Did it Take Time to Create Aphrodite?
Read at the conference Venus and the Venereal: Interpretations and Representations from Classical Antiquity through the Eighteenth Century, held on April 25-26, 2008 at Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, sponsored by The Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies.
(Ludovisi Throne, from the site of the University of
Wisconsin,
Just to orient ourselves visually, the screen shows a
relief on what is called the “Ludovisi Throne,” from the Villa Ludovisi in
This theme of
connecting Aphrodite a.k.a. Venus to the sea extends into modern times, as we
may hear later in this conference. But to begin the proceedings my offering to
the goddess, as it were, is to make a few remarks on what may be the earliest
treatment of the subject in classical antiquity itself. This is namely a
section of the poem Theogony ascribed to Hesiod, which probably coalesced in the 1st half
of the 7th century, B.C.E. The first entry of your handout
gives a translation of the section, plus some matters you can consider at your
leisure to the extent of your individual interest: some footnotes on
subtleties, the Greek text, a bibliography, and a synopsis of another early but
undatable treatment of the theme. Theogony
itself tells of the origins of various divine principles, some anthropomorphic
and others standing for forces of nature, and of their battles with one
another, eventually leading to the hegemony of Zeus a.k.a. Jupiter, all
composed in the same meter as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey epics,
and with many of their stylistic conventions. The section of interest appears at
a key juncture of the story: when the battles begin. Cronus
a.k.a. Saturn, who will eventually become the father of Zeus himself and then
be overthrown by Zeus, has just castrated his own father Uranus the sky-god, at
the urging of his mother Gaea, the earth, because Uranus had hidden all their
children inside her, causing her discomfort. We are told:
But the severed genitals did not escape from Cronus’s
hand in vain: Gaea took in as many of the bloody drops as sped away from
Uranus’s wound, and upon the turning of periods (in the Greek periplomenōn eniautōn)
she engendered the powerful Furies and the great Giants of brilliant armor
holding long spears in their hands, and over the boundless earth she engendered
the nymphs called Ash.
As to these products of fertilization by blood, the warrior Giants are
certainly associated with blood, and the presence of the Furies also seems
logical enough. The reasons for the Ash nymphs seem to me to be, first, that
the cited spears are made of ash, and second, that an association between ash
deities and giants apparently goes back to Indo-European times. In any case,
returning to the translation, we learn:
Meanwhile, no sooner had Cronus first cut
off the genitals with the hard-metal and thrown them from the land into the
much-surging sea than they were borne on the water polun
chronon (which I leave untranslated
because its signification is precisely what is at issue), with white foam
arising all around from the deathless flesh (in Greek, athanatou
chroos), and in it a maiden was formed.
To summarize the rest, the creature that eventually emerged is called Aphroditē since she came from aphros, foam, and other names for similar reasons.
She acquired the companions Love and Longing. And she instills amorous feelings
into both gods and humans.
My specific concern in
this passage is with the role of what passes for the entity now called time,
and we need some clarification of the terms (following
handout #2).
To the earliest Greeks it was not the word chronos,
but the section’s phrase meaning “the turning of periods,” i.e., a space
straightforwardly measured by processes like the revolutions of the sun, that
best matched the modern idea that time is a particular continuum that is
divided into measurable intervals bounded by instants. Thus at the outset of
Homer’s Odyssey we learn that the year finally arrived for Odysseus
a.k.a. Ulysses to return home, after he had been away during “the turning of periods.”
In another place the turning of a single eniautos
accompanies the actual gestation of a fetus, in a human woman impregnated by a
god. And from such natural periods Homer and Hesiod
cite duration quantitatively in terms like twenty years or days. They express
instants, i.e., occasions for action, with expressions like “early-born
rosy-fingered Dawn appeared.” All that is like our concept, if at times more
picturesque. But despite association of chronos
with those ideas for the later Greeks such as Aristotle, a judicious balancing
of the claims of the studies cited in the handout shows that in epic the
term does not mean a series of instants, but simply duration in a qualitative
sense. It can be translated as “a while.” The handout’s citation from Odyssey
19 is the one place I know where Homer might have actually connected chronos to duration in days or years, if so surely
in a loose way. He would not say that this panel is to last a chronos of 1¼ hours, nor that it began at the
chronos of 2:05 PM. End of clarification.
