ABSTRACT
The late-eighth-century Hymn to Aphrodite tells the story of how the goddess was stricken with love for the mortal Trojan Anchises, who was tending cattle in the wilds of Mt. Ida. The natural landscape of the seduction, Mt. Ida, "mother of wild beasts", locates Anchises' experience far from the city and its institutions. Aphrodite is not the Goddess of Love, as we call her today, but the goddess of sex, the sheer amoral drive of all life to reproduce, "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower", as Dylan Thomas put it. The duplicitous sexual beauty of Aphrodite has, of course, a much broader dimension, for she is the source of all fertility and procreativity, the universal urge of all creatures to mate and reproduce after their kind. The bloody members were flung into the sea, and from the foaming semen and blood was born Aphrodite.
