APPENDIX ONE
Acropolis rock and Agora, 469–399 BC
Do you not see what a great goddess Aphrodite is? She, whom you can neither name nor measure, how great she is by nature, from how great a thing she comes through. She nourishes you and me and all the mortals. And as proof, so that you might not only comprehend this in words, I will show you by deed, the strength of the goddess.
On the one hand, earth desires rain when the dry barren ground is in need of moisture on account of drought; and on the other hand, the revered sky, when it is filled with rain by Aphrodite, desires that it fall on the earth; and when the two mingle into the same thing, they beget everything for us, and at the same time, they nurture everything through which the mortal race lives and grows.
Fragment from a lost play by Euripides1
BECAUSE THE PARTHENON DOMINATES ATHENS’ SKYLINE, it is easy to imagine that Athena allowed few other goddesses elbow-room in her golden city. But swathes of the Acropolis rock – the very foundation of Athena’s peacock-blue and green and gold shrine – were sacred to Aphrodite.2
Gouged out of the red limestone of the Acropolis itself are tiny pocks – little stone larders prepared for the offerings of the faithful in Athens. These niches were sacred to the goddess of love. Here, throughout the year, men and women would come to placate and honour Aphrodite and her son Eros: they left small cakes, marble replicas of genitalia (now kept modestly under lock and key in the storerooms of the Agora Museum) and terracotta figurines for the goddess. When I last visited, despite the fact that the area was cordoned off to the public, someone was coming week in, week out to leave a fresh-cut pomegranate for the erotic spirits of the place.
Two fifth-century BC inscriptions have survived next to the crumbling niches. They are so eroded now as to be almost invisible to the human eye – best to feel them out with your fingers:
FOR APHRODITE … FOR EROS
At night, pairs of two or four virgins (aged seven to eleven years old) would pick their way down to these niches. These were the Arrhephoroi, distinguished children selected by the Archon Basileus of Athens for religious service. Imagine a high-class ‘Myrtis’, the little eleven-year-old plague victim whose face has recently been re-created by a team of international scientists. Housed east of the Erechtheion, the Acropolis would be their home for almost a year.3 Both sacred and juvenile, these were children allowed to play with childish things; up on the complex was a courtyard for ball games. One can easily imagine the jointed dolls – which now sit unloved in the glass cases of museums – being dangled on knees and clutched tight up here, with the jangle of Athens and the wide reach of the Attic countryside stretched out beneath. The girls probably spent the bulk of their days tending to the needs of Athena Polias (it might be them peeping out from the skirts of the priestess on the Parthenon friezes), and then one night of the year the priestess summoned them, presented them with a basket of arrheta – secret things – which they were instructed to transport to the niches.4
But not for them the monumental sloping stairway through the Propylaia. They travelled down through the very bedrock of the Acropolis itself. Their staircase was a vulva-like cleft in the north citadel, which, following earthquake damage in the thirteenth century BC, had been scooped out by the pious Late Bronze Age inhabitants of the Acropolis and still emerges discreetly at niche-level. Slowly, slowly, with their precious load (what could these unspeakable offerings be? genitalia? – but these were common at thetime, nothing to be covered up – a sacred dew for Athena’s sacred olive tree perhaps?), they climbed down deep inside the cold rock.
Now the passageway is dank and smells appropriately (given that the dove was Aphrodite’s familiar) of the guano of a colony of collared doves. Here the girls emerged. The rituals they engaged in at the niches themselves are unrecorded, although it seems that at the end of the nocturnal rites the maidens returned to the Acropolis – to be replaced by next year’s fresh-faced votaries.
And Aphrodite did not just walk the Athenian streets at night. She was there too at the grand entrance to the Acropolis complex. Today tourists shuffle past the polished stones oblivious to their significance – happy only that they will soon be reaching the summit. For this was where Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite of all the people) was worshipped together with the goddess Peitho – Persuasion.5 The fifth-century Athenians knew only too well that they inhabited a fragile city-state. Where there were so many political players, each with a vested interest, how could they possibly stop the body politic from fracturing? Aphrodite’s stock-in-trade – love, desire, communality – were all vital in a political system that had suddenly given each citizen equal rights.
