Some such process of narrowing of functions has, we may suspect, gone on in the shaping of the figure of Aphrodite. It would be rash to assert that she was primarily an earth-goddess, but certain traits in her cult and character show clearly that she had analogies with the ‘Lady of the Wild Things.’ Fertile animals belong to her, especially the dove and the goat, the dove probably from very early days. In the Mycenaean shrine recently discovered by Mr Arthur Evans, one of the figures of goddesses, a quaint early figure with cylindrical body and upraised hands, bears on her head a dove. Such a figure, dating more than a thousand years B.C., may be the prototype of Aphrodite. About the cylindrical bodies of other similar figures snakes are coiled, as though to mark an earth-goddess. In those early days differentiation was not sharply marked, and as yet we dare not give to these early divinities Olympian names. [Illustration: FIG. 87.] At Pompeii the excavations have recently brought to light the charming relief in fig. 87[803], a relief which from its style must date about the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. A goddess is seated Demeter-like upon the ground, and holds her sceptre as Queen. Worshippers approach, man and wife and children. The offerings they bring, a sheep and a dove, mark the goddess as Aphrodite. * * * * * The myth of her birth from the sea—a myth which probably took its rise in part from a popular and dubious etymology—seems, at first sight, to sever Aphrodite wholly from the company of the earth-born Korai. And yet, even here, when we come to examine the art-forms of the myth, it is at once manifest that the Sea-birth is but the Anodos adopted and adapted. The design in fig. 88 is from a red-figured hydria[804] now in the museum of the Municipio at Genoa. It dates about the middle of the 5th century B.C. and is, so far as I know, the only instance of the birth of Aphrodite in a vase-painting. In the centre of the picture a goddess, clad only in a chiton, rises up from below, but whether from sea or land the vase-painter is apparently not concerned to express. Had he wished to utter his meaning more precisely nothing would have been easier than to represent the sea by the curved lines that in his day were the conventional indication of waves. But he is silent and I think significantly. The goddess on the vase-painting is received by a slender winged Eros; she uplifts her hands to take the taenia with which he greets her. Eros is here grown to young manhood and his presence at once makes us think of Aphrodite; but we are bound to remember that on the Ashmolean amphora already discussed (fig. 72) it is the Anodos of Pandora, not of Aphrodite, that is greeted by the Love-god with a taenia. Moreover, it must also be remembered that on the Berlin krater (fig. 69) a Love-god greets the rising of an Earth-goddess, be she Ge or Kore or Semele[805]. [Illustration: FIG. 88.]