Dan Snow's History Hit - Aphrodite: Goddess of Love

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

This episode contains graphic references.Aphrodite is the goddess of love and beauty in Greek mythology.Her origin story is one of the more colourful ones, being born from the foam of Uranus’s castrated genitals. Her life is no less dramatic, and one where love and war are intimately connected. She is unhappily married to the son of Zeus and Hera, Hephaestus, yet carries on her affair with Ares, God of War, and her competitive relationship with Hera and Athena results in the beginning of the Trojan War. In this episode, Tristan Hughes is joined by host of the Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! podcast, Liv Albert. Together they discuss Aphrodite’s origin in both myth and what she shares with warrior goddesses from other ancient cultures, as well as her most famous myths, and how she’s become one of the most iconic deities history has ever known.The Senior Producer was Elena GuthrieScript written by Andrew HulseVoice over performed by Nichola WoolleyThe Assistant Producer was Annie ColoeEdited by Aidan LonerganIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Thanks for watching! sky. That is Helen's plea as she stands upon the highest tower of Troy. She wishes to hear the story of her flight from Greece, of the war that ensued. In its recitation, she seeks punishment, for she and her lover Paris have brought this ancient city to its destruction. Ten thousand Greeks spill into the streets beneath her. They are a deluge of flame, and the embers rising from their savage work write new constellations into the night sky. But it is not the muses, that company of sisters, that come to Helen. It is a lone goddess who appears upon the battlements. Her beauty is unforgiving, uncompromising. It's a perfection that befits marble, not flesh. Indeed, when she wipes a tear from Helen's rosy cheek, her touch is the cold kiss of stone.

It is flawless Aphrodite, goddess of love, and the story she comes to tell is her own. It's the Ancients from History Hit. I'm Tristan hughes your host and today we're back with our greek gods and goddesses series our special series you guys have been clamoring out all about it and how much you're enjoying it this is the fourth episode of this series as we make our way through these various gods and goddesses from ancient Greece. This incredible, yet quite sometimes I think it's fair to say complicated, ancient family of deities atop Mount Olympus. We've done Zeus, king of the gods. We've done Hera, queen of the gods. We've done the god of fire, Hephaestus. and today we're talking all about the goddess of love. We're talking all about Aphrodite.

Now this special series of episodes is all about trying to give a sense of how the stories of these Greek gods and goddesses were passed down through generations and what they meant to the people of ancient Greece and that's why in these episodes well we kick them off with a story, but not just any story, a story about that particular god or goddess to give some context to him or her. and we finally relented and thank goodness we did too because we've got the very funny the lovely host of the incredibly popular let's talk about myths baby podcast i am of course talking about live albert as mentioned lives podcast it's so popular it talks about the various myths of ancient greece of the ancient, and sorting the fact from the fiction. So stick around following the story about Aphrodite when we delve into this really fun interview with Liv all about Aphrodite and her fascinating role amongst these ancient Greek gods. So without further ado, Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

The scene Aphrodite first sets for Helen is upon Olympus. The bronze-floored halls are playing host to a wedding. The deathless Nereid, Fetis, is marrying the mortal king, Peleus. It is a raucous affair. Music echoes amid the rafters. Ambrosia fills every platter, nectar every cup. And all the deathless gods have been invited. All except one. Eris, goddess of discord. It should come as little surprise, but there are few events to which Eris is invited. Weddings, not least of all.

And yet, you will often find her there. She lurks in the darkened brow of a scorned lover. She stalks the shadow of a disapproving parent. She leers from the depths of a jealous sibling's wine cup. And so, of course, Eris has crashed the wedding of Fetis and Peleus too. and Peleus too. She hangs, giggling from the rafters, waiting for the exact moment to strike her discordant note.

The guests cease to sing, to dance, to play the lyre and the flute. All eyes turn to the centre of the bronze hall and the golden apple that has landed, clanging in their midst. It is Zeus, father of gods and men, who picks it up. An evening of revelry and nectar has left him sodden and self-satisfied. So he does not think of discretion. He reads aloud the words carved into the golden flesh. For the fairest. Eris's discord is quick work.

The candidates do not put themselves forward. Rather, the crowd parts about them like a breeze parting ears of corn. The candidates are Royal Hera, queen of the gods, grey-eyed Athena, the maiden of wisdom and war, and me, Aphrodite explains coolly to Helen. And though the flames below them continue to swell and engulf further districts of Troy, the goddess continues her tale unhurriedly. Zeus is keen to resume the wedding festivities, but even drunk, he recognises the danger should he cast the judgement.

They are his wife and his daughters. And so he tries to think. He struggles to hold the problem in his mind. He fumbles with it this way and that. He misweaves his thoughts and unwinds his reckonings. And he comes less to a solution than an abrogation. There shall be judgment, but it will be by another. A mortal, a child of Troy, Paris. He is a young man, his cheeks have never known the scrape of a razor, but he has had dealings with gods before and proven himself a shrewd arbitrator. When they find him on the lower reaches of Mount Ida, he is daydreaming in the shadow of a cypress tree. There is little to say.

