I

In order to study the pattern as a whole, I must describe some of the other realizations of it known from early Greek literature. To begin with, it lies behind Helen and Paris in the Iliad .^[14] Aphrodite "snatched" (ex-herpax ') Paris from the battlefield and took him to an enclosed place, his bedroom (3.380-82): the verb is the one used of goddesses carrying off beloved youths.^[15] There he remains, beautiful, compliant, apparently immobile until she returns to him (with Helen). Aphrodite then goes to find Helen, who is so close to Aphrodite that, as Helen herself implies, she and Aphrodite can replace each other in love relationships.^[16] Helen says to Aphrodite, when summoned to the side of Paris: "You go sit by [Paris], leave the way of the gods and no longer tread Olympus with your feet, but always worry over him and guard him until he makes you his wife—or his slave" (3.406-9). In the Odyssey , Kirke and Kalypso enact the pattern with Odysseus.^[17] Kalypso holds Odysseus captive, desiring him for her

[14] Helen was a heroine (i.e., a figure whose grave was worshiped) or a goddess at Sparta: Hdt. 6.61; cf. Od . 4-561-69; Theoc. Id . 18. Calame, Les chœurs 1:334-44; West, "Immortal Helen," and Clader, Helen , argue for her being a goddess,

[15] The plates in Kahil, Les enlèvements , show the increasingly sexualized representation of both Paris and Helen in vase painting in the course of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E .

[16] Cf. Clader, Helen , esp. 58-62, 69-80.

[17] Od . 10.203-574, 5.55-261. The Kirke and Kalypso episodes are generally thought of as duplicates: cf. Od . 9.29-32.

husband, and has offered him immortality. She also mentions two more examples in the course of her protest to Hermes about being forced to let Odysseus go:

You are harsh, you gods, supremely jealous, you who begrudge goddesses' sleeping openly with men, if one would make him her proper consort. Thus when rosy-fingered Eos chose Orion, the lightly living gods resented it, until chaste, golden-throned Artemis killed him, assailing him with her gentle arrows. Thus when Demeter, yielding to her desire, mingled in love with Iasion in a thrice-plowed field, Zeus was not ignorant but killed him, striking him with a flashing thunderbolt.

The Theogony , or rather its pseudo-Hesiodic continuation, offers a list specifically of goddesses who slept with mortal men and of their offspring (965-1020). Included are Demeter and Iasion, Harmonia and Kadmos, Kallirhoe and Chrusaor, Eos and Tithonos, Eos and Kephalos, Aphrodite and Phaethon, Medea and Jason, Psamathe and Aiakos, Thetis and Peleus, Aphrodite and Anchises, Kirke and Odysseus, and Kalypso and Odysseus.^[18] Phaethon, whom Aphrodite carried off to be her immortal temple-keeper, is here the son of Eos and Kephalos.^[19] In the case of Aphrodite and Phaethon, unlike the others, no issue is mentioned. Finally, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells the story of Aphrodite's seduction of Anchises. Aphrodite appears before Anchises' hut, claiming to be a mortal virgin who was snatched by Hermes from the dance and brought to Mount Ida to be Anchises' wife. Persuaded, Anchises takes her to bed on the spot. Afterward, when Anchises learns who it is that he has just slept with, he cowers and begs not to be made impotent: "Don't let me live strengthless among men, but take pity. For not flourishing of life is the man who sleeps with immortal goddesses" (188-90).^[20] In the final conversation between them, Aphrodite reassures him and promises him a son but warns him not to speak of the encounter. To explain why she cannot make him immortal she narrates the story of Eos and Tithonos and, a variation on the pattern, of Zeus and Ganymedes (202-38).^[21] If we range down through the fifth century we find the first attested narration

[18] It is striking that only one of the heroes born to a goddess in this list is central to Greek heroic legend. That is Achilleus, and it has long been noted that Achilleus is a misfit in the Greek genealogical system. Two of the heroes, Aineias and Memnon, are Eastern. Three— Latinos, Agrios, and Geryones—belong to the Far West, and Geryones is more monster than hero. The famous heroes do not come from such unions.

[19] Cf. also Eur. Hipp . 454-56, who mentions Eos's snatching Kephalos.

[20] Cf. Giacomelli [Carson], "Aphrodite and After," for a discussion of the meaning of amenenos , "strengthless."

