if we used a similar insult today. And the character of a dog in modern culture is usually presented positively: loyal, devoted, and so on.

They agree that Hephaestus should be given back the bride-price he paid to Zeus to marry Aphrodite (financial assessments of women’s worth were common in the ancient world, and often dependent on their chastity), and they think that Ares should pay a fine. And then, as is so often the way with men who disapprove of women, they wonder if she might be interested in sex with them.

This moment, I think, reveals the heart of Aphrodite’s power. No matter what the situation, no matter how humiliated or shamed she is supposed to feel according to the men around her, she is restored to her usual smiling serene beauty in the blink of an eye.

Her beauty, her perfection are unharmed by whatever happens to her.

Actually, it is Lenny who is the idiot, neglecting his wife to pursue his interest in Linda; Amanda has to leave him before he realizes what is really important to him.

If slighted, Aphrodite’s revenge is both comprehensive and horrific.

This beautiful young man should not even exist: his mother, Myrrha, developed an intense inappropriate sexual desire for her father. Cinyras was not incestuously inclined, but did like having sex in the dark with a young woman who said she was the same age as his daughter. Thus Myrrha conceives a baby.

Roman gods everyone

Because of her actions, Myrrha prays to be transformed. Still pregnant and weeping, she is turned into a tree. Her tears form the precious resin myrrh.

Her dual life (as some kind of forest spirit) is only uncovered when one couple follow her into the woods and find a malevolent tree with babies apparently trapped beneath its bark.

Forest horror. Trippy.

Myrrha’s baby survives the tree’s wooden labour and is pronounced beautiful by all who see him.

The years slip past and Adonis becomes an increasingly handsome man.

In three perfect words that summarize all obsessive love, Orpheus sings: caelo praefertur Adonis – she prefers Adonis to heaven.30

She has always tended to spend her time in the shade, indulging herself and intensifying her beauty. But now she’s running through the woods and over the rocks so she can stay close to Adonis at all times.

The Latin here reads fuge coniugis usum – flee the use of a husband

Luckily, the time when women repress their abilities to avoid making a man feel bad about himself is long gone.

But does he then thank Venus for helping him to victory? Does he burn incense in her honour? He does not. He forgets he owes his life and his bride to the goddess. Suddenly, says Venus, I was consumed with rage.

As she should be.

They are passing by a shrine of the great mother goddess Cybele, and Venus hits Hippomenes with an urgent desire for sex with Atalanta. Cybele is predictably enraged that her temple has been profaned and turns the pair into lions. The mother goddess then tames them with a bridle between their teeth. So avoid lions at all costs, Venus tells Adonis.

This is obviously a perfectly reasonable moral to draw from the tale, although I have tended to prioritize the more subtextual moral (don’t pretend to be less than you are to make a mediocre man feel better, as you will both regret it when you have tails).

This is a side to Venus that we have seen elsewhere and can never be overlooked: her favour is both conditional and temporary. And when it is wi...

Adonis immediately attacks a boar, precisely the kind of animal his lover urged him to avoid. The boar spears him in return, burying its tusks in his groin.

*tsk* doesn't follow instructions well.

She sees him lying dead in a pool of blood.

So she also creates a horticultural memorial, sprinkling the pooled blood with nectar. An hour later, a flower the same colour as Adonis’s blood rises from the pool. It’s the same colour as the pomegranate seed, Orpheus says.

Venus is not just the beauty that we see in Botticelli, she is the broken-hearted lover that we read in Ovid.

Born from the white foam, Aphrodite’s love is marked with the red flower.

Artemis is about to shoot seven girls, while her brother Apollo slaughters their seven brothers.

All great hunters share this quality: Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) describes the same phenomenon in 1984’s The Terminator. ‘It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop . . . ever, until you are dead.’

There is no expression on either of their faces. The Niobids must die, so these two expert archers will kill them without hesitation.

Proud of her fecundity, Niobe describes herself as the equal of fair-cheeked Leto, goddess and mother of Apollo and Artemis.1 And because of this vain and foolish boast, all her children are slaughtered by Leto’s furious offspring. They lie unburied for nine days, Achilles adds.

No one else can intervene to bury them, because Zeus has turned her compatriots to stone.2 Only on the tenth day do the gods relent and bury the children themselves. Niobe is a case study in grief, her mourning exemplifying a terrible exaggeration of what most mortals will ever suffer.

There is no more difficult goddess to pin down than Artemis. Partly, this is because her name was attached to goddesses across the Greek world with whom she shared one or more characteristics.

syncretism, meaning that the characteristics of multiple goddesses were folded into one character.

But with Artemis, aspects of her nature in different parts of Greece are so various as to be almost contradictory. She is the queen of wild animals, but she also hunts and kills them.

She can heal mortals but she can also cause sudden, otherwise inexplicable deaths.

Local cult beliefs are attached to Artemis’s name whenever the Greeks decide to syncretize her with a local goddess they haven’t met before.

And perhaps it is appropriate that she is so hard to capture: like any true hunter, she is a mistress of camouflage.

Artemis occupies an interesting state: she is certainly not a child, but she rejects the traditional life of a Greek woman.

But the next day is the time for sacrificial offerings, and this is where things start to go downhill. First, says Pausanias, people throw live birds onto the altar, then deer and wild boar. Just to add to the image of a wooden altar seething with furious and terrified animals, they then chuck live wolves and bear cubs into the mix.

this scene could only be improved if someone started lobbing fruit at the menagerie,

It is only at this point that the priests set the huge wo...

But these animals do not live to fight another day: those who had thrown them onto the altar in the first place (and the Greek word embalontes does literally mean ‘throw in or on’) recapture them and chuck them back onto the fire. You don’t have to have been a vegetarian for decades to find this scene both demented and traumatic.

This scene of carnage seems hard to reconcile with the common artistic image of Artemis as a woodland goddess, riding through mountainous forests with her entourage of wild creatures.

This Artemis – like many of her iterations – is served by girls who are too young to marry.

But one beautiful priestess, Komaitho, catches the eye of a very good-looking young man named Melanippos. He falls in love with her and she with him, but their parents will not let them marry.

In a rage at having her sacred space profaned by sex, Artemis visits every punishment on their people: crops fail, unknown and deadly illnesses afflict them.9 The only way to appease her, according to the Delphic Oracle (and it should know, since it is sacred to her brother Apollo), is to sacrifice the most beautiful boy and girl to her every year henceforth.

This date – perhaps 1,400 years before Pausanias is writing – gives us an idea of the great antiquity of the tale he has uncovered here.

Greek gods certainly never mind taking their revenge on a later generation.

After shooting a deer, the Greek king boasts that not even Artemis could have done a better job, and this kind of statement rarely goes down well on Olympus.