The appearance of the three goddesses and the words carved into the apple are explanation enough. But where is shrewd Paris to start? How is he to judge? You see, the goddesses agree on little, but they agree on this. medium of this contest is beneath them, deathless beauty as judged by a mortal is as a philosophical treatise debated by an ant. Nonetheless, it is a contest. And none of them is prepared to lose. Flawless Aphrodite makes the first move. She begins to shift, to bend, to warp her form like quicksilver. She stands before Paris now as a comely maid, a perfect facsimile of that girl from the nearby village who has filled his daydreams for weeks. Of course, Hera and Athena quickly follow suit, till shrewd Paris's sweetheart parades before him in triplicate.

Next, Aphrodite watches for the linger of the youth's eye, the curve of a breast, the bloom of a cheek, the slant of a smile, and she begins to amplify those features, magnify them. Soon, all three goddesses are making sport of Paris, endowing themselves with the extremes of his shallowest fancies. But it is always Aphrodite in the lead. It is always she who reads the young man best. And so Hera, queen of the gods, tries a change of tact. Perhaps you should judge us by another measure, says Hera. And as she speaks, she plucks a lily. Its stem begins to gild to twist itself into a circlet. The petals elongate to form points. Before long, she holds a crown.

I am a patron of royalty. Offer me the apple, and I will make you king of the known world. Your dominion will be bound only by the wine-dark sea. Not to be outdone, grey-eyed Athena snaps a branch from an olive tree. Its bark begins to bronze, to whittle itself into a blade. The knots swell to form a hilt. Before long, she holds a sword. I am a patron of warfare.

Offer me the apple, and I will make you a warrior without equal. Your name will be synonymous with glory forevermore. Your name will be synonymous with glory forevermore. They all then look to Aphrodite in expectation. Almost lazily, she pulls a leaf from the cypress overhead. Its pulp begins to cinder, to burn itself into an image. The edges crumble to form a silhouette. Before long, she holds nothing.

The leaf has burnt away completely. I am thee, patron of desire. It is mine alone to stoke. It is mine alone to stoke. Offer me the apple, shrewd Paris, and I will give you what you truly want. Love. Not fancies and fantasies, but a love that blazes and burns, a love lit in the heart of the most desired woman in all the world.

The first crunch as flawless Aphrodite sinks her teeth into the golden apple, her prize. It is enough to banish Athena and Hera. They leave scornful. They regard the contest a farce, a sham. Paris is not shrewd, he is a fool. Only a fool would be swayed by Aphrodite's meagre offer. Only a fool would choose her love over the power they offered. Aphrodite recalls their contempt, and her memory chills the air, even as the embers of Troy fall, Helen's skin becomes goose flesh.

Athena and Hera would offer that boy war and kingship. Aphrodite continues, As if I do not deal in war. As if I do not deal in kingship. Well, my fellow goddesses know better now, don't they? And so do you. Aphrodite's rebuke is sharpened by a glare of marble, and Helen shivers beneath it. You are not worthy of the punishment you seek, Helen.

You and shrewd Paris did not put Troy to the torch. Love did, and that is my power. Thank you so much for having me. It's very exciting. You're more than welcome. As we mentioned just before we started recording, the Ancient History Podcast world is colliding with this episode today. Your Myths Podcast, it's incredibly popular, and we're talking about another of these Greek myths today, or a figure from these Greek myths, Aphrodite. Now, of all the goddesses, she's one of the coolest to talk about. I agree entirely. She is my longstanding favorite. So when this was possible, I was very excited to talk all things Aphrodite. Well, first of all, then, no such thing as a silly question. Who was Aphrodite?

Yeah, start simple. Aphrodite was the goddess of love and sex and passion and a number of other smaller points of life in the ancient Greek world, and just controlled all of those things. Specifically, she was considered often to be love itself, which I find an additional fascinating piece of her. I'm sure we'll get into it more, so I won't keep going on and on, but that's the basics. Yeah. We will delve into all of that, as you say. Absolutely. I mean, but of course, we've already talked on the podcast, Zeus, about Hera. Aphrodite, where does she sit in, in this, maybe can we say this pyramid scheme of gods? The pantheon, we'll call it. She sits in the pantheon of the Olympian gods. So there's

always 12. She is always one of them. The 12 are not always the same, which is why I phrase it that way. But Aphrodite is certainly always one of the 12. And she has an interesting role because she, according to most, I would say, of the more prominent ancient sources, she is one of the oldest gods of the Olympian pantheon in that she was born at the very early days of everything. I won't try to go into the whole ancient Greek cosmogony, but it starts with Gaia, Mother Earth, and she eventually creates herself a mate, Uranus, who proves himself to be less than ideal. And so Gaia facilitates his overthrow via her son, Cronos, which essentially is Cronos castrating his own father, throwing the leftover bits into the sea.