[21] Ibycus PMG 289 mentioned Tithonos and Ganymedes as young men of great beauty. Tyrtaeus 12.5 (West) referred to Tithonos's supreme beauty.

of Adonis's life in Panyassis's poetry, as Apollodoros records.^[22] The reference runs thus:

Panyasis [sic] says that [Adonis] was a son of Theias, king of Assyria, who had a daughter Smyrna .... [She commits incest with her father, then flees and is changed by the gods into a myrrh tree.] In the tenth month thereafter, the tree having burst, the one called Adonis was born, whom Aphrodite, in secret from the gods, hid in a chest on account of his beauty while he was still an infant and entrusted to Persephone. But when [Persephone] saw him, she refused to give him back. Judgment being in the hands of Zeus, the year was divided into three parts, and [Zeus] ordained that Adonis should remain under his own cognizance for one part of the year, with Persephone for one part, and with Aphrodite for the third part. Adonis assigned to [Aphrodite] his own share also. Later, however, while hunting Adonis was gored by a boar and died. (3.14.4)

While there is no way to know how far the summary draws on Panyassis, it can be argued, on the basis of the coherence of the plot, that the whole summary except the last clause should be attributed to him.^[23] Apollodoros may have borrowed the detail of being gored from the better-known version given above.

The Adonis story stands out among the others because it is associated with a festival, the Adonia. Sappho's lines of lament for the dying Adonis may have been meant as a song for the ritual mourning of Adonia. The festival was kept at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries, and later at Alexandria, as well as elsewhere. The Athenian festival has been reconstructed largely from vase paintings, with help from remarks in Plato and comic writers.^[24] It was celebrated by women, who planted seeds of lettuce, fennel, perhaps wheat and barley in pottery vessels or large shards. Once the seeds had sprouted, the pottery pieces were carried to the roofs of the houses, where the sprouts shriveled in the sun and the women lamented. The pots were thrown into the sea or into streams. At some point in the festival incense was burned, fruit was heaped up in baskets, and women danced to flute and tambourine.^[25]

[22] See, in addition to works cited above, the notes in Frazer's Loeb edition of Apollodorus ad 83-89.

[23] This is the solution of Atallah, Adonis 53. Ribichini, Adonis 133 n. 82, on the other hand, thinks that Panyassis told of Adonis's death after a life of cycling between earth and Hades.

[24] In addition to Atallah, Adonis chaps. 3-6, see Weill, "Adoniazousai," and Servais-Soyez in LIMC under Adonis, nos. 45-49 and cat. 227-28. Ar. Lys . 389-96 and Plato Phdr . 276b are the most informative contemporary literary sources.

[25] At Alexandria, as we learn from Theoc. Id . 15, Queen Arsinoe set up a display of Aphrodite and Adonis stretched out together on a banquet couch surrounded by fruit. A singer told Adonis's story. Then with lamenting the image of Adonis was thrown into the sea. Cf. Gow, ed., Theocritus , esp. 2:262-66. See Weill, 'Adoniazousai" 674, for the possibility that it was celebrated at Argos in the mid-fifth century.

The same mythic pattern of a goddess with a mortal man lies behind Pindar's narrative of Jason and Medea in Pythian 4. as well. Euripides' Hippolytus and Phaethon have links to it. Other examples of the story pattern exist—Kybele and Attis, for instance, Eos and Kleitos, Hylas and the nymphs, the story of Hermaphroditus found in Ovid.^[26] The story of Aktaion and Artemis is a negative inversion of the same pattern: she destroys him after he has seen her in the nude.^[27] Bacchylides 17 has a deflected example: the young Theseus leaps into the sea and comes to the home of his father Poseidon, where he sees his stepmother Amphitrite: "She put around him a shimmering purple robe and set on his curly hair a faultless wreath that guileful Aphrodite had given her once at her wedding, dark with roses" (112-16): then she sends him back to his ship.^[28] A cup by Onesimos shows a youthful Theseus, dressed in a short filmy chiton, standing before Amphitrite. Athena stands between them as if to chaperon Theseus.^[29] It is evident that the pattern was popular and generative.

No recent interpretive approach has considered all these stories together, a procedure that may appear too reminiscent of Frazer's.^[30] But various strategies have been used on individual myths or subsets of this group.^[31]

[26] The narratives of Kybele and Attis are late and divergent, e.g., Ovid Fasti 4.223-44 and Paus. 7.17, although his story was known much earlier: it is indirectly attested by Hdt. 1.34-45. Cf. Vermaseren, The Legend of Atthis , esp. chaps. 3-4. Eos and Kleitos: Od . 15.250-51. Hylas and the nymphs: Theoc. Id . 13: this story too was connected with a ritual, a search for the boy (Ap. Rhod. 1.1354). The figure of Hylas is attested by Hellanikos FGrH 4 F 131. Hermaphroditus: Ovid Met . 4.285-388. Similar is Stesich. PMG 279' (placed among the spuria by Page), which sketches the story of the shepherd Daphnis, loved by a nymph, unfaithful to her, and blinded in consequence. On young men as victims of rape and on the fear of sexuality as feminizing, see Zeitlin's excellent discussion, "Configurations of Rape."

