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Venus and Aphrodite in Lewis's scholarship, poetry, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, and in the poetry of Charles Williams. Complexity of signification. The donegality of The Magician's Nephew. Venus Infernal, the Morning Star, apples in the Garden of the Hesperides, mirrors, mothers, copper, laughter, fertility, sweetness. How to rank human love with respect to divine love.

Chapter two discusses selected aspects of Chariton's hometown, Aphrodisias, which might have been relevant to the invention of a new form of writing: the massive building programme in the city‐centre since Augustus, the local cult of Aphrodite, and various links to Miletus (which also had a famed cult of Aphrodite and was known as the focal point of Aristides’ Milesiaca, arguably a source of inspiration for Chariton's prose fiction). A detailed study of Chariton's date points to the Julio‐Claudian era. His use of Virgil's Aeneid supplies us with the terminus post quem of 19 BC, the year of Virgil's death; Persius’ reference to one ‘Callirhoe’ in his first satire (1. 134) with the terminus ante quem of AD 62, the year of Persius’ death. This time frame ties in with an identification of Chariton's employer, Athenagoras, in Aphrodisian epigraphy. An excursus on Chariton's potential impact on non‐novelistic authors suggests his significance as a paradigmatic author.

Chapter 1 takes as its starting point the end of the Theogony, a conclusion that has been troubling to both ancient and modern scholars. At line 963, the poet invokes the Muses and sings about one subset of divinities, the goddesses who lie with and have children by mortal men. While many contend that the Theogony proper ends at some point before the catalogue of goddesses, I argue that the end as we have it is genuinely Hesiodic and look at how this interpretation affects the meaning of the Theogony. The conclusion of the Theogony encapsulates an essential truth about the poem and about ancient Greek culture: men acquire names and histories when they become objects of desire for goddesses, and ritual becomes established when Aphrodite chooses Phaethon as her temple keeper. The narrative of the Theogony is thus framed by two different versions of nympholepsy, which in turn recapitulate both the poetic and the cultic manifestations of the phenomenon. From an ancient Greek’s perspective, the catalogue of goddesses—and, more specifically, the goddesses’ interest in mortal men—represents the beginnings of human history.

Chapter 3 returns to the literary sources and focuses on the interaction between myth and genre. After a brief examination of the different paradigms (and their possible origins) for encounters between goddesses and immortals, I analyze the encounter between Aphrodite and Anchises in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Although we find few explicit examples of nympholepsy in Greek poetry, I argue that we find a mirror image of the cultic practice in the popular poetic motif of the goddess or nymph falling in love with a mortal man. Or, to put it the other way around, the localized religious phenomenon of nympholepsy reproduces at the cultic level the poetic narrative of the goddess falling in love with a mortal. Hymnic poetry gives its own twist to the nympholeptic narrative by privileging etiology and the pan-Hellenic dimension of this version.

This chapter examines how sophia depersonalizes Aphrodite and divinizes sexual power in Euripides's poetics. It considers the intellectual predicament in which Euripides must have found himself, as a thinker and a dramatist, in interpreting the irrational and perverse nature of human sexual drive. It explains how Aphrodite's presence could account for the irrational behavior of Helen, and her return to make love with Paris after having strongly rejected that intercourse. It suggests that the mysterious, mad, and commanding force of erotic passion can be attributed to Aphrodite's instigation and imperious will. It also reflects on the debate between Helen and Hecuba in relation to the nature and effects of eros.

Among the many places of worship that could be found in the territory of the city of Athens and its chôra during the classical period, several offer remarkable configurations of nature: the sanctuary of Aphrodite of the Gardens on the slope of the Acropolis with its flowery meadow, the green field in Eleusis for the celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries in honour of Demeter and Persephone, the olive tree sacred to Athena near the Erechtheion, groves and running water at Brauron where young Athenian girls played the bear in honour of Artemis, etc. Often actualised in the tragedies of Euripides, the aetiological legends that constitute the foundations of these cults help to associate the relevant divinity with a hero or heroine. This combination is the starting point of a discussion of the identities of the gods in a polytheist system and their modifications through the association of a heroic partner.

The paper treats the visualization of epiphany and theoxeny in ancient Greek art with particular reference to votive reliefs, such as those dedicated to Asklepios, Aphrodite, Herakles and the Dioskouroi. It discusses some images showing the direct encounter with the divine, most of them from the fifth and fourth century BC. It points out their significant characteristics and analyzes them, showing that different concepts of gods are reflected in different modes of epiphany.

This chapter evaluates the relationship of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite to the Iliadic tradition. Taking into consideration the methodological approach of Neoanalysis, it is suggested that the narrative of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite interacts with the narrative sequence of the Homeric aristeia. Attention is given throughout to the ways in which the Hymn to Aphrodite defines its own place in relation to the heroic traditions of Homeric epic. A thorough analysis of the Hymn's narrative structure is undertaken.