And from where they land, a foam erupts and Aphrodite is born from that foam. I do call it castration foam on the podcast, but that's a little bit more my podcast style. I don't know how things go anywhere else, but that is the basics of her story, making her one of the most ancient to the birth of these primordial figures. And then of the basics of her story, making her one of the most ancient, the birth of these primordial figures. And then of course, there is an alternate, it's in Homer's Iliad, I believe, alternate idea where she's just a daughter of Zeus and a nymph named Dion. Considerably less exciting. So I personally always go with the birth of Uranus's castration film story. I mean, absolutely. Go wild and all of that.

And it's a more interesting story to tell, isn't it, for the origins of Aphrodite. And it's quite interesting what you mentioned there, therefore. So Aphrodite, she is, as you say in there, she's one of the oldest deities in the whole pantheon. And the whole idea of love kind of fits into that because most of this comes from Hesiod's Theogony, which is, of course,

like the earliest source we have for some kind of detailed retelling of the origin of the gods and the universe itself. And in Hesiod's Theogony, there's another figure who comes like right at the beginning of things, birth from the chaos that kind of starts everything. And that's the idea of love as a concept. So they are called Eros or kind of this sort of figureless, genderless blob. Like they don't really have any kind of personification in this form. And it's sort of the origin of love. And then Aphrodite comes later. And then even later comes Aphrodite's child, Eros, who's the more Cupid style figure that we know of as more of a personified god. So I like to see it as the overarching, like, basic, broad ideas of love are birthed first, and then the sort of the other pieces have to come later.

Aphrodite has to come for the more traditional ideas of human love, and then Eros has to come for the even more sort of petty side of love, because he's causing love and taking it away and much more of sort of the day-to-day. So they really had this really broad idea of all the sort of facets of love that humanity encompassed. It almost evolves over time, as it were, therefore. Yeah, yeah. They saw all the different pieces of it. Right. Well, let's keep a bit more on that. So I'd like to ask a bit more about that origins myth because I've got one more question surrounding this on my sheet in front

of me. And this is in regards to sculpture and art. Obviously, it's an entertaining, interesting origin myth of Aphrodite. Are there any attempts to portray this, to depict this in art at all? Yes, but not as much as we'd like, I think, or personally, I would like to see a bit more of the explicit what the situation is there. There are so many different types of art depictions of her in the sea. The most obvious would be like Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Of course, this is, you know, not a piece of ancient artwork, but it is, I would say, the most famous. And she's coming out of a shell and it's all gorgeous. And she has all these figures all around her. It's very beautiful. It's very indicative of her status as goddess of beauty and love and sex and all of this.

And then if you know the story underneath, it's a little bit more interesting, which is that, well, I guess that shell is just sitting on, you know, the foam that erupted from Moranis' castration, which makes it a little bit more interesting. So there's a lot of her in the sea. There's a lot of ideas of the sea. interesting. So there's a lot of her in the sea. There's a lot of ideas of the sea. I can't imagine any kind of explicit foam involved, but a lot of the idea of her arising out of the sea and a lot of sort of neglecting the details of how she got to arise from the sea. So if we focus on sculpture, is there, are there any particular qualities that you see again and again in depictions of Aphrodite, how she's depicted,

or does she sometimes have particular objects that you see again and again associated with Aphrodite in particular? What do we know about that? In sculpture, I would say there's a little bit less in terms of objects. She has items, things that she's associated with, things like doves and roses. And I think that the shell does come up, you know, more than once this idea of there's a shell, I think it's kind of putting a physical object that she could be standing on in the sea, you know, to deal with the gravity of it all literal gravity, I should say. But so there's a little bit of that. And she does have these items. The only statue that seems to be coming to my mind when you ask this question is a pretty great

one. And I do believe that there's, there's at least two different depictions of this, I think, in statuary and pottery as well, if I'm remembering correctly. But there is a really iconic piece. It's in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. And she is standing Cupid or Eros rather, but he looks very Cupid-like because he's a baby, which he isn't always in Greek iconography. But he's sort of flying off behind her. And then a satyr, I think the god Pan, is down below coming at her. And she's about to hit him with a sandal. And that is definitely something that has happened more than once in iconography,

which I find just very entertaining. She's literally holding a sandal up in her hand, like about to smack this god because he's getting kind of handsy with her. It's wonderful. So there are so many different ways to depict Aphrodite. She is often naked or there's some history to her nakedness that I'm forgetting the exact details of. But there's some where she's kind of hiding herself or some where she's very proudly naked. And she really does come in all these different types and forms. But that is certainly the one that always really stands out to me. And it's

very fun. I just love the idea of there being lots of sculptures in the past, maybe statues, of Aphrodite literally holding a sandal. Yep. And then in pottery as well. In pottery as well. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So it's also painted. They really understood it. Well, I mean, keeping on Aphrodite therefore a bit longer, we've, as the title of the podcast would suggest, in this God series, we've already had a look at Zeus, we've already had a look at Hera, and focusing in on how there are inspirations, influences on the creation of these gods from other cultures around that time in the Eastern Mediterranean,