Now in approaching
this text it is interesting to note that births in the actual theogonical narrative before our section are simply stated,
without indication of anything like time being required, granted that the
turning of periods is cited in connection with the Muses in the poem’s proemium, before the theogony
proper. I ask: how will early listeners to the poem have reacted to hearing
that the Furies et al only arose after a turning of periods, and, especially,
Aphrodite only after poulun chronon? But in answering the question I do not adopt
the usual hermeneutical standpoint of the Hesiod commentariat of isolating the posited pure thought from Hesiod’s poetry and considering the verse form in which it
is expressed to be irrelevant. Rather, my analysis features a point of
verse form, namely, that poulun chronon is a standard epic expression, often called a
formula. In a number of places, listed in handout #3,
Homer uses the accusative case phrase polun
chronon in a particular verse position, and it is
in fact the same as Theogony’s phrase except
that one syllable is shorter for technical reasons. And my point is that the
audience cannot have thought of it simply as a large amount of chronos, simply “a long while,” because the response
to any given repeated epic expression derived as much from its contexts as the
literal meanings of its component words, according to the writers listed in handout #4.
Or if you will, to early audiences the connotation of such an expression
was as important or more so as its denotation. If for example we
consider a phrase consisting of noun and epithet, in a number of places Homer
speaks of ōkupodes hippoi,
literally “swift-footed horses,” but this does not reduce to horses that happen
to be fast, because sometimes they balk or even turn out to lose the race.
Rather, the expression carried to the audience what we can call an “image”
without trying to define that concept too precisely, which derived from the
totality of its epic uses known to the audience.
And the simpler
phrases such as ōkupodes hippoi
will have been available to the composer of Theogony
even if it coalesced before the Homeric poems did, as some believe, because the
expressions themselves surely arose much earlier in the epic tradition. So what
are the inherited associations of poulus chronos that Hesiod’s
original listeners will have sensed? (And by the way the audiences will have
been listeners, not readers, even if the author read from a written text as
some believe.) The first of the citations listed in #3 is typical: the Greeks’
elder statesman in Book 2 of the Iliad complains that they have spent polun chronon
quarreling among themselves after the defection of their best warrior Achilles,
i.e., instead of soldiering on and fighting the real enemy, the Trojans. Thus
we can infer that polus chronos
effectively meant “wasted time.” Not all of the citations quite say that --
after all, in Odyssey Book 5 Odysseus almost drowns during the polus chronos --
but there are enough for me to believe that wasting time is the principal image
the phrase will have evoked to listeners such as Hesiod’s.
If so they will have sensed, granted, in an inchoate fashion, that the private
parts of the sky god would have done better not to float around and form
the maiden who became Aphrodite, whatever the parts might have done as an
alternative. But that is to say that there is something wrong with creating
her, and this is in accord with the analysis of a number of commentators based
on other considerations. Scholars have long thought that the account of her
creation was part of Hesiod’s overall misogynist
project, as suggested by being born along with the female Furies or by
parallels with the negative account of the first woman later in the poem. Thus
Annie Bonnafé in her book cited in handout #1
and Kathryn Stoddard in a communication to me hold that the formation of
Aphrodite is one manifestation of a curse Uranus utters just after the end of
our section; that is, she is the sky-god’s revenge for his castration. But I
think the first audience’s visceral response, if not our modern rational
analysis, will have sensed this negativity as built into the temporal phrase Hesiod uses.
Another point of
interest is that there is alliteration between two words in the successive
verses 190 and 191; namely, and to cite them in the nominative case, chronos, the temporal entity that was needed for the
foam to nourish the embryonic goddess, and chrōs,
the material flesh that produced the foam, respectively. The wordplay is
striking because it is set off by another example. In the text with a more
literal translation (handout #5)
there is assonance between the prepositions that introduce the respective
clauses, am and amphi.