[27] In the earliest extant version, Eur. Batch . 339, Aktaion is punished because he boasted that he was a better hunter than Artemis. But cf. Stesich. PMG 256 (from Paus. 9.2.3), the well-known version, though conflated with one in which Aktaion is killed to prevent his marrying Semele.

[28] See Segal, "Myth," for the scene as an erotic initiation of Theseus.

[29] For the cup (Paris Louvre G104 and Florence Museo Archeologico PD321), see LIMG under Amphitrite no. 75: ARV 318.1 It is dated to ca. 300 B.C.E . Cf. also no. 76, where Athena is not present.

[30] Frazer, Adonis , esp. chaps. 1-3, 9-10, of course, saw in Adonis a paradigmatic case of the vegetation god who yearly dies and is reborn. The pattern is universal, according to his rendition.

[31] Boedeker, Aphrodite's Entry , argues for an Indo-European background for the myths involving Aphrodite, Eos, Kirke, on the grounds that these goddesses are descendants of Eos, who is cognate with the goddess Ushas of the Rig Veda : she distinguishes them from Near Eastern goddesses (chap. 3). Helen as a tree-goddess who withdraws periodically has been claimed for the Indo-Europeans by West, "Immortal Helen." Nagler, "Dread Goddess," using Jungian categories, finds an old pattern of a goddess who lives near the still center of the world and who is maleficent until resisted or overcome, when she becomes a helper, providing information or sending the hero to one who can provide it. Sowa, Traditional Themes , treats the patterns in a Jungian framework (esp. chaps. 2-3.5). Segal, "Homeric Hymn," does a structuralist reading of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and finds that the child Aineias is a mediation of the contradictions between mortal and immortal, city and wild. E Smith, Nursling of Mortality , follows his method but throws the emphasis on the justification for mortality.

Of these, the structuralist approach of Marcel Détienne, with its emphasis on the logic of culturally specific symbolism, has been the most productive; consideration of its results will be my starting point. Détienne argues that Adonis represents the extremes of sensuality and sterility, as expressed by his connection with spices and lettuce. In the Adonia (which he claims was celebrated at Athens only by courtesans and their friends) erotic but unfruitful sexuality is negatively contrasted with marriage and reproduction as they were celebrated in the Thesmophoria, a festival of Demeter. The courtesans, on this interpretation, would be enacting their own marginality.

Détienne's work on the Adonis myth and ritual is stimulating because it has shown the way to ideological interpretation of apparently apolitical myth and ritual complexes. A particular myth or ritual can take on meaning from its contrast with other myths and rituals. Narrative details can be read as codes carrying oppositional meaning.^[32] Others have combined structuralist techniques with a historical perspective. Ribichini, for one, undertaking an interpretation that takes the Near Eastern material into account, proposes that Adonis is the Greek conception of the effeminate, ineffectual Near Eastern man, marked by all that the Greek man considers to be antithetical to himself.^[33] Adonis is a failed hero. The meaning of the Adonis festival for Athenian men is that by not celebrating it they mark their masculine effectiveness.^[34] Ribichini assumes an implicit contrast with the normative Greek male self-image as recorded in the figures of the hero and the citizen.

John Winkler criticizes Détienne from a different perspective: in drawing one message from the myth-ritual complex, Détienne assumes a homogeneous social fabric with the citizen males' point of view as the only source

[32] Piccaluga, "Adonis e i profumi," criticizes Détienne for his handling of the evidence. Lévèque, "Un nouveau décryptage," wishes a more historical approach had been integrated into the analysis.

[33] Ribichini, Adonis 13-20, esp. 17 ff. Adonis is consistently identified as an Easterner, from Assyria, Arabia, Syria, or Cyprus. Hesiodic fr. 139 (Merkelbach-West) says his father was Phoenix ("the Phoenician"). He is therefore a fantasy figure of the "effeminized" other in a geographical as well as bodily sense. Sex-role reversal is typical of figures from the Near East in Greek thought: see Ribichini's list, which includes Paris, 69-70.

[34] Ribichini, Adonis 85-86.

of meaning.^[35] The inattention to the question of "meaning for whom?" is especially culpable because Détienne is not using a strict Lévi-Straussian model of contradictions and mediations but positing a contrast of values: one pole is affirmed, the other rejected. Winkler poses the question of the meaning of the Adonia for the participants , who, as he correctly points out, are not just courtesans. His reading of the juxtaposition of the Adonia with the Thesmophoria is that the women are enacting the differential involvement in sexual union and reproduction between men and themselves:

If any contrast is to be drawn between the respective roles of the sexes in cultivating these natural processes, men must be placed squarely on the side of Adonis, Aphrodite's eager but not long enduring lover. What the gardens with their quickly rising and quickly wilting sprouts symbolize is the marginal or subordinate role that men play in both agriculture (vis-à-vis the earth) and human generation (vis-à-vis wives and mothers).^[36]

In other words, the gardens are a women's joke about male sexuality. What Winkler has done is to shift the oppositional terms from legitimate and illegitimate sexual union (in Détienne's analysis) to male and female implication in sexual union, as described by the women. Out of the complex of terms used by the ritual, different interpreters have singled out different terms as the significant oppositional ones. Ribichini, concentrating more on the mythic assemblage and less on the ritual, finds the controlling opposition to be the one between the Greek male and the Near Eastern man as constructed in Greek popular culture.