Central Mediterranean, and before that, the ancient Greeks, as it were. With regards to Aphrodite, do you think she's a fully Greek creation or do we think once again there's an inspiration from other cultures? I don't think many of the gods are fully Greek creations. I think it's really important to talk about exactly what this question entails, which is just that the Greeks didn't exist in a vacuum. And I think a lot of times we put that idea on them and the whole of the Mediterranean, specifically in the East, was really flourishing a long time before the Greeks were at the height that we consider for them, you know, Archaic Greece and Classical Greece. Mesopotamia and the Phoenicians,

everyone, the Egyptians, of course, everyone was developing all of their own things long before the Greeks. And so everyone kind of had influence all over that region. And Aphrodite is certainly a perfect example of that. The foam that she is born on is explicitly on the island of Cyprus. So she is born very far to the east, you know, even in terms of geography in the mythology. And so I think even it's a similar thing with the god Dionysus, where even the Greek stories explicitly tie her to these Eastern ideas. And so there's a lot of Eastern goddesses that she really has strong connections with and strong origins with. Ishtar and Inanna in Mesopotamia, they are goddesses of love, but also war, and they're

warrior goddesses, which connects to, and I know we'll get into it as well, but it connects to Aphrodite's relationship with Ares. connects to, and I know we'll get into it as well, but it connects to Aphrodite's relationship with Ares. So the Greeks didn't explicitly make her a goddess of love and war, but they did make her have a very volatile and strong relationship with the god of war. So they're doing a really similar thing there. And there's also the goddess, the Phoenician goddess of Astarte, who's often left out of that aspect of it, because I think the Ishtar and Inanna connection is a lot more often made. But Astarte was a Phoenician goddess who had really similar attributes to Ishtar and Inanna and to Aphrodite herself. So there's so many in that whole eastern region

and everything kind of spoke to each other and connected and everyone's sort of working off each other's previous ideas. And that's potentially therefore how the idea of idea of this Greek Aphrodite comes about, is it? This interconnection, this cross-cultural, you know, these meetings of these people in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Central Mediterranean in perhaps like the early first millennium BC? Yeah, or possibly earlier.

I mean, the Bronze Age in Greece, we don't know a ton about who they worshipped specifically just because the things we have written tend to be records of boring items, unfortunately, in the Linear B, which has been translated. But they did have a lot of what we know are goddess figurines. And so I often wonder whether there's sort of an earlier crossover with Mesopotamia, with Egypt before that fell by the wayside in favor of the male gods. But yeah, I think the whole of the Mediterranean was really working closely. They were trading, they were interacting, they were warring with each other, all these different reasons why they would have learned about the gods and used that influence to develop their own.

That's not to say that Aphrodite isn't a Greek idea. It's just more that they were seeing other things and building off of that and getting inspired and developing these ideas of their own divinities based on these cultures that had existed long before them. I want to keep a bit more on this Ishtar Inanna, this warrior goddess link, therefore, because what does this therefore tell us about this link, this tantalizing, this link that we're going to get into now between love and war for the ancient Greeks, but also for these other ancient cultures? I wish I did have more knowledge on the other ancient cultures. I really know the basics. I constantly want to get more into it, but I have a lack of knowledge and sourcing.

But when it comes to Aphrodite and Ares, they are a really fascinating couple. So Aphrodite is married, not to Ares, really specifically. And the gist of that story is that she was unmarried for a long time. And the god Hephaestus, who was a bit of a troublemaker at times, I think often for good reason, but he was. And he was angry at his mother Hera and built her a throne as a gift. And that throne trapped her the minute she sat down, just chained her up, and she couldn't get out of this chair. And so Zeus was looking for a way to free her. Nobody could do it because Hephaestus is the god of the forge. Nobody can, you know,

destroy what he has created. And so he kind of put it out there. Zeus did. He said, whoever could get Hera freed from this chair could marry Aphrodite. Aphrodite had no say in the matter. Ares tried because they explicitly had a relationship already. He tried and he couldn't free her. And eventually through some other machinations, Hephaestus comes along and he's like, well, I can free her because I trapped her in the first place. And then I could just, you know, undo what I did and marry Aphrodite. So they were married because of this, but they did not have a particularly happy marriage. They notoriously have no children together, which is almost unheard of in the Greek pantheon of gods. Whereas Aphrodite and Ares continued on with their affair and they have lots of children

