[465] Il. iii. 400.
[466] Il. iii. 418; also 395, where ὀρίνω, as most commonly in Homer,
means to excite with fear.
[467] Il. v. 422-5.
[468] Il. iii. 402.
~_Venus as yet scarcely Greek._~
The negative evidence, then, thus far tends to the belief that Venus
was not yet established among the regular deities of the Poet’s
countrymen: and it is supported by positive testimony. For some of
the functions, that must in the post-Homeric view of her office have
belonged to her, Homer studiously makes other provision. Of this
there is a most remarkable case in the Odyssey. He designs that the
Suitors, before they are put to death, shall be made to yield of their
substance to the house of Ulysses, in the form of gifts to Penelope.
For this purpose he arrays her in all her charms, and brings her forth
in appearance like Diana, or golden Venus[469]. It is not a common
practice with Homer to compare a beautiful Greek woman to Venus;
especially when it is one so matronlike as Penelope. On the other hand,
the comparison of Cassandra to Venus[470] is entirely in keeping with
the Asiatic character of the deity. But the intention of the allusion
here is manifest: for when the Suitors see her, it is passion which
prompts them to vie with one another in courting her favour through the
medium of costly gifts. How, then, came the sad Penelope thus to deck
herself? It was not her own thought: it was the suggestion of a deity,
and if Venus had been recognised by Homer as an established object of
worship in Greece, Venus would most properly have made the suggestion:
for she, says Achilles, is supreme in beauty, as Minerva is in industry
and skill[471]. But it is Minerva who instils this suggestion into
the mind of Penelope; though in a form which conveys no taint to her
mind[472]. She goes, however, beyond this: for she sends Penelope to
sleep, and then, to enhance her beauty, applies to her face a wash,
of the kind that Venus herself uses when she goes among the Graces.
Yet this is not procured from Venus, as Juno in the Iliad procures the
_cestus_ from her on Mount Olympus; nor is her agency or aid in any
manner employed. Thus she is not allowed, as it were, to have to do
in any manner with Penelope; a clear indication, I think, that though
known, she was not yet worshipped in Greece proper.
[469] Od. xvii. 37. xix. 54.
[470] Il. xxiv. 699. I think the case of Hermione (Od. iv. 14.) is an
exception.
[471] Il. ix. 389.
[472] Od. xviii. 158-68.
She appears, indeed, in the legend of the daughters of Pandareus[473]:
but the scene of this legend is not stated by Homer to be in Greece,
and by general tradition it is placed in Crete or in Asia Minor.
[473] Od. xix. 67, 73.
Again, the predicaments in which she is exhibited in the poems are
of a kind hardly reconcilable with the supposition, that she was an
acknowledged Greek deity at the time. In the lay of Demodocus, the Poet
seems to intend to make the guilty pair ridiculous, from his sending
them off, when released, so rapidly and in silence. It is true that
he exhibits to us in the Iliad the sensual passion of Jupiter: but he
has wreathed the passage where it is described in imagery, both of
wonderful beauty, and rather more elaborate than is his wont[474].
But whatever may be thought of the Eighth Odyssey, the Fifth and
Twenty-first Iliad seem, so far as Venus is concerned, only to permit
one construction. In the former, she is, after being wounded, both
menaced and ridiculed by Diomed[475]. In the latter, for no other
offence than leading the battered Mars off the field, she is followed
by Minerva, and struck to the ground by a blow upon the breast. As
in the case of Mars, so and more decidedly in the case of Venus, it
appears as if the ignominious treatment in the Theomachy was difficult,
and the wounding and treatment by Diomed quite impossible, to reconcile
with the idea that it could have been devised by a Poet, and recited
to audiences, for whom the personages so handled formed a part of the
established objects of religious veneration. Even Helen is permitted
to taunt her bitterly: to recommend her becoming the wife, or even the
slave, of Paris, and her ceasing to make pretensions to play the part
of a deity:
[474] Il. xiv. 346-51.
[475] Il. v. 335, 348.