And if we reject the idea that Hesiod’s verse form is
a mere shell, people who have carefully considered the matter agree that there
is a certain solemnity involved in employing wordplay in early Greek texts, not
just skill in versification. (Without spending time on the point, for your
reference I note a much discussed example in handout #6.)
To be sure, the fact that the chrōs was athanatos (deathless or immortal) only means to our modern
consciousness that the immortal material naturally caused the nourishing foam
and therefore its product Aphrodite to be immortal. But the alliterative
connection could not help but cause a sensation on the part of the original audience,
if again inchoately, that some of this immortality accrued to the overall
sentence stating that a maiden was formed from foam during poulon
chronos. That is, the consciousness will have
been that the story of her origin was itself immortal.
To deviate briefly
from discussing Hesiod’s basic vision, the sense that
a story is immortal seems connected to the aetiological
function of myth, where divine events in some distant past affect humans today
in mundane ways. In myth, for example, one sometimes hears a statement on the order
of saying that some primal figure shed tears, and so we now have dew. And
similarly with our story there is now foam on the surface of the sea, which has
indeed been interpreted as the sky-god’s semen having been transformed into
foam.
And in this vein one
can supplement a general understanding scholars have had about what the birth
of Aphrodite signifies in the poem itself. Granted, she is primarily associated
with sex as opposed to its results. Still, many of the commentators of handout
#1 agree that, apart from some 20-odd lines featuring parthenogenesis
immediately following our segment, complementing instances earlier in the
narrative, and apart from her own unnatural birth, that event signals the onset
of regulated procreation by sex. Her role in subsequent procreation is
clear in that several of the later births are said to occur “by means of golden
Aphrodite,” and it is regulated in that whether there was sex or parthenogenesis
before her was haphazard. I would only add that the combination of the temporal
expressions associated with her and with the Furies et al means the onset of
definite periods for growth from conception to adulthood. I mean that we have
an onset because of the sense of permanence the chronos-chrōs
wordplay lends to Aphrodite’s birth, and that the periods are definite because
the expression with the Furies et al involves concrete time-reckoning. Indeed,
later in the poem the time needed for Zeus himself to grow up in a cave in
Of course, Hesiod does not give an explicit aetiological
statement, something like “therefore to this day foam exists on the surface the
sea,” nor that regulated sexual intercourse now exists as a result of the birth
of Aphrodite, as he will later in the poem on the division of the sacrificial
ox between gods and humans after Zeus and Prometheus interact. This is because
in our section he is primarily interested in the basic theologico-poetic
vision. To get back to that, and in particular to the theme of a goddess
involved with the sea, I add finally that the sea setting surely adds a sense
of spatial infinity to the timelessness the passage evokes. If we judge from
Homer’s epithets for it, the early Greeks thought of the sea by turns as
turbulent as in poluklustos, “much-surging,”
in our v. 189, or barren, or dark-colored, but also expansive, as in a 4-times
repeated Odyssey verse about someone carrying someone else over “the
broad back of the sea,” a phrase which is also employed on occasion in our poem.
Thus while the warlike Ash nymphs were arising all over the boundless earth,
the domain of Aphrodite accompanied by Love and Longing was becoming as vast as
the sea.
I conclude and
summarize: What it actually took to create Aphrodite was not time in our modern
sense of a measured continuum objectively given to us in which everything
happens, but poulus chronos,
with the assistance of athanatos chrōs. That means that Aphrodite is the product of
what we now call “a waste of time,” and one which is immortal in that she has
effects on us today. To be sure, the author of the standard philological
commentary on the poem, Martin West, is able to speak of “the absence of … any
definite time-scale” in our episode; yet he considers the passage a thing of
beauty, to which that timeless aspect gives a “dream-like quality.” But if so
it is a problematic dream, if not an outright nightmare, it is all-pervasive,
and we never wake up from it.
Thank you.