together. And a really entertaining and notorious story of getting caught in the middle of having sex by the gods which is a whole other story it's found in the in the odyssey i believe it's in one of the two i'm always going to forget which but it's wonderful but that's all to say so they explicitly are not married aphrodite and aries but have a long-standing relationship many children they have a volatile relationship in that we're pretty clear that they were explicitly in love but just the nature of them being not married and Hephaestus being Aphrodite's actual husband who she didn't really care about in this time when they were caught and everything the volatility is really strongly there and so I think it's an explicit connection between love and war

in this way but in this way where the Greeks are kind of pointing out how much these concepts are both linked and opposed, they're really explicitly linked in that way, but they also are not married. The two concepts are not married, but they are connected. And one interesting aspect of that as well is Eros, who is the son of Aphrodite and Ares, is also often a counter to the idea of Eros. So Eros is the ancient Greek word for love. And this god and Eros is the ancient Greek word for strife, specifically in wartime.

And she is a goddess also explicitly linked to Ares, not romantically, but just as a sort of companion specifically in war. And so you have another use of that counter between love and war, sort of the overarching ideas of Aphrodite and Ares as love and war, and then the lesser ideas, the more day-to-day concepts of it, of that lesser love of Eros and that strife of war in Eris. So they have so many really explicit connections between these two without actually making them married happily, having kids who were explicitly from these married gods, if that makes sense. I've sort of talked my way out of my point, but I think I made it. No, I think you absolutely did. I mean, it is always so interesting with

myths because there's never normally one definitive version is there. So there's not, Always so interesting with myths, because there's never normally one definitive version is there. So there's not, I'm presuming in the Greek mythology, there's not one story which kind of says how Ares and Aphrodite first got together, or is there just always this kind of continuing, very much affirming that there was this attraction there almost? It's exactly that. Yeah, we don't have a source that explains any kind of origin relationship, or really even anything about... The one thing that comes up so often in Greek myth is we don't have a source that explains any kind of origin relationship or really even anything about. The one thing that comes up so often in Greek myth is we don't really know how anyone felt about anything because these stories weren't developed, you know, for the reasons that we would think of storytelling now. We don't need an inner monologue of the gods.

We don't need to know how Aphrodite felt about anything or Ares for that matter, because the whole point was just that this relationship happened. This match happened. The children happened. for that matter, because the whole point was just that this relationship happened, this match happened, the children happened. It wasn't about understanding the why, right? Or any kind of emotional impact. It was just that these things existed. And so we have these really disparate stories of Aphrodite and Ares, you know, being together, but it's really the only story I think we have of them explicitly together is when they are caught in a bed together and and so we know that they were passionate and that they were together but we don't have much beyond that other than like a list of the children they had together and things like that which is also I should say in itself fascinating because Eros is their most famous

child this sort of lesser concept of love day-to-day love and then Harmonia is another of their children she's the goddess of harmony. She's also the only goddess to ever marry a mortal and live as a mortal. And we have no explanation why she would choose that or why it happened to her. And then they have the gods, Phobos and Deimos, who are basically like fear and panic. And they are also those children. So we have these two gods who are really good and like beautiful concepts, love and harmony. And then we have these two coming from like the Aries side, and they're just like fear and panic, just personification gods of scary subjects, basically. I'm Matt Lewis.

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Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to gone medieval from history hit wherever you get your podcasts okay then we've kind of discussed around it, but let's delve into the sex story. So how were Ares and Aphrodite caught? It's wonderful. The story appears as sort of an aside, a backstory. I'm 95% sure it's in

the Odyssey, but if it's in the Iliad, I'm, you know, wrong. But basically, the story goes to explain, I think, Hephaestus' attitude because he's sort of notoriously mad. And I don't really blame him. Essentially, they're caught by Helios, the god of the sun, because Helios notoriously can see everything. There's a number of stories where Helios appears as this sort of all-seeing, omniscient figure. And it's not because he's more powerful. It's because he's literally the sun. And so he's over top of everything. and he can just witness everything happening from above and so

he catches them in bed together in hephaestus and aphrodite's bed i should say specifically and he tells hephaestus and hephaestus learns about this and he decides he wants to try to catch them in the act and so he he builds this sort of net of chains that is going to deploy in the bed the next time that they are in it together. They are invisible. They are all powerful. This is mythology. It's fascinatingly entertaining. And so the next time that Aphrodite and Ares are in this bed together, the net of chains deploys catches them and they are not only caught in bed but literally can't move can't get out of it I think we're to presume they're naked together in this bed completely caught and Hephaestus he had sort of lied and said he was

going off to Lemnos so that they would get together in there and then he comes back in and he decides that he wants to show all the other Olympians what has happened. There's some theories around like maybe he's trying to get his dowry back. Like he's trying to like almost get a sort of ancient version of a divorce in whatever form that would take. They would still be together. But he's trying to get recompense for the fact that his wife is not with him and is with another god. But the other gods all end up just laughing at the situation. It's pretty unfortunate for Hephaestus, honestly, and there's a lot to do with that. And Hephaestus is notoriously also a god with disabilities. And