And so Aphrodite’s unions were not all thought to be sexual. When we think of the goddess of love, we should banish the voluptuous Venus figure that inhabits many imaginations. As well as bodies, the goddess of love also joined hearts and minds. And for this reason the flow of the faithful to her shrine was steady. At the very least the love goddess has eight altars in and around Attica, including one – as recent excavations have shown – in the heart of the Agora itself.6 Damaged by the Persians, this love-zone in the Athenians’ marketplace kept functioning through the Peloponnesian and civil wars. The epistyle of her temple at the edge of the Acropolis was discovered in 1968, and on it an inscription. ‘This to you, O great August Aphrodite Pandemos we honour you with our twenty gifts.’7 In the summer, at the festival of Aphrodisia, thimblefuls of the blood from the breasts of sacred doves were spilled onto her altar here.
And in the Agora itself more sacrifices were regularly made to the goddess of unions.8 Between 1980 and 1982 the American School of Classical Studies at Athens unearthed a wide altar, just at the northern limit of the Pan-Athenaic Way, a stone’s throw from the court of the Archon Basileus and within spitting distance of the Altar of the Twelve Gods (the Centre-point of Athens), and here were burned offerings of sheep and goats, because horned creatures were the animals most sacred to the goddess of desire. As Socrates walked through the Agora – particularly on the fourth days of the month9 – he would have seen, month in, month out, these habitual, desperate measures to keep these goddesses on-side.10
Did the banality of such practices trouble Socrates? Did he look at priestesses catching thimblefuls of blood or at priests faffing around with the slippery tongue of a goat and think, quietly: why are we going through such futile gestures? Love and harmony are vital, but can we really ensure them only by sending burnt offerings to the sky, or by sending out children to scramble around on rock staircases at night?
If you read between the lines of Plato’s Dialogues, it seems that Socrates offers an alternative when it comes to the matter of love.
DIOTIMA: [The] right way of approaching or being initiated into the mysteries of love [is] to begin with examples of beauty in this world, and using them as steps to ascend continually with that absolute beauty as one’s aim, from one instance of physicial beauty to two and from two to all, then from physical beauty to moral beauty, and from moral beauty to the beauty of knowledge, until from knowledge of various kinds one arrives at the supreme knowledge whose sole object is that absolute beauty, and knows at last what absolute beauty is.11
Socrates sees in the power of human wisdom, of will, the potential to hold together societies, however disparate. For him, love = virtue = knowledge = social cohesion and happiness. Socrates sought some kind of universal union in human affairs. He invokes the wise men who ‘claim that community and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world order’.12 He goes on to argue that nous – mind – encourages the heavens to move in an orderly way, just as nous brings order and health to the human body.13 Socrates’ life-work was to encourage men to find a way to live together and be good. But he does not simply see Harmonia dripping out of the neck of a dove as a gift of Aphrodite.
Unfortunately for those on the wrong side of her clever little tongue, Peitho’s (Persuasion’s) force could be malevolent. But she did have her good days. The great goddess Aphrodite was, remember, family. Aphrodite added passion to Peitho’s persuading power. The goddess of love could herself persuade Peitho to persuade men to act harmoniously, to seek concord. Peitho’s goddess-mistress-mother Aphrodite was thought capable of promoting an important sensation in the democracy – harmonia/homonoia, harmony/union: qualities vital to the variegated political entity that was fifth-century Athens.
Kleisthenes himself recognised the potency of the Aphrodite-Peitho combination. When he advanced his reforms and set Athens on the road to democracy, around 507 BC, he cast Athena on the front of his triobol coins and on the obverse a female Janus – a woman with two faces – the potent Aphrodite-Peitho, Love and Persuasion, hybrid.14
Socrates too promoted the unifying power of love within human society. Aphrodite was one of the goddesses that he worshipped with most reverence. In fact the philosopher suggested that it is only when you look for your own goodness in others, and find it – in other words, allow yourself to love others – that you yourself can be a truly good person:
As the effluence of beauty enters him through the eyes, he is warmed; the effluence moistens the germ of the feathers, and as he grows warm, the parts from which the feathers grow, which were before hard and choked … become soft … as nourishment streams upon him.
Love is the one thing in the world I understand.
I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not in love with someone.15