Comparison of Détienne's and Ribichini's readings as if from the hegemonic position of a Greek (especially fifth-/fourth-century Athenian) man and Winkler's as if from that of a Greek (fifth-/fourth-century Athenian) woman exposes the dependence of the analysis on the position assumed by the interpreter, that is, on the social position in whose terms the myth is perceived. Détienne and Ribichini unproblematically adopt the position of the hegemonic male as the place from which to determine the meaning of

[35] De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 103-6, likewise criticizes the early forms of narratology, which developed under the stimulus of structuralism: "More often than not, however, those efforts all but reaffirm an integrative and ultimately traditional view of narrativity. Paradoxically, in spite of the methodological shift away from the notion of structure and toward a notion of progress, they end up de-historicizing the subject and thus universalizing the narrative process as such" (105-6).

[36] Winkler, Constraints of Desire 205. In his discussion, Winkler makes use of my interpretation of the myth pattern in Sappho's poetry, which I first put forward in a paper entitled "Sappho and the Enclosing Goddess" at the Berkshire Conference on Women's History in 1981. This paper is a reworked version of that one with different emphases, but its reading of Sappho supports Winkler's very suggestive connection between Sappho's use of the pattern and the women's joking at the Adonia.

the myth and ritual.^[37] Winkler constructs the possibility of a different set of shared views among women as the matrix for attributing meaning. The Adonia may indeed have had separate meanings for the female participants and the citizen male observers. The reading strategy of positionality— awareness that interpretation always comes from a specific social, sexual, and intellectual place—allows the modern interpreter to suggest the gist of other discourses besides the hegemonic one.^[38] It allows the modern interpreter to escape from the view that myths as ideological formulations work their power to shape thought in undifferentiated fashion within a culture.

I will follow Détienne's lead in seeking an ideological dimension to the set of myths I have singled out, while observing the interpretive position from which the ideology is discerned. However, as soon as one examines this set of myths, including the Adonis myth, for significant codes, it becomes clear that in their emphasis on the sexual code of male and female, Détienne and Ribichini have ignored another code, an equally potent (in symbolic terms) hierarchical opposition, that between divine and human. Adonis's lover is a goddess. Furthermore, in these myths as viewed from the position of a hegemonic male, the two codes produce a contradiction, a point at which cultural logic collapses. The pairing of a goddess and a human man poses, within Greek hegemonic discourse, an irreconcilable conflict between the two established hierarchies, the hierarchy of male and female and that of divine and human. In human relations the female is "tamed" by sexual intercourse, and the subordinate position is identified with the female one. But in divinehuman relations the human is subordinate to divine desire. Sexual intimacy between a human male and a goddess is therefore impossible to think in simple terms because the relative status of the two cannot be determined. The relationship must be adjusted somehow to make it conceivable.^[39]

[37] I do not mean to imply that the modern interpreter can align her- or himself fully with an ancient figure or social position. Détienne analyzes the myth and ritual from the modern construction of the place of an adult citizen man. The idea of positionality is a useful reminder that one is working with a modern construction of a "Greek" social construction.

[38] Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism" 428-36, argues the usefulness of an idea of positionality in feminist discussion. It is a valuable interpretive frame in any attempt to move between a work of literature and the society that produced it.

[39] Cf. below, n. 65, on hierarchical sexual relations. The practical effect of the two hierarchies on daily life would seem to be quite different. However, the gods were a conceptual form used to think about power relations. Alkman warns the male members of the audience, "Do not attempt to wed Aphrodite" (1.17 PMG ). The line probably encodes a warning not to seek above one's station, not to seek an enthralling woman as a bride: the thought is cast in terms of divinity and human. Cf. the separation of the two in Pind. Nem . 7.1-7. The problematic of the human place vis-à-vis the divine was real.