so there's more to it than it just being funny. I have some great episodes on that. But essentially, this is what happens. And eventually, Poseidon, I believe, is the one to convince Hephaestus to let them go. Everyone wants them let go because when these literal gods of love and war are chained up together, that actually has some major ramifications on the earth itself and the concepts of love and war. So they need to be let out. And Poseidon is the one to eventually be like, look, like if you do it, you know, all the other gods will be really happy with you. And Hephaestus does let them go. And they sort of very angrily both flit off to their own areas. Aphrodite probably goes

to Cyprus or she might go to Kythera, which is her other sacred island. And Ares goes off to Thrace really angrily. And that's essentially the end of it is just that they both kind of leave angrily. But we are to presume they probably got together again. And who knows when the kids came about and all these different things. But it is it's one of their most notorious stories. It's one of the most detailed stories we have about Ares generally. He doesn't feature into a lot of stories in that way otherwise. And Hephaestus too. It's their main storyline that we have from the mythology, which is so entertaining.

That story is wonderful. I think entertaining is completely the correct word there. And I think you kind of highlighted it. So many of these gods had affairs anyway. Didn't they all like especially the gods having mistresses i mean so why was this particular affair why does it seem to be so scandalous because aphrodite is a woman because all the other affairs are men having affairs with other goddesses nymphymphs, humans. It's the men being in control of their own sexuality.

And Aphrodite is the only goddess who gets to control her own sexuality. And I mean, it's because she's the goddess of sex, but even the goddess of sex doesn't get a free pass like the men do. My whole podcast is about, you know, feminism and how the patriarchy influenced everything. But that is really explicit here. This goddess of sex doesn't have the same freedom in her marriage as any of the other gods, even though she is explicitly as powerful, if not more powerful than them. They get a free pass to do anything they want. And Aphrodite's is all about these stories of her and you know getting into trouble getting caught the other longer story that we have about her and her

relationships is this story and it might come up later I might be jumping the gun but the birth of Aeneas is the Homeric him to Aphrodite and but it's relevant in that it's another story of her having an affair outside of her marriage to Hephaestus and it's with a mortal and it's another story of her having an affair outside of her marriage to Hephaestus and it's with a mortal and it's explicitly caused because Zeus was angry that Aphrodite as love itself had caused so many gods to have affairs with mortals and embarrass them in that way because they've been with mortals and so he wanted her embarrassed in the same way by being with a mortal and so he influenced her in some way i forget the details exactly but he influenced her in some way to to fall for aeneas's father whose name is going to escape me because who is it anchises yes it's anchises thank

you it's explicitly another story like that where she still doesn't have complete control over her own choices and sexuality. So it's really interesting because I know you wanted to then therefore talk about this part because it almost seems as if, you know, well, this affair between Aphrodite and Ares, it's really interesting in terms of women empowerment in the Greek myths in the Pantheon. Exactly. And it's also why Aphrodite is my personal longtime favorite goddess, because she is the only one who gets to make these decisions. And they don't always work out well for her. And she still doesn't hold the same power and freedoms that the men do. But she still does it anyway, in a way that I just love. You know, she's like, I'm going to get in trouble. There's going to be all this drama. That's fine. I'm going to go with Ares. I'm going to do what I want and just sort of deal with the resulting drama versus, you know, the other goddesses. Porhera just has to watch as Zeus goes off with every woman around. And same with Amphitrite, who's married to Poseidon and all these different goddesses who don't get their

own relationship or sexual choices at all, whereas Aphrodite does. Persephone is a little bit different, I think, but Aphrodite is one who explicitly really gets to do whatever she wants, even if it does sometimes cause trouble. Well, talking about causing trouble, Trojan War, talk to me about Aphrodite's role, and you can correct me if I'm wrong in regards to this, because I'm sure there's been a lot of laying the blame at her feet for so much for this, but what is Aphrodite's role in the outbreak of the Trojan War? I mean, it's fascinating and any kind of blame, you can rationalize all of it. But the story goes that, and this is Eris coming into play again, the goddess I mentioned earlier,

the goddess of strife, this sort of counter to Eros at times. So Eris is not invited to a wedding. It's the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. She's a nymph Thetis and Peleus is just a mortal king, but they will go on to have Achilles who doesn't come into this story, but that's why they're famous. They are Achilles' parents. And so at their wedding, all the gods are invited. It's one of two weddings where all the gods attend, the other being Harmonia's, the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares.

And this one goes badly. So all the gods attend except Aerys. She's not invited because she's strife. She would have made it not fun, but she's mad because she is strife. And so she gets a golden apple and she inscribes on it the word Caliste, which means for the fairest. And she just tosses it at the feet of the three goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena. And essentially it's just like, well, you can fight over this, which they do, which I mean, it's a golden apple. It doesn't sound like the most exciting thing

in the world to me, but these three goddesses, because it says for the fairest, like they each decide they absolutely deserve it themselves. A whole sort of squabble breaks out. Zeus determines that he can't be the one to decide because he would anger one of three. It's like Athena is his favorite goddess. Hera is his wife.

