[470] Il. xxiv. 699. I think the case of Hermione (Od. iv. 14.) is an exception.
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.
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:
ἧσο παρ’ αὐτὸν ἰοῦσα, θεῶν δ’ ἀπόεικε κελεύθου[476].
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.