The Greeks regarded sexual enjoyment as the area of life in which the goddess Aphrodite was interested, as Ares was interested in war and other deities in other activities. Sexual intercourse was aphrodisia, ‘the things of Aphrodite’. Sexual desire could be denoted by general words for ‘desire’, but the obsessive desire for a particular person was eros or love. Our own culture has its myths about the remote past, and one myth which dies hard is that the ‘invention’ of sexual guilt, shame and fear by the Christians destroyed a golden age of free, fearless, pagan sexuality. That most pagans were in many ways less inhibited than most Christians is undeniable. This chapter explores attitudes to sexual behaviour in classical Greece, focusing on inhibition, women's segregation and adultery, commercial sex, resistance to sexual desire, homosexuality, class and status, and Greek philosophy and sexual intercourse.

This chapter examines Tatian's reasons for thinking that Christians must reject sexual activity altogether in order to be saved. It also uses the extant fragment from Tatian's On Perfection according to the Savior and his Oratio ad Graecos. The chapter then investigates the Greek ideas which motivated Tatian to declare that sexual activity is contrary to the way of God. Tatian believes that the Greek gods tangibly exist and that they have the powers traditionally associated with them in Greek religion, Homer, and astrology. A discussion on Tatian and the early Christian dilemma between choosing God or Aphrodite is also presented. Tatian reinterprets the Prophets' and Paul's ideas about God's punishment of his spiritually adulterous people. The theme of soul therapy allows him to recreate the metaphor of adultery in the Prophets and Paul. Tatian's principle of sexual renunciation has not become the dominant mode of Christian sexual mores.

This chapter examines the application of narratology to epic by offering a close reading of Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, a specimen of epic narrative from one of the Homeric Hymns. It begins with an overview of the Homeric Hymns, a collection of thirty-three poems, at least one of which had been ascribed in antiquity to Homer. It then analyses the narrative of the Hymn to Aphrodite and suggests that the story of the encounter between Aphrodite and Anchises can be read as a comedy of errors, or rather, a ‘tragicomedy of errors’.

This chapter examines how the character of Phaedra in Hippolytus enables Euripides to stage the split/conflation that he has dramatized in the debate of Troades between the traditional, anthropomorphic and the cosmic, natural source of sexual desire. In the first part of Hippolytus, Phaedra, after her confession to the Nurse, seems to relax: she describes the painful trajectory of her attempts to silence her shameful passion for Hippolytus. She is unaware of being Aphrodite's victim without hope of escape, and believes that she can silence and suppress what the audience knows from the prologue to be an inextinguishable erotic passion implanted in her by the goddess. This chapter analyzes Phaedra's confession and its specific language and how her eros drives her being, voice, and utterance into a hallucinating fantasy, bringing her closer to Hippolytus.

As a lover, Hermes is generally regarded as comparable to other male divinities. His perceived connection to ithyphallic herms only strengthens this impression. In literature, however, the character of Hermes’ erotic activity is different from that of other gods. In general, as might be expected, he relies on stealth rather than force, and he is often content to play a secondary role by facilitating the amorous adventures of other figures. In fact, Hermes can be said in most cases to sublimate his own sexuality in favor of someone else’s, often in a way that bespeaks his own greater interest in homosocial bonding than in sexual conquest. These tendencies are clearly visible in archaic, classical, and Hellenistic representations of Hermes, and they develop in generally consistent and almost predictable ways through classical Roman treatments of Mercury down to quite late texts that become foundational for the medieval reception of classical antiquity.

The chapter presents a corpus of votive inscriptions to Hermes. Who dedicated to the god, for what reasons, and to which gods was he associated? It comments on chronological and geographical aspects and proceeds to discuss some themes visible in the collected material. First, it examines why women are not frequent among worshippers visible in votive inscriptions, in contrast to Hermes’ frequent female company in myth and cult, second, how Hermes appears as the protector of magistrates, often in the company of Aphrodite, and third, the significance of the denomination New Hermes.

This chapter focuses on Homer’s Iliad, the most canonical version of the story of Helen of Troy and the Trojan War. It starts by discussing Helen’s similarity to Achilles, and epic techniques for portraying beauty, before moving to the different perspectives on her behavior supplied by various characters. She is objectified by the men, especially on the Greek side, in a way that helps to keep their struggle a heroic one, a task that is further aided by desplacing male desire away from Helen and onto revenge or warfare as such. But Helen’s own perspective challenges this picture. Her characteristic self-blame is both an exercise of power (in so far as it wins her sympathy and protection), and a retrospective assertion of agency in her elopement. The chapter includes a detailed treatment of her confrontation with Aphrodite in Book 3, which provides a window into Helen’s subjectivity, showing that despite the goddess’s power Helen is, in fact, responsible for her actions.

This chapter reviews representations of Eros personified in Attic art alongside what we know of Eros' cult at Athens, evidence which has an important contribution to make to our understanding of the emotion. It is generally agreed that the images chart a change from a late archaic focus on pederastic erôs to a later fifth-century association with women and heterosexual desire. It is argued here that this shift in emphasis is reflected in Athens' two major cults of Eros: at the Academy, from c.540 BC worship focused on Eros alone, its pederastic character in keeping with the gymnasium context; on the Akropolis' north slope, from c.450 BC, Eros displayed a heterosexual concern with fertility, in close association with Aphrodite. Such a background makes sense of Eros' frequent appearances in wedding scenes, which further suggest that erôs’role in marriage became firmly established in the second half of the fifth century.