In the public discourse of early Greece, where these myths are found, the adjustment is the work of narrative. In each telling of each myth the narrative must resolve the conundrum by adjusting the hierarchies and shaping the outcome of the encounter, or, in other words, by assigning a location to the phallus. Given this need for resolution, observation of static codes is not sufficient to discover the ideological working of these myths: we must follow the movement of the narrative. My second source of inspiration, then, is a sentence of Teresa de Lauretis's. Speaking of film, de Lauretis says "the very work of narrativity is the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire."^[40] I must also observe the effect of narrative positioning in creating ideological harmony in these myths.^[41]

From the point of view of hegemonic culture, the most conservative move is to ensure that the male/female hierarchy ultimately predominates. There are other possible resolutions that also preserve the male/female hierarchy (without elevating it over the divine/human one), as I will point out below. Not all adjustments, however, would reinforce hegemonic values. If the divine/human hierarchy is emphasized at the expense of the male/female one, an autonomous, sexually active female figure, one who controls the phallus, is created. Thus, cultural logic, through this myth pattern, can potentially offer narratives that subvert male dominance. In fact, public narratives from early Greece avoid this outcome. Using the narratives described above I will show how male/female hierarchy is protected.

The Kalypso episode in the Odyssey details the impossible situation that results when neither hierarchy gives way to the other. Odysseus is held captive by Kalypso, who would like to shut Odysseus up forever on her island in a state of emotional and physical dependency. In this condition Odysseus is forced to make love with her: "At night he would lie beside her under compulsion in the hollow cave, an undesiring man beside a desiring [woman]" (5. 154-55). The act that defines him as a "man" also defines him as subordinate, for his sexual activity "under compulsion" is the clear sign of his submission to Kalypso.^[42] Yet his refusing immortality is his refusal to accept definition as her paramour and the subordinate sexual status implied. Kalypso had no intention of accepting his refusal, as her speech to Hermes makes clear (5.118-36, quoted in part above), while Odysseus's "sweet life was flowing away as he mourned for his homecoming, for the nymph no

[40] De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 106.

[41] See Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions , on the use of closure in ideological fiction to emphasize the point being made. Closure functions in the myths I will discuss to establish the definite status of the paradigmatic figures.

[42] The verb used, iauein , does not mean "to make love." It means "to spend the night," but it is used to refer to lovemaking elsewhere in the Odyssey , e.g., 11.261, 22.464.

longer pleased him" (5.152-53). According to Athena, Odysseus wants to die (1.59). This impasse in their relationship and in the narrative is dissolved only by displacing the problem upward.^[43] Zeus exercises his patriarchal dominion and commands Kalypso (via Hermes) to send Odysseus on his way.

Structurally, then, both hierarchies remain in force. Odysseus's status is preserved, though only because Kalypso lets him go. However, the audience's desire for the narrative to continue means that the audience is positioned to identify Odysseus's autonomy, his sexuality, with narrative movement and to wish for it to prevail over hers. His escape can therefore be read as his triumph. Narrative in this case requires male predominance over the immobilizing goddess.^[44]

In the case of Kalypso and Odysseus control of the phallus is contested. Most of the narratives I mentioned resolve the conflict by revising the status of one of the figures. Odysseus's encounter with Kirke points up the contrast. On this occasion Hermes intervenes beforehand to protect Odysseus from Kirke. Not only does Hermes give him the mold that inhibits Kirke's magic: he also instructs him to pull his sword on Kirke. When she asks him to her bed, he is not to refuse, "but ask her to swear a great oath of the gods that she will devise no other evil pain for yourself so that she not make you worthless and unmanned when you are disarmed/naked" (10.299-301; cf. 336-44). By neutralizing Kirke's power, the gods arrange it so that the male/female hierarchy will predominate from the start and Kirke accommodate herself to Odysseus.^[45]

The Theogony continuation elevates the male/female hierarchy by other methods. It chooses, apart from the Aphrodite- and Eos-stories, those stories in which the female has been compelled by another god rather than desiring the young man (Thetis), has been at least partly humanized into a mortal woman (Medea, Harmonia), or is a minor nymph. The unions mentioned, except for Aphrodite and Phaethon, are all fertile. Eos and Tithonos have two sons in the Theogony (whereas none is mentioned in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite ). Odysseus and Kirke have two children, Agrios and

[43] Without the gods' intervention Odysseus's story can neither end nor move forward. The narrative signals the impasse by repeating the description of Odysseus's state: 1.11-15, 48-59; 5.11-17.

[44] See de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 113-24, on the male as subject, the female as obstacle in myth as analyzed by Lotman. In the complementary fashion, Devercux, Femme et mythe 36, citing the myth of Pirithoos—who went to Hades to seduce Persephone, but sat down and found himself immobilized, stuck to his seat—equates immobility with castration and impotence.

[45] Kirke too threatened to interrupt Odysseus's journey, although the narrative moves past the threat so rapidly as to neutralize it: after a year Odysseus's men remind him that they should be on their way (10.469-74).