ἧσο παρ’ αὐτὸν ἰοῦσα, θεῶν δ’ ἀπόεικε κελεύθου[476].
[476] Il. iii. 406.
~_Her advance from the East._~
In entire harmony with these suppositions is, first, the side taken
by her in the war; and secondly, the geographical indications of her
worship. It appears to have moved from the East along that double
line, by which we have found it probable that the Pelasgians flowed
into Europe: one the way of the islands at the base of the Ægean, the
other by the Hellespont. We know, from other sources, that the East
engendered at a very early date creations of this kind. Under the names
of Astarte, Mylitta, Mitra, and the like, we seem to encounter so many
separate forms or versions of the Greek Venus. We may indeed observe
that Astarte was commonly associated with the Moon, and it would be a
matter of interest to know the original relation between the popular
or promiscuous Venus (πάνδημος), and the celestial one. In Homer we
find them completely severed: we perceive Artemis with many traces of
the older, and Aphrodite fully representing the more recent and carnal
conception. There still remains one sign of correspondence; it is the
standing epithet of χρυσέη for Aphrodite, compared with the cluster
of golden epithets[477] applied to Diana. We may not unreasonably, I
think, take Artemis as the probable prototype; and Aphrodite as the
sensual image, into which the old and pure conception had already
degenerated, before the time when the two fell, as poetic material,
each for its own purpose, into the moulding hand of Homer. While such a
source is every way probable, our reference to it is the more natural,
because it is not very easy to attribute to the Greeks of the heroic
age the original conception of such a divinity as Venus. For though
they were of social and therefore somewhat jovial habits, and though
they were a race of ready hand, given to crimes of violence, yet they
were not, on the whole, by any means a sensual race, in relation to the
standard which seems to have governed the Asiatic nations, whether we
estimate these latter the Trojans, the Assyrians, or the Jews.
[477] Sup. sect. ii. p. 146.
The marriage with Vulcan, and the relation to a mother Dione, invented
apparently for the purpose of maternity, are marks of recency. If I
have rightly referred Vulcan to the Phœnician order, this marriage may
be an indication that Venus likewise had a place in it: and again,
considering her station in Troas, it seems not impossible that the
worship of Vulcan may have been introduced there the more readily,
because of his being reputed to be her husband.
Like Maias the mother of Mercury, Dione, the mother of Venus, is
excluded from the list of Jupiter’s amorous or matrimonial connections
in the Fourteenth Iliad (312-28). This leads to the conclusion, either
that the tradition respecting her was known only as a foreign one, or
else that it was recent, slight, and as yet unauthenticated in popular
belief. In either view it coincides with the other indications as to
Venus.
~_Her rank and personal character._~
The primary function of Venus, apart from Asia, appears to lie among
the Olympian deities. That she was, as a member of that family,
in actual exercise of her prerogatives, we see plainly from the
application made by Juno to her in order to obtain the grace and
attractiveness, by which she hoped to act upon the mind of Jupiter. As
a mythological conception, she exhibits to us on the page of Homer the
union of the most finished material beauty with strong sensuality, and
the entire absence of all traces of the ethical element. She represents
two things, form and passion; the former refined, the latter not so. In
her character, as conceived by Homer, we see how that which is divine,
when it has ceased to be divine, becomes, not human, but something
much worse and baser: as he that falls from a height cannot stop
half-way down the precipice at his will, but must reach the ground.
Even feminine tenderness does not cling to the character of Venus. She
is effeminate, indeed, for when wounded she lets her son Æneas fall:
but gentle she is not, for in the scene of the Third Iliad with Helen
her conduct is harsh even to brutality, and she drives the reluctant
princess into sensuality only by the cruel threat of violence and
death[478].
[478] Il. iii. 414-7.
