Aphrodite Literature Quotes

I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.

The influence of Greek art and literature became so powerful in Rome that ancient Roman deities were changed to resemble the corresponding Greek gods, and were considered to be the same. Most of them, however, in Rome had Roman names. These were Jupiter (Zeus), Juno (Hera), Neptune (Poseidon), Vesta (Hestia), Mars (Ares), Minerva (Athena), Venus (Aphrodite), Mercury (Hermes), Diana (Artemis), Vulcan or Mulciber (Hephaestus), Ceres (Demeter).

We dare not be original; our American Pine must be cut to the trim pattern of the English Yew, though the Pine bleed at every clip. This poet tunes his lyre at the harp of Goethe, Milton, Pope, or Tennyson. His songs might better be sung on the Rhine than the Kennebec. They are not American in form or feeling; they have not the breath of our air; the smell of our ground is not in them. Hence our poet seems cold and poor. He loves the old mythology; talks about Pluto—the Greek devil,—— the Fates and Furies—witches of old time in Greece,—-but would blush to use our mythology, or breathe the name in verse of our Devil, or our own Witches, lest he should be thought to believe what he wrote. The mother and sisters, who with many a pinch and pain sent the hopeful boyto college, must turn over the Classical Dictionary before they can find out what the youth would be at in his rhymes. Our Poet is not deep enough to see that Aphrodite came from the ordinary waters, that Homer only hitched into rhythm and furnished the accomplishment of verse to street talk, nursery tales, and old men’s gossip, in the Ionian towns; he thinks what is common is unclean. So he sings of Corinth and Athens, which he never saw, but has not a word to say of Boston, and Fall River, and Baltimore, and New York, which are just as meet for song. He raves of Thermopylae and Marathon, with never a word for Lexington and Bunkerhill, for Cowpens, and Lundy’s Lane, and Bemis’s Heights. He loves to tell of the Ilyssus, of “ smooth sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,” yet sings not of the Petapsco, the Susquehannah, the Aroostook, and the Willimantick. He prates of the narcissus, and the daisy, never of American dandelions andbue-eyed grass; he dwells on the lark and the nightingale, but has not a thought for the brown thrasher and the bobolink, who every morning in June rain down such showers of melody on his affected head. What a lesson Burns teaches us addressing his “rough bur thistle,” his daisy, “wee crimson tippit thing,” and finding marvellous poetry in the mouse whose nest his plough turned over! Nay, how beautifully has even our sweet Poet sung of our own Green river, our waterfowl,of the blue and fringed gentian, the glory of autumnal days.

Paul follows precisely the same strategy in dealing with the problem of eating food sacrificed to idols. Meat was a precious and rare commodity in an ancient city. Most people could not afford to buy it in the market. The main time they would eat meat would be at a sacrificial festival provided either by the city or more often by a wealthy individual who paid for the festival and its expenses out of his own pocket in return for the honor he and his family would then gain. The sacrifices would be made, some of the materials would be burned for the god, some would be given to the priests or other officials of the cult, and then the rest would be distributed to the people for their own feasting with their families and friends. But of course, any participation in these activities was precisely what Jews and early Christians considered idolatry. The poor Christians at Corinth would have had to attend a sacrificial setting in order to eat meat, and it would have been meat that had been sacrificed to a deity. The more “superstitious” Christians, no doubt, probably believed that the god, perhaps in the form of a “demon,” could have “possessed” the meat, and that by eating it, they could endanger themselves with demonic possession. They did believe, in at least some contexts and in some sense, that when they ate the “body and blood” of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, they were ingesting Christ himself. Why wouldn’t a similar process take place if they ate the sacrificial foods of Apollo or Aphrodite, two of the most important and powerful gods of Corinth? Even meat sold in a marketplace likely would have come from some kind of sacrificial practice. The officials or priests who were given portions of the sacrificed animal—often choice portions—had the liberty of making a bit of money by selling their portions to a butcher, who would then process the meat and resell it to people. In other words, unless one were rich enough to buy an animal and have it butchered and prepared, one could scarcely avoid eating meat that had been part of a sacrifice. The poor could hardly do so if they ate meat at all.