Latinos: Odysseus and Kalypso's son is Nausithoos. The offspring may be metaphorical, for instance, Demeter giving birth to Ploutos (Wealth) and Eos giving birth to Phaethon (the Shining One). This representation minimizes the conflict of hierarchies without acknowledging its existence. From the perspective of the Theogony as a whole, these goddesses (except Aphrodite) are hardly powerful, and the production of sons is the only story they are given. For the audience this bareness is satisfying because the lines are attached to a narrative in which Zeus establishes patriarchy by asserting his control over reproduction. These lines link the cosmic order (expressed through the distribution of divinities) with human history and tie the audience, placed in history, into Zeus's plan. Because of their narrative position, the lines can assimilate the sexual power of the female to her reproductive activity and thereby stabilize the location of the phallus, the location of control over the erotic situation, with the man. The goddess is placed within patriarchy and subsumed in the category "mother."

In the one instance of the union of Aphrodite and Phaethon, as told by the author of the Theogony continuation, a different resolution is found. The author says of Phaethon, "When he was young, in the tender bloom of glorious youth, a child with light thoughts, laughter-loving Aphrodite darting down snatched him up and made him an enclosed temple-keeper, a shining daimon , in her holy shrine" (988-91).^[46] The abduction is not said to have been followed by sexual union.^[47] Only in Aphrodite's epithet "laughter-loving" is the phallus indirectly and unspecifically signaled via a pun.^[48] This vignette settles the status conflict unequivocally in favor of the goddess but deprives Phaethon of all activity, including sexual activity: immortalized and enclosed, he has no further story. As in the case of the Odyssey , generation, histors; and narrative require male dominance. Phaethon's fate indirectly

[46] West, Hesiod: Theogony , points out ad loc. that daimon is a term used of men who have lived on earth and after death have a limited sort of divine power. The adjective dios (shining) is applied to goddesses but not to the higher male gods. (It is also applied to human men.) The text implicitly marks Phaethon's limited and subordinate divinization.

[47] In Apollod. 3.14.3 Tithonos is the son of Eos and Kephalos, and his son is Phaethon (by what mother is not said); Adonis is Phaethon's great-great-grandson. The notice indicates both the fluidity of these stories and the fact that the young men were felt to be linked as well as interchangeable. It is remarkable that in Euripides' partly preserved play Phaethon the young man is about to marry a goddess on the day that he goes to find Hellos, drives the chariot, and is struck down by Zeus's lightning. Diggle, Euripides: Phaethon 10-27, 155-60, thinks that the goddess is a nymph, one of Heliades. He denies any connection between the Phaethon of this myth and the one in Hesiod, but the pattern seems to exert its pull.

[48] Hesiod puns on Aphrodite's epithet "laughter-loving," philomeides , and a term for genitals, media , saying that Aphrodite is laughter-loving because she was born from the severed genitals of Ouranos (Theog . 200).

points to the significance of the other couples, whose offspring are part of the audience's "historical" past.

By calling as much attention as it does to Phaethon's youth, the Theogony continuation also points to another way to escape from impasse in a re-assertion of male dominance. A narrative may explicitly mark the man as subordinate within the human hierarchy: his status may be clarified by making him the object of homosexual love.^[49] If a man who is subordinate to a goddess is also subordinate to another man, then his position with respect to the goddess does not establish a model of female control that would threaten the male/female hierarchy.^[50] Thus in various tellings Dionysos, Apollo, and even Heracles are said to have been Adonis's lovers.^[51] Adonis is thereby assimilated to the category of youths who fail to make the transition to adulthood.^[52] The fourth-century comic poet Plato emphasizes the humorous results produced by this resolution of the conflict. In four lines quoted from a lost play, Adonis , Adonis's father receives a prophecy:

Oh, Kinyras, king of the Cyprians, hairy-assed men,
Your child has become most beautiful and most marvelous
Of all humans, but a pair of deities will destroy him,
She being rowed with clandestine oars, he by rowing:
        (fr. 3 Kock)

The deities are Aphrodite and Dionysos. Adonis, caught between extremes as beloved of a male god and lover of a goddess, will perish of status ambiguity. We cannot tell about narrative positioning in the case of Adonis, but Plato Comicus seems to have presented Adonis as ambiguous and marked for

[49] For analysis of the unequal status of the two partners in a male homosexual relationship, see Dover, Greek Homosexuality 100-109, and Foucault, The History of Sexuality 2: chap. 4, esp. § 3. Public norms, not behavior, are in question.

[50] One version of the tale of Eos and Kephalos makes explicit Kephalos's submissive character. In a story that may come from Pherekydes, Kephalos's wife Prokris, disguised as a man, came to hunt with him, bringing a javelin that never missed and a dog that always caught its prey. Kephalos wished for these: Prokris set the condition that Kephalos should submit to "him" in sexual intercourse. When they lay down Prokris revealed herself to him and either accused him or was reconciled with him: Ant. Lib. 41.6-7; Hyg. Fab . 189, See Fontenrose, Orion 91-94. Eos does not occur in this version as the rival of Prokris, but Fontenrose suggests that "Nephele" (Cloud) represents her.

