Primitive Athens as described by ThucydidesHarrison, Jane Ellen
History
Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides
Harrison, Jane Ellen
Athens (Greece) -- Antiquities; Athens (Greece) -- Description and travel
Aphrodite Pandemos was a ‘great and holy goddess,’ giver of increase. She
was no private divinity of the courtesan; the second inscription tells
us that she was worshipped by a married woman, who is her priestess. It
is literature and not ritual that has cast a slur on the title Pandemos;
the state honoured both her and Ourania alike ‘according to ancestral
custom.’ Plato[249] in his beautiful reckless way will have it that
because there are two Loves there are two Goddesses, ‘the elder one
having no mother, who is the Heavenly Aphrodite, the daughter of Ouranos;
to her we give the title Ourania, the younger, who is the daughter of
Zeus and Dione, and her we call “Of-all-the-People,” Pandemos.’
The real truth was that Aphrodite came to the Greeks from the East and
like most Semitic divinities she was not only a duality but a trinity.
When Pausanias[250] was at Thebes he saw the images of this ancient
Oriental trinity and he knew whence they had come. ‘There are wooden
images of Aphrodite at Thebes so ancient that it is said they were
dedicated by Harmonia and that they were made out of the wooden
figure-heads of the ships of Cadmus. One of them is called Heavenly,
another Of-all-the-People, and the third the Turner-Away.’ The threefold
Aphrodite came from the Semitic East bearing three Semitic titles: she
was the Queen of Heaven[251], she was the Lady of all the People, Ourania
and Pandemos, what the third title was which the Greeks translated into
Apostrophia we do not know; as already noted it took slight hold. At
Megalopolis[252] we see how the third title of the trinity faded. There
close to the house where was an image of Ammon made like a Herm and
with the horns of a ram, there—significant conjunction—was a sanctuary
of Aphrodite in ruins, with the front part only left and it had three
images, ‘one named Ourania the other Pandemos, _the third had no
particular name_.’ So it was that the Greeks lost the trinity and kept,
all they needed, the duality.
The Greeks themselves always knew quite well whence came their Heavenly
Aphrodite, she of Paphos, and she of Kythera. Herodotus[253] is
explicit. He is telling how some of the Scythians in their passage
through Palestine from Egypt pillaged the sanctuary of Aphrodite
Ourania at Ascalon. ‘This sanctuary,’ he says, ‘I found on enquiry is
the most ancient of all those that are dedicated to this goddess, for
the sanctuary in Cyprus had its origin from thence, as the Cyprians
themselves say, and that in Kythera was founded by Phenicians who came
from this part of Syria.’ Pausanias[254] says ‘the first to worship
Ourania were the Assyrians, next to them were the dwellers in Paphos of
Cyprus, and the Phenicians of Ascalon in Palestine. And the inhabitants
of Kythera learnt the worship from the Phenicians.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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