Aphrodite is love. None of them does he want to anger himself. And so he gives the role to a young man named Paris. But chronologically speaking, it feels like that has to come later. So there's a lot of sort of question marks there. But regardless, Paris is given this choice. He has to decide between the three goddesses. Athena promises him victory in war, that he'll be, you know, sort of the best warrior around.

Hera promises him power, I suppose. I'm going to forget the exact details, but something along the lines of, you know, she would grant him power in some way. And Aphrodite promises him the most beautiful woman in the world, which he chooses. And that means that Aphrodite somehow grants him Helen, but not explicitly because Helen is already married. And so eventually Paris and Helen go off together. Whether Helen wanted to or not is also very much up for debate. I don't think she's to blame either. You know, so the blame for this war, which obviously comes because Helen goes off to Troy with Paris. The blame comes at

Aphrodite because she gave him Helen or it comes at Helen because, you know, people think she went with him or what have you. I mean, ultimately, I think the blame lies with Paris. He's making all these decisions and he's deciding that he does want to be with this woman who is explicitly already married, all these different things. He's never given the blame, of course. But it's really debatable who is actually to blame. Or ultimately, it's not even Paris. It's Agamemnon who wants to start the war in the first place, or Menelaus for wanting to. details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing

to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. any one of them could have just been like well i guess she's over there now you know i'll find another woman to marry like it's fascinating the way the blame does get set in this sort of really famous way at either aphrodite or helen as at fault when ultimately it's like it's the people choosing to invade troy that actually cause it, literally speaking. But the story is pretty fun all the same. It is. And it's really interesting once again, isn't it? Because we've already talked about Aphrodite and Ares, love and war, love and desire. And it seems to be that linking once again with the Trojan War, isn't it? The kind of going to Troy to get Helen back, once again, like this kind of

warfare aspect and the love and desire aspect is linked together, not just with Aphrodite and Ares, but with this whole story too. Yeah, absolutely. It's very explicitly connecting the two. And Aphrodite plays a big role in the war as well, helping on the Trojan side because her son Aeneas is a Trojan. And, you know, she even gets wounded in the war, which is fascinating. She gets hit by an arrow and she's trying to save Aeneas at some point. And they really all play a strong role in this. Ares as well, but I don't think he's on a side. He just is war. And so he's there. Ares is on his chariot with him, like screaming for blood. It's wonderfully visual.

But yeah, it again is linking these two ideas really explicitly. And interestingly, in the East too, you know, Troy is obviously modern Turkey. And so you've got these kind of hidden sort of under the surface ideas of the origin too of Aphrodite as this love and war goddess from the East and then connecting her with Ares in the Greek mythology. And there's just so much to unpack, I think, in all of that. Absolutely. And you hinted at Aeneas earlier. So how does he fit into this whole story with Aphrodite? Aeneas, I'm just fascinated by him basically, because his origin does come in the Homeric came to Aphrodite. And so it's a very ancient and long story that tells of the quote unquote love in whatever way it came of of Anchises and Aphrodite.

It's very extensive. There's a lot of origins on. OK, she has the child Aeneas and she gives him I think he's raised by some nymphs or something off. And then eventually he will meet up with Anchises, his father. But he's given this really important backstory in this Homeric hymn, this really kind of epic origin. as an important Trojan, but specifically one who is helped by the gods explicitly. The only other character who's helped by the gods so explicitly on the Trojan side, that is, is Paris, who is also pulled out of the war at some point. But Aeneas has these really important origins and these important acts within the Iliad. So he's vital in these two really ancient sources. And then there's nothing else at all about him later. He just kind of drops off the map. And I love it because then, of course, Rome picks him up and makes him this sort of pseudo founder of a place before Rome.

I'll never find a good way of describing exactly what Aeneas plays in that role. But it's like they recognized how important he was in these sources and that the Greeks didn't give you any follow up on who he was or what happened. And maybe that's because he died in the war later in a source that we no longer have in a Greek source, rather. But it is fascinating that he has these really epic origins. And then the Romans pick up upon that and like, well, we'll write, you know, the rest of it and we'll kind of take hold of his story and utilize this important character for our own means, you know, a good however many hundreds of years later that it was that they kind of assigned Aeneas to that role. I mean, Greek Aeneas versus Roman Aeneas, good to highlight that there straight away

as well, Liv. And I mean, you mentioned the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite now sources I normally ask about right at the start but actually I've kind of gone over that to go straight into this list of questions that I've got in front of me and just before we therefore wrap up I mean for these stories of Aphrodite that we've gone over today whether it's Aeneas whether it's with Ares whether it's her origin story. I mean, what sorts of sources do we have available to piece together the story of this Greek god or what the Greeks believed was the story of Aphrodite? Well, the sources I've mentioned are all very early,