[51] In addition to Plato Comicus (below), see Ptolemy Hephaistion in Phot. Bibl . 190, 147b.9-12 (Henry) for Herakles; 146b.41-42, 147a.1-3, for Apollo. He calls Adonis "androg-ynous." Atallah, Adonis 50-51, calls this a late "deformation" of the myth, adding that the "slender, equivocal ephebe" is an Alexandrian preoccupation. It seems to me rather that the fantasy potential of the myth pattern is increasingly overtly expressed.

[52] E.g:, Hyakinthos and Narkissos: cf. Ribichini, Adonis 128-29. Ribichini stresses that Adonis does not seduce but is seduced, except in one late pastiche found in Servius ad Verg. Ecl . 10.18, in which, pressured by Juno, he violates Erinome, beloved of Jupiter.

failure from the beginning, in contrast to his father, king of hairy-assed men. Adonis is also a failed hunter, whose death from the wound inflicted by the boar makes him a victim of male aggression.^[53]

From this perspective, it is clear that to mark Adonis as an "effete Easterner" is one more mode of achieving a resolution that preserves (Greek) male sexual control; Ribichini's analysis of Adonis's meaning reveals a strategy for resolving the contradiction in status hierarchies created by the story. The possibility of yielding to a woman is acknowledged, but rejected as non-Greek. And the spices (Adonis's mother Myrrha) and lettuce, whose opposition in the myth Détienne studies, mark the two ends of the narrative (birth and death) and trace Adonis's demasculinization. Adonis is overloaded with markers of his subordinate status, for he is the most prominent mortal lover of Aphrodite.^[54] Attis castrates himself, driven mad by Kybele, when he undertakes to marry a nymph (and thus assume adult male status). His sexual subjection is clarified at the moment when he tries to escape from it. Hylas drowns, pulled down into a pool of water by the nymphs—an image of surrender to sensuous passivity. Anchises' statement in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite that men who sleep with goddesses do not flourish and Hermes' fear that Kirke might unman Odysseus fit in here. In these cases the goddess's control of the phallus is taken literally; it is lost to the man. The man is marked as a non-man: thus there is no question of an otherwise dominant man's yielding sexually to a female.

The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite itself does not make use of the simple resolution suggested by Anchises. Instead it explores at great length the ironies created by the confusion of hierarchies.^[55] Zeus shames Aphrodite among the gods by causing her to fall in love with the mortal Anchises. But Aphrodite's desire leads her to exercise her power over the human man, deceiving him while causing him to desire her. Yet her deception is to

[53] The boar was sent by Apollo or Ares; in later tellings Apollo himself, Hephaistos, Heracles, Persephone, the Muses, or Artemis kills Adonis: Atallah, Adonis chap. 2, esp. 63-74; the earliest extant reference is fourth century B.C.E . (unless it was in Panyassis). Discussion in Ribichini, Adonis 108-44, who points out that Adonis is associated with other hunters who are overcome, e.g., Aktaion, Hippolytos, Perdikkas, Kephalos (108). Piccaluga, "Adonis, i cacciatori falliti," concentrates on this aspect of Adonis, believing him to represent a preagricultural life that had been left behind and was therefore coded in myth as inadequate.

[54] I do not mean to suggest that my interpretation overrides Ribichini's and Détienne's, that the operation of status hierarchies is the only point of these stories. The need to adjust hierarchies is a constraint, one of various pressures that act on material of diverse origin to produce similar stories.

[55] Bergren's excellent discussion of the Hymn , "The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite," takes a different approach—rhetorical analysis—and pays special attention to the distribution of power among the gods. She too emphasizes the ambiguities in the narrative.

cast herself as a mortal woman, an innocent virgin submitting to others' directives. Only so can she be the recipient of Anchises' uninhibited desire. Anchises says to her, "If you are a mortal woman ... as you say, and come here through the agency of the immortal messenger Hermes and will be called my wife for all time, then no one of the gods or mortal men will restrain me here from mingling in love with you right now" (145-51).^[56] Once they have made love she pours sleep over Anchises. Then, dressed again, towering in height to the roof of the hut, and shining with her immortal beauty unveiled, she wakes him. Anchises cowers in the bedclothes, seeing in her swelling figure a portent of his impotence and cries, "Do not let me live strengthless among men"; she now controls the phallus. Yet Aphrodite assures Anchises that she will not only do him no harm but will give him a child, as though she were a mortal woman. In her final statement, however, she explains that she cannot make him divine. Furthermore, he must not mention or boast of the encounter. If he uses it to enhance his male status among humans, Zeus in anger will strike him with a thunderbolt (that is, reduce him to the "strengthlessness" that is his proper lot). Male/female hierarchy has been restored among the gods: Aphrodite is subordinate to the will of Zeus. Between Aphrodite and the human the situation is more ambiguous. Aphrodite, in her desire, provoked Anchises' desire: both desires have been satisfied. Aphrodite's threatening stature at the end is counterbalanced by the fact that she is pregnant.

