Adonis

Mythology

Birth

While Sappho does not describe the myth of Adonis, later sources flesh out the details. According to the retelling of the story found in the poem Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – AD 17/18), Adonis was the son of Myrrha, who was cursed by Aphrodite with insatiable lust for her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus, after Myrrha's mother Cenchreis bragged that her daughter was more beautiful than the goddess. It was to her nurse that, with much reluctance, Myrrha revealed her shameful passion. Sometime later, during a festival in honour of Demeter, the nurse found Cinyras half-passed out with wine and Myrrha's mother nowhere near him. Thus, she spoke to him of a girl who truly loved him and desired to sleep with him, giving her a fictitious name and simply describing her as Myrrha's age. Cinyras agreed, and the nurse was quick to bring Myrrha to him. Myrrha left her father's room impregnated. After several couplings, Cinyras discovered his lover's identity and drew his sword to kill her; driven out after becoming pregnant, Myrrha was changed into a myrrh tree but still gave birth to Adonis. According to classicist William F. Hansen, the story of how Adonis was conceived falls in line with the conventional ideas about sex and gender that were prevalent in the classical world, since the Greeks and Romans believed that women, such as Adonis's mother Myrrha, were less capable of controlling their primal wants and passions than men.

Aphrodite and Persephone

Aphrodite found the baby, and took him to the underworld to be fostered by Persephone. She returned for him once he was grown and discovered him to be strikingly handsome. However, Persephone too found Adonis to be exceedingly handsome and wanted to keep Adonis for she too fell in love with him; Zeus settled the dispute by decreeing that Adonis would spend one third of the year with Aphrodite, one third with Persephone, and one third with whomever he chose. Adonis chose Aphrodite, and they remained constantly together. Another version states that both goddesses got to keep him for half the year each at the suggestion of the Muse Calliope. Thus was Adonis's life divided between Aphrodite and Persephone, one goddess who loved him beneath the earth, the other above it. In his comical work Dialogues of the Gods, the satirical author Lucian features Aphrodite in several dialogues, in one of which she complains to the moon goddess Selene that Eros made Persephone fall in love with Adonis and now she has to share him with her.

Death

Then, one day, while Adonis was out hunting, he was wounded by a wild boar and bled to death in Aphrodite's arms. In different versions of the story, the boar was either sent by Ares, who was jealous that Aphrodite was spending so much time with Adonis, by Artemis, who wanted revenge against Aphrodite for having killed her devoted follower Hippolytus, or by Apollo, to punish Aphrodite for blinding his son Erymanthus. The story also provides an etiology for Aphrodite's associations with certain flowers. Reportedly, as she mourned Adonis's death, she caused anemones to grow wherever his blood fell, and declared a festival on the anniversary of his death. In one late account, his blood transformed into roses instead.

According to another version of the myth, the Muses became angry with Aphrodite because she caused many of them to fall in love and bear children. In revenge, they sang a beautiful hunting song that excited Adonis and lured him into the hunt, where he was killed by a boar. In a different version, Ares either transformed himself into the boar or attacked and killed Adonis as he charged at it.

In a very different version from the standard, surviving in the works of fifth century AD grammarian Servius and perhaps originating from the island of Cyprus, Adonis was made to fall in love with a mortal girl named Erinoma by Aphrodite herself at the command of Hera. Erinoma, a virgin girl favoured by Artemis and Athena, rejected his advances, so Adonis crept stealthily into her bedroom and raped her. Adonis then fled and went into a cave to hide from Zeus, who also loved Erinoma and would surely avenge the violence done against her. Hermes, however, lured him out with a trick, and Ares wounded him mortally in the form of a boar. Adonis died, but was eventually restored to life after Aphrodite begged Zeus. Erinoma bore him a son named Taleus.

Other loves

Adonis was also said to have been loved by other gods such as Apollo, Heracles and Dionysus. He was described as androgynous, for he acted like a man in his affections for Aphrodite but as a woman for Apollo. "Androgynous" here means that Adonis took on a receptive role during sex with Apollo, which was interpreted in classical Greece to be the feminine position.

Heracles's love of Adonis is mentioned in passing by Ptolemy Hephaestion. The text states that due to his love of Adonis, Aphrodite taught Nessus the centaur the trap to ensnare him.

Another tradition states that Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and madness, carried off Adonis.

