Download Copyright of Australia Copyright Act 1968

Copyright of Australia Copyright Act 1968 The female Olympians
Chris Mackie The FeMale Olympians
The older generation
The younger generation
• 
• 
• 
• 
•  Athena
•  Artemis
Aphrodite
Hera
Hestia
Demeter (with her
daughter Persephone)
Chris Mackie The Olympian Family TRee
IMAGE: http://www.buzzle.com/images/zeus-family-tree.jpg Chris Mackie Aphrodite (Venus)
Birth of Aphrodite from the sea,
Ludovisi Throne, Southern Italy?,
c. 470-460 BCE.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/
thumb/8/83/
Ludovisi_throne_Altemps_Inv8570.jpg/320pxLudovisi_throne_Altemps_Inv8570.jpg
•  Older than Zeus and the others
by 2 generations
•  Birth from the genitalia of the
sky god conveys her power and
her aged authority
•  Goddess of the sexual lives of
women outside of marriage
(including prostitutes)
•  The role of women in Greek
society is fundamentally linked
to their availability in a sexual
sense
Chris Mackie Aphrodite
The Judgement of Paris: From left, Hera,
Athena, Aphrodite (with Eros), Hermes, Paris.
Attic Red Figure Kylix , ca 440 BCE.
•  Aphrodite has a fundamental
opposition to Hera and
Athena (goddesses of
marriage and virginity, see
the Judgement of Paris)
•  Sexual liaison with Ares, the
brother of her husband
Hephaestus (Odyssey 8).
They are both humiliated in
both Homeric poems
(compare Iliad 5)
http://www.theoi.com/image/K4.5Hera.jpg
Chris Mackie Aphrodite
•  Greek society is very patriarchal, and so Aphrodite
represents something that is confronting and dangerous.
•  On one reading the Trojan war is the consequence of
Aphrodite’s role in destroying the marriage of Menelaus
and Helen (Judgement of Paris)
•  Homer gives a different genealogy from Hesiod. In the
Iliad Aphrodite is daughter of Zeus and Dione (the name
Dione suggests a kind of female Zeus). Homer is very
forceful in his adaptations of myth when he wants to do
so
Chris Mackie Aphrodite
•  There is a work called the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite in
which Aphrodite seduces Anchises, a royal shepherd on
Mount Ida, near Troy.
•  The result of this is that Aphrodite gets pregnant and
ultimately gives birth to Aeneas, the Trojan hero (who
features fairly prominently in the Iliad)
•  This is meant to be punishment for Aphrodite for her part
in ‘infecting’ gods with love, including Zeus
•  Aeneas survives the Trojan war, and in the Roman
tradition, he guides the Trojans to Italy where they
ultimately found the city of Rome
Chris Mackie Aphrodite
•  So by this extended myth, the Romans can
claim to be linked to the Troy of Homer.
Everybody in antiquity wants a bit of Homer and
Troy.
•  Julius Caesar even claimed to have Venus
(Aphrodite) as his original ancestor (which in
turn links him to Zeus)
•  A half brother to Aeneas is Eros/Cupid
Chris Mackie Hera (Juno)
Hera, tricked into suckling the
infant Herakles. Apulian Red Figure
Lekythos Attributed to the Suckling
Painter, ca 360 - 350 BCE.
http://www.theoi.com/image/K4.11Hera.jpg
•  Wife and sister of Zeus
•  Swallowed by Cronos with her
brothers and sisters (except
Zeus)
•  Zeus’s ‘main wife’
•  Goddess of marriage and the
lives of women within it.
•  In the tradition of very powerful
fertility goddesses like Gaia
and Rhea
•  Often the ‘nagging wife’ (Iliad)
Chris Mackie Hera
•  Zeus is a philanderer who chases most females
whom he sees for sex. As the sky god, Zeus
usually impregnates these women (or
goddesses). At the psychological level this
makes live very difficult for Hera
•  She often responds by persecuting the girl or
even the child of the ‘marriage’ (such as
Heracles, whose name means ‘glory of Hera’)
•  Io is one tragic case of a girl who is turned into a
cow and persecuted for a very long time
Chris Mackie Hera
•  In the Judgement of Paris she offers Paris kingly
power, which he rejects in favour of Helen
•  She has a fierce hatred of Troy, and in the Iliad
she can’t wait for it to be destroyed.
•  This hatred spills over into Roman myth, where,
as Juno, she tries (and fails) to prevent the
Trojans from establishing the new city.
•  She is actually associated with Carthage in
some ways, the great enemy of Rome
Chris Mackie Hestia (Vesta)
•  Sister of Hera and Demeter. Born ‘twice’ with her
brothers and sisters.
•  There is virtually no mythology about her.
•  She is a virgin goddess (cf. Vestal Virgins at Rome)
associated with the hearth of the house.
•  The house is a sacred space in ancient thought
•  Her virginity and the hearth are fundamentally connected
because the hearth contains the phallic force of fire and
is the place where the young girls spend their time (so
says Walter Burkert in Greek Religion)
Chris Mackie Demeter (Ceres)
Persephone and Demeter, Attic
Red Figure (White ground)
Lekythos, ca 450 - 425 BCE.
•  Demeter is born like the others
twice
•  Her name contains the word
‘meter’=‘mother’
•  Very little mythology.