In Venus we see the power of an Immortal reduced to its minimum. Even
the faculty of self-transformation seems to have been in her case but
imperfectly exercised[479]. She does not pretend to give strength or
courage to her son Æneas, but is represented simply as carrying him off
in her arms. It is here worthy of remark, that she has not even the
ability, like the greater deities, to envelop him in cloud: she has
no command over nature, only over the corrupt and rebellious impulses
of man: she has power to carry Æneas away, but he is folded in her
mantle[480]. In fact, her privileges in general appear to be like those
of the inferior orders of deity, held and used for her own enjoyment;
but they do not carry the power of acting upon man or nature, except
in a particular and prescribed function. Her capacity of locomotion
is limited in a peculiar degree. Mars, though no great deity, went,
when wounded, up to heaven on the clouds. But Venus required to borrow
the disengaged chariot of Mars for the purpose, when in the same
predicament[481].
[479] Il. iii. 396.
[480] Il. v. 311-18.
[481] Il. v. 355-64. 363.
It is no wonder that the ancient, probably the earliest Greek, account
of her origin which is given by Hesiod[482], should mark her as of
entirely animal extraction.
[482] Theog. 188-98.
Another peculiarity in the case of Venus is, that she already takes
her name, and not only receives mere epithets, from two particular
spots where she is worshipped. Cyprus makes her Κύπρις in the Iliad,
and from Cythera she is also Cytherea in the Odyssey. She thus stands
distinct from Juno: to whom the Argeian name is simply an appendage,
though one of a most characteristic force, and one involving important
inferences as to her origin. Nor is she less distinct from Minerva,
whose name is not derivative in form when she is called Ἀθήνη, and whom
we must consider as the eponymist of Athens, and not its namesake. No
indication could be of greater force, than this marked localism, in
stamping the ideas about Venus as purely human in their origin.
~_Venus unable to confer beauty._~
It would be an error to consider the Venus of Homer as even the goddess
of beauty. She was endowed with it personally, and she possessed the
_cestus_ of fascination and desire: but she had no capacity to make
mortals beautiful, such as Minerva exercised upon Penelope and Ulysses,
and Juno upon the virgin daughters of Pandareus. She is there passed
by in such a manner as to make it plain that she did not possess any
power of imparting this gift. Her δῶρα, in Il. iii. 65, do not appear
to include it; or Paris would not say, ‘no one would spontaneously seek
them.’ For beauty of person was among the recognised and highly valued
gifts of heaven[483].
[483] Od. viii. 167-77.
We are told, in the Twentieth Odyssey, that Venus fed the orphan girls
of Pandareus with cheese, honey, and wine; and, continues the passage,
Juno gave them extraordinary beauty and prudence, Diana lofty stature,
Minerva industrial skill. Afterwards, they being thus equipped, Venus
went up to Olympus to pray Jupiter that he would make arrangements for
their marriage[484]. Thus her operations in a work of good are wholly
ministerial and inferior: and not only does she not confer beauty
herself, but she sees it conferred by Juno. This again shows that the
Venus of Homer, except for evil, has no power to work upon the body or
mind of man.
[484] Od. xx. 66-75.
But we must not omit to mark that sign of the real chastity of Homer’s
mind which he has given us by his method of handling the character of
Venus; a deity whom the nature of his subject in the Iliad would have
led almost any other heathen, and many Christian, poets to magnify.
In not a single instance does Homer exhibit this divinity to us in an
amiable or engaging light, or invest her with the attractions of power,
glory, and success.
When Minerva advises Diomed in the Fifth Iliad[485], she says, Do _not_
attack any of the immortals; but if you happen to see Venus, her you
may wound. We seem to have a clear indication, that Homer introduced
this passage simply in order to throw contempt on Venus; because
afterwards, when Mars is in the field, and Diomed pleads the inhibition
he had received as a reason for his inaction, Minerva at once removes
it, and bids the warrior assail that god without scruple[486].
[485] Il. v. 131. cf. 330.
[486] Il. v. 818, 27.
Again, when Diomed wounds Mars, it is because Minerva invisibly directs
and impels his lance[487]: but he wounds Venus without any aid. In the
Theomachy, she appears upon the list of deities enumerated as taking
the Greek and Trojan side respectively; but when the Poet comes to
match the others for fight, she disappears from his mind; as though it
would have been an insult to any other member of the Olympian family to
be pitted against her effeminacy. Accordingly, no antagonist is named
for her.