Other versions

In Idyll 15 by the early third-century BC Greek bucolic poet Theocritus, Adonis is described as still an adolescent with down on his cheeks at the time of his love affair with Aphrodite, in contrast to Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which he is portrayed as a fully mature man. Pseudo-Apollodorus (Bibliotheke, 3.182) describes Adonis as the son of Cinyras, of Paphos on Cyprus, and Metharme. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus's Bibliotheke, Hesiod, in an unknown work that does not survive, made of him the son of Phoenix and the otherwise unidentified Alphesiboea.

In one version of the story, Aphrodite injured herself on a thorn from a rose bush and the rose, which had previously been white, was stained red by her blood. In another version, an anemone flower grew on the spot where Adonis died, and a red rose where Aphrodite's tears fell. The third-century BC poet Euphorion of Chalcis remarked in his Hyacinth that "Only Cocytus washed the wounds of Adonis". According to Lucian's De Dea Syria, each year during the festival of Adonis, the Adonis River in Lebanon (now known as the Abraham River) ran red with blood.

In post-classical literature culture

The medieval French poet Jean de Meun retells the story of Adonis in his additions to the Roman de la Rose, written around 1275. De Muen moralises the story, using it as an example of how men should heed the warnings of the women they love. In Pierre de Ronsard's poem "Adonis" (1563), Venus laments that Adonis did not heed her warning, but ultimately blames herself for his death, declaring, "In need my counsel failed you." In the same poem, however, Venus quickly finds another shepherd as her lover, representing the widespread medieval belief in the fickleness and mutability of women.

The story of Venus and Adonis from Ovid's Metamorphoses was tremendously influential during the Elizabethan era. In Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590), tapestries depicting the story of Adonis decorate the walls of Castle Joyous. Later in the poem, Venus takes the character Amoretta to raise her in the "Garden of Adonis". Ovid's portrayal of Venus's desperate love for Adonis became the inspiration for many literary portrayals in Elizabethan literature of both male and female courtship.

William Shakespeare's erotic narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593), a retelling of the courtship of Aphrodite and Adonis from Ovid's Metamorphoses, was the most popular of all his works published within his own lifetime. Six editions of it were published before Shakespeare's death (more than any of his other works) and it enjoyed particularly strong popularity among young adults. In 1605, Richard Barnfield lauded it, declaring that the poem had placed Shakespeare's name "in fames immortall Booke". Despite this, the poem has received a mixed reception from modern critics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defended it, but Samuel Butler complained that it bored him, and C. S. Lewis described an attempted reading of it as "suffocating".

The story of Adonis was the inspiration for the Italian poet Giambattista Marino to write his mythological epic L'Adone (1623), which outsold Shakespeare's First Folio. Shakespeare's homoerotic descriptions of Adonis's masculine and Venus's beauty inspired the French novelist and playwright Rachilde (Marguerite Vallette-Eymery) to write her erotic novel Monsieur Vénus (1884), about a noblewoman named Raoule de Vénérande who sexually pursues a young, effeminate man named Jacques who works in a flower shop. Jacques is ultimately shot and killed in a duel, thus following the model of Adonis's tragic death.

As a dying and rising god

The late nineteenth-century Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer wrote extensively about Adonis in his monumental study of comparative religion, The Golden Bough (the first edition of which was published in 1890) as well as in later works. Frazer claimed that Adonis was just one example of the archetype of a "dying-and-rising god" found throughout all cultures. In the mid-twentieth century, some scholars began to criticise the designation of "dying-and-rising god", in some cases arguing that deities like Adonis, previously referred to as "dying and rising", would be better termed separately as "dying gods" and "disappearing gods", asserting that gods who "died" did not return, and those who returned never "really" died.

Biblical scholars Eddy and Boyd (2007) applied this rationale to Adonis based on the fact that his portion of the year spent in the Underworld with Persephone is not really a death and resurrection, but merely an instance of a living person staying in the Underworld. They further argued that Adonis is not explicitly described as rising from the dead in any extant Classical Greek writings, though the fact that such a belief existed is attested by authors in Late Antiquity. For example, Origen discusses Adonis, whom he associates with Tammuz, in his Selecta in Ezechielem ( "Comments on Ezekiel"), noting that "they say that for a long time certain rites of initiation are conducted: first, that they weep for him, since he has died; second, that they rejoice for him because he has risen from the dead (apo nekrôn anastanti)" (cf. J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, 13:800).

Some other scholars have continued to cite Adonis/Tammuz as an example of a dying and rising god, suggesting that the descent into and return from the underworld is a functional analogue for death even if no physical cause of death is depicted.