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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, Milwaukee)
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.