[487] Il. v. 856.
She is sometimes made contemptible, as in the foregoing instances. She
is at other times silly and childish, as under the bitter taunt of
Minerva and the admonition of Jupiter[488], and again, when she falls
into the trap cunningly laid by Juno[489]. Odious in the interview with
Helen in the Third Book, she is never better than neutral, and never
once so handled by the Poet as to attract our sympathies.
[488] Il. v. 421-30.
[489] Il. xiv. 190-224.
~_Never made attractive in Homer._~
Again, there is not, throughout the Odyssey or Iliad, a single
description of the beauty of Venus, such as Homer has given us of the
dress of Juno, or the arms of Minerva. It is never, either directly or
indirectly, set off for the purpose of creating interest and favour.
One exception may perhaps be alleged: but, if it is such, at least it
affords the most marked illustration of the rule. Once he does praise
the exceeding beauteous neck, the lovely breast, the sparkling eyes of
Venus; but it is when he has clothed her in the withered form of the
aged spinstress that had attended upon Helen from Sparta, and through
whose uninviting exterior such glimpses of the latent shape of Venus
are caught by Helen as to enable her, but no one else, to recognise the
deity.
How different is this from the case of Virgil, who has introduced a
most beautiful and winning description of her in the Second Æneid[490],
just when he brings her into action that she may acquit both Helen
and Paris of all responsibility for the fall of Troy. It would have
been not only natural for Homer, but, unless he was restrained by some
strong reason, we may almost say it would have been inevitable, that he
should have done for Venus what has been done in our own day, with very
high classical effect, by Tennyson in his Œnone:
[490] Æn. ii. 589-93.
Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,
Fresh as the foam, new bathed in Paphian wells,
With rosy slender fingers backward drew
From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair
Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat
And shoulder: from the violets her light foot
Shone rosy-white, and o’er her rounded form
Between the shadows of the vine-branches
Floated the glowing sun-light as she moved.
Upon the whole, I should confidently cite the treatment of Venus in the
poems as being among the most satisfactory indications of the state of
heroic Greece, and one of the most honourable tokens of the disposition
of her Poet.
_Vulcan._
~_The Vulcan of Homer._~
Besides Juno and Bacchus, Hephæstus or Vulcan is the only Homeric
deity who bears upon him this unequivocal, or at least significant,
mark of novelty, that we are supplied with a distinct tradition of his
childhood[491]. In his youth he was rickety and lame. His mother Juno
wished to conceal him, and she let him fall into the sea. Here Thetis
and Eurynome received him, and reared him in a submarine cave, not,
however, under the Mediterranean, but the Ocean; and in that cave for
nine years the boy-smith employed himself in making ornaments for women.
[491] Od. viii. 311: and Il. xviii. 395.
He is thus associated by his traditions with the two opposing elements
of water and fire; with water by the history of his childhood, and
with fire as the grand instrument and condition of his art. The latter
was by much the stronger association, for it was continually fed by
the history and progress of the art itself; so that he became the
impersonation of that element itself, and in the phrase φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο
it is his name which gives the distinctive force; for φλὸξ in Homer
seems to mean the flame or light of fire[492], and is not used to
signify fire proper, except with some other word in conjunction to it
or near it. But the explanation of the seeming contrariety is probably
to be found in the hypothesis, that his worship was of Phœnician
introduction; as the Phœnicians seem to have made the Greeks acquainted
with the use of fire in working metals. If they made the deity known
to the Greeks, this will account for his association with the idea of
fire: and as accounts and traditions, which they had supplied, were
evidently the source of all the more remote maritime delineations of
Homer, (since they alone frequented Ocean and the distant seas,) this
is the natural and easy explanation for the tradition of his childish
arts in the oceanic cave. That he is thus, like the Phœnicians, for
Homer, the meeting point of fire and water, appears clearly to stamp
him as Phœnician or oriental in his origin, relatively to Greece.
[492] Thus, in Il. xviii. 206, it means that blaze without heat, as
from shining armour, with which Minerva invested Achilles when he went
forth unarmed. The name Ἥφαιστος also stands alone for fire in Il. ii.
426.
Accordingly, true to the association between Phœnician and Hellenic
elements, he is one of the five Hellenizing deities in the Trojan war;
in which, as the element of fire, he opposes and subdues the river
Xanthus. He was not, however, unknown to the Trojans; for Dares, his
priest, had two sons in their army. His introduction to Troas may have
been due to his conjugal connection with Venus; or it may have been
due to the neighbourhood of Lemnos, the island on which, when hurled
from Olympus by Jupiter, he fell, and which thenceforward formed his
favourite earthly habitation. With Lemnos and other isles Troy was in
communication, at least from the time of Laomedon, for that prince
threatened to seize Apollo and to sell him, νήσων ἔπι τηλεδαπάων[493].
A regular commerce was established between Lemnos and the camp during
the Trojan war[494].
[493] Il. xxi. 453.
[494] Il. vii. 467.
Among the deities of Vulcan’s generation we find but one married
couple, and they are a strangely assorted pair, Vulcan himself and
Venus. Neither character nor occupation will account for this singular
union: on the contrary, there is no case in which the extremes of
repugnance must so decidedly be supposed. It is questionable whether
the hypothesis, that Venus represents the beauty which gives perfection
to works of art, is in entire keeping with the tone of the Homeric
system. Indeed Venus with Homer represents absolutely nothing, except
sensual passion in a fine exterior form which can hardly be severed
from it. One explanation, and one only, may suggest itself as more
natural. It is this: that the worship of Vulcan and that of Venus
came in, not distinctly connected with those of any other deity, at
about the same time, and from the same quarter. We have already seen
upon Venus those marks of comparative modernism, and of an eastern
extraction, which we now find in Vulcan; and here probably is to be
found, either wholly or in part, the actuating suggestion of their
ill-starred wedlock.
Though we find the works of Vulcan scattered promiscuously abroad,
there is no notice of his worship, or of any site or endowment
belonging to him in the Greece of Homer. He was available to the Poet
for embellishment, but he probably had not become for the Greek nation
a regular object of adoration.
I think we may trace the tokens of his eastern origin in the legend of
his infancy. It was into the sea that he was thrown: but, as we have
seen, the cave in which he was reared was a cave of Ocean[495].
[495] Il. xviii. 402.
περὶ δὲ ῥόος Ὠκεανοῖο
ἀφρῷ μορμύρων ῥέεν ἄσπετος·
Also, by a rather singular arrangement, there are two deities, not one
only, employed in taking him up and watching over his childhood. Nor
are the two naturally associated together: for Thetis is a daughter of
Nereus, and belongs to the Thalassian family; Eurynome is a child of
Ocean. The connection with Thetis and the sea is appropriate enough in
the case of any child of Juno, for the wife of Peleus, as his nurse,
seems to give him an Hellenic character: but it seems hard to explain
the appointment of a colleague belonging to the race of Ocean, and for
the situation of the cave in its bed, except as having been due to the
eastern origin of the divinity, of which the mark had not yet been
effaced.
~_His marriage with Venus._~
The marriage of Venus and Vulcan, metaphysically interpreted,
represents the union of strength and skill in the production of works
of art: but though this may have been a Greek application of eastern
traditions originally independent, there is no distinct trace of it in
Homer; while it may seem strange that, if the Poet had had such an idea
before his mind, his only picture of their conjugal relation should
have been the one given in the Eighth Odyssey. Still, he may have had
that idea.
Vulcan’s other wife, Charis, represents an exactly similar conception;
and here there is a more obvious probability that the combination was
Greek, and was one intended, or even devised, by Homer.
It is common to treat the handling of this subject in the Iliad as in
contradiction with that of the Odyssey; and to use the assumption of
discrepancy either in support of the doctrine of the Chorizontes, or in
proof that the Olympian lay of Demodocus is spurious.