particularly Aphrodite. It plays its most prominent role in the Homeric epic, so the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Homeric hymns, all of which, not all the Homeric hymns necessarily, but I believe certainly the one to Aphrodite, they are all kind of attributed to, they were probably, you know, written down for preservation in the Archaic period, possibly late Archaic, but they are almost certainly considerably older, probably, you know, Iron Age, i.e. the time when people sometimes call it the Dark Ages, which isn't a thing. Basically, the time in between the Bronze Age and the Archaic Period in Greece, you know, their oral storytelling, which all of Greek mythology ultimately is,

unless you're talking about the plays. And so there are these stories that are so much older, and then eventually we have these versions that were written down, but there's also so much that's missing and so much that's lost. So it's fascinating to think about everything else. And I think a lot of times that's features into art and things. We have these sort of ideas that we can pull out of the artistic representations that we have. really specifically, they all tend to come from these archaic sources, at least in the ones I've talked about, because it's the ones I'm most knowledgeable in. I really like to stick to the most ancient of Greek sources when possible. So they are these really, really ancient ideas that then get developed later. And she certainly features into later sources, into the plays and then the later mythographers who are writing during the Roman period and things like that. But specifically, these stories are some of the most ancient in terms of surviving sources. It's such a fascinating character and how her story,

as you say, continues down into the Roman period. I'm presuming, we don't need to cover this in too much detail if you don't want to, Liv, but I'm presuming, as you say, Aphrodite, her character revolves more and more as time goes on. And for instance, by the time you do get to the Roman period. The interesting thing that that does bring up that I meant to mention earlier is, is this connection with Venus. And so, you know, the Roman take on Aphrodite is Venus explicitly linking her with the planet, which would have been visible and would have looked like a star, of course. What's fascinating about that is that Ishtar, Inanna, and Astarte are also all linked with the planet. And so we have these really ancient

origins of connecting goddesses and specifically goddesses of love and war with the planet Venus. Now, do I know what that means on any kind of like cosmology? I don't know. I don't even know the right word to use on connecting that to planets because science is not my thing. But it's fascinating to me that all of them did link it with this planet and saw and linked it with this goddess seems to me just sort of an interesting addition that links all of these goddesses across the Mediterranean. But that all of that said, I don't know enough about Venus, except, of course, when they do take on Aeneas as their pseudo founding figure, which most of that story gets developed when Julius Caesar or after Julius Caesar, rather, when they're trying to really deify him and make him into this more important

figure. And so making Aphrodite and Aeneas these origins then gives Julius Caesar and thus Augustus this like divine heritage that they're really aching for. And so you have this really explicit use of Venus in that way, in a way where in the Greek pantheon of gods and heroes and important people, it tends to be that they're related to someone like Zeus, not necessarily related to someone like Aphrodite, because Aeneas is really her only mortal child. And so again, the Romans really like picked up on that. We have a mortal we can use who's connected with Aphrodite, like we want this. So I don't know what that means for their appreciation of Venus. I'd like to, but it definitely suggests they had a high reverence for her as this goddess of love and whatever else they kind of associated with her in Rome. Liv, this has been absolutely cracking.

Last but certainly not least, tell us a bit about your podcast. So my podcast is called Let's Talk About Myths, baby. I have many hundreds of episodes for people to listen to if they are so inclined. For the first three years of the podcast, it was essentially me telling stories in this way. And then the last couple of years, I've gotten very deep into sources. So they are incredibly detailed and incredibly extensively researched. But also, I do that once a week. And then once a week, I also usually talk to scholars and academics and authors about their work and really get even deeper insights in a similar way

to you into this various wild topics in the ancient world. Yes, there's a lot to listen to. It's very fun. And I certainly love doing it. And I will talk about ancient mythology at any possible opportunity. Liv, this has been absolutely great. And it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me. It's been very fun. Well, there you go.

There was Liv Albert talking all about Aphrodite, the fourth episode in our special Greek Gods and Goddesses series. Credit, of course, being to our senior producer, Elena Guthrie, the real beating heart of making this series a reality. And we are marching forwards because next up, we've got Aphrodite's lover. We've got the God of War. We've got Ares coming up next.

Stay tuned for that. Now, the senior producer for this episode was the aforementioned Elena Guthrie, assisted in the production by the hero that is Annie Colo. Alongside that, we've got the scriptwriter to thank. That was Andrew House. The narration for the story was done by Nicola Woolley. And the editor of the episode was another great legend based at Ancients HQ, Aidan Lonergan. So that's enough from me today. Of course, if you

want to leave us a lovely rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please do that. But I'm going to stop rambling for now, and I'll see you in the next episode. you