The Hymn closes with Anchises unscathed and a father-to-be but warned of his merely human status: the hierarchies, no longer suspended, are delicately balanced. Yet the Hymn also points to a resolved closure, projected beyond its own text. Aphrodite's emphatic warning to Anchises not to speak of the encounter activates the audience's knowledge that Zeus did thereafter strike him with lightning.^[57] Anchises must have been unable to keep silent about his encounter with Aphrodite, unable to renounce the glory or resist naming his son's mother. Once the tale exists in public discourse, Anchises must take on the status of a non-man.^[58] Narrative positioning here is complex. The

[56] Anchises' doubt over whether Aphrodite is mortal or goddess in itself sums up the conflict of hierarchies: if she is a goddess he will worship her, if a mortal woman he will take her to his bed. Cf. Bergten, "The Homeric Hymn" 16-17, 20-22, on Anchises' effort to test her with logical alternatives and his eros -induced blindness to flaws in his logic.

[57] This statement assumes that the audience for the Hymn was already familiar with the tradition: the earliest extant reference is Soph. Laocoon fr. 373 (Pearson). E Smith, Nursling of Mortality 142 n. 129, and Rossbach, in PW under Anchises, col. 2107, discuss the evidence; Anchises has an "eldest daughter" in Il . 13.428-33, but she may be an invention out of Homer's need for names.

[58] I assume that the lightning strike symbolizes unmanning and that the portrayal of Anchises as crippled is both a decorous and an overt representation of his condition. For the phallic quality of lightning, cf. the story of Semele: e.g., Eur. Bacch . 6-9, and Dodds's notes on the subject in Euripides .

audience notes what Aphrodite wishes to keep hidden and also knows (or guesses) Anchises' fate. But the audience's desire is for Aphrodite's desire to be revealed; it is complicit with Anchises' failure to keep silent, and so replays Aphrodite's shame, but also her desire. We will return to this situation.

These narratives resolve the contradiction in such a way as to preserve the male/female hierarchy. The story pattern calls forth this closure so consistently that the story's potential for subverting the male/female hierarchy must have been felt. The two tales that refuse to reduce the relationship between goddess and man to a simple hierarchy. Odyssey 5 and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite do in fact make use of the contradiction in interested fashion: the contradiction supports a positive evaluation of mortality from the point of view of an adult man. The goddesses Kalypso and Aphrodite consider immortalizing Odysseus and Anchises, but in each case immortality would have as its price subordination and/or confinement. Thus the tradeoff for immortality is presented as a loss of sexual autonomy and evaluated as not worth it. Kalypso offers to immortalize Odysseus if he will stay with her even though he does not desire her (5.206-10), so it is conditional on confinement and relinquishing of desire. Aphrodite herself rejects the desirability of immortalizing Anchises because there are only two models for doing so: Ganymedes', with its eternal subordination and passivity (absence of desire), and Tithonos's, which includes (temporary) desire but also aging and confinement as its necessary correlate.^[59] So in these two stories the sexual hierarchy of male/female is called on to reconcile the man to his mortal lot.

In a series of instances from the Greek literary canon, we have seen that the self-contradictory notion of a goddess and a man in sexual union is imagined and narrativized in such a way as to protect the adult man's claim to sexual dominance. Narrativity, at work engaging the subject in positionalities of meaning, reproduces the cultural norm for male/female relations. However, other narratives with other resolutions are possible. The story of Demeter and Iasion, of which no early version has survived, may have been told by women (who need not have agreed with Kalypso's interpretation of it) in

[59] P. Smith, Nursling of Mortality 87-90, and Bergren, "The Homeric Hymn" 33-35, have posed the question why Aphrodite does not ask Zeus for immortality and eternal youth for Anchises, as the paradigm of Eos and Tithonos would suggest. Smith argues that Anchises' mortality is taken for granted, or rather, insisted on by the poem, so the thought that it might be otherwise is not entertained. Bergren points out that Zeus's will requires Aphrodite's grief, so the poem does not permit Aphrodite to seek satisfaction. In an article in process I am working out at greater length the argument that the Ganymedes and Tithonos models between them exhaust the possibilities.

connection with the festival for Demeter, the Thesmophoria. Demeter's treatment of Demophon—the baby she started to immortalize, rejected when his mother caught her at it, but continued to favor as he grew up—has affinities with our pattern.^[60] In this story and perhaps in the women's version of the Adonis story, whatever it was, divinity is the source of a female