•  Almost entirely associated with
her role as mother to
Persephone, the daughter that
she has by Zeus
http://www.theoi.com/image/K3.2Demeter.jpg
Chris Mackie Demeter and Persephone
The Return of Persephone, by
Frederic Leighton (1891).
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
commons/thumb/f/f5/FredericLeightonTheReturnofPerspephone%281891%29.jpg/
435px-FredericLeightonTheReturnofPerspephone%281891%29.jpg
•  In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
Zeus accedes to a request from
Hades to take Persephone as his
wife
•  As she is plucking a flower the earth
opens and Hades emerges on his
chariot, grabs the girl and takes her
to the Underworld to be his wife
•  Demeter’s menis (wrath, anger)
includes a famine above the earth
•  The gods need mortals
Chris Mackie Demeter
•  Zeus is brought to heel and has to negotiate a
solution. He sends Hermes down to Hades to
bring the girl back.
•  But she has eaten a pomegranite seed which
means that she has to stay part of the year
under the earth with Hades
•  The whole story reveals the power of Demeter
and the other goddesses in Zeus’s violent and
arrogant treatment of his daughter, whom he
effectively abandons
Chris Mackie What is the Demeter hymn saying?
•  It is connected with the cycles of nature and the growing of grain,
the spring and the autumn (‘fall’). There is death in life and life in
death. They are not mutually exclusive or unconnected
•  Establishes the Eleusinian mysteries (a historical religion based at
Eleusis) which seems to have made death less frightening
•  Persephone’s presence makes the Underworld less ‘masculine’ and
less forbidding. There is a new element of the feminine, a new of
compassion.
•  It is also a mythological rite of passage (ie the bride experiences a
violent rupture from the world of women to the world of men). The
rites of passage are usually associated (mythologically) with death
to the previous phase of life. Persephone (literally) ‘marries death’
Chris Mackie Athena (minerva)
Athena is born from the head
of Zeus. Hephaistos (right)
acts as midwife.
Black Figure kylix, 550-520 BCE.
ARTSTOR Slide Library.
•  Zeus decides to eat the pregnant
goddess Metis after learning that she
will bear a child greater than the
father
•  Eating Metis signifies the taking of
wisdom into himself. This
distinguishes his act from (say) the
eating by Cronos of his children.
•  When the time comes Athena is born
from Zeus’s head. What does this
signify?
Chris Mackie Athena
Jason Being Disgorged by
the Dragon Guarding the
Golden Fleece, and Athena.
Attic red figure kylix by
Douris, c.480-470 BCE.
ARTSTOR Digital Library.
•  Virgin goddess, who can,
therefore, move in the male
sphere of warfare as an equal (or
a superior) of Ares. Victory (Nike)
•  War, strategy, heroism. The
‘noble’ side of war. The spear in
the Iliad and Odyssey
•  Connected to heroic triumph (cf.
Achilles in Iliad 22)
•  Cunning intelligence, wisdom
(esp. Odysseus). Hates Ajax.
Chris Mackie Athena
Also the goddess of:
•  Craft and weaving (an idealised female virtue, as with
Penelope and Andromache). Cf Arachne
•  Ships and shipbuilding
•  The controlling force that harnesses the energy of nature
(eg. the bit in the horse’s mouth)
•  Cities (like Athens). Athena is a ‘culture god’.
•  She is actually a god worshipped at Troy, but she helps
in the destruction of the place (Judgement of Paris,
where she offers victory in war as a bribe)
Chris Mackie Athena and Ares (Mars)
Athena
Goddess of the
‘noble’ side of war,
the strategy, the
heroism and
courage, the
victory. A revered
goddess in Homer
Ares
God of the nasty,
brutal side of war,
the blood and the
guts.
Reviled and
humiliated in both
Homeric poems.
Chris Mackie Artemis (Diana)
Artemis draws her bow as Actaeon
is torn apart by his hounds. Attic
Red Figure bell krater, the Pan
Painter, ca 470 BCE.
http://www.theoi.com/image/K6.1BArtemis.jpg
•  Daughter of Leto and Zeus.
The twin of Apollo. She is born
first and then helps with her
brother’s birth as midwife
•  Virgin goddess
•  Associated with girls at the
age of puberty and the
transition rites into womnhood
•  Archer and huntress (Actaeon)
•  Supporter of Troy, but not
much use in battle (Iliad)
Chris Mackie ARtemis
•  Artemis doesn’t have a
particularly extensive
mythology
•  She often works in tandem
with her brother, including
the killing of the children of
Niobe who boasted that was
a better mother than Leto
Apollo and Artemis slay the children of
Niobe. Cw. Homer, Iliad 24.602-617.
Attic Red Figure calyx Krater, Niobid
Painter, c. 475 - 425 BCE.
http://www.theoi.com/image/K5.4Apollon.jpg
Chris Mackie Conclusions
•  Aphrodite is two generations older than Hera, Demeter
and Hestia, who are in turn older than Athena and
Artemis
•  Aphrodite has her ‘wings clipped’ in the Greek sources
because of the threat that she represents to patriarchal
order.
•  Notice the part that the sexual lives of divinities play
(virginity, married sexual life, promiscuity)
•  This is linked to their spatial roles (the bedroom, the
weaving room, the woods, the fields etc.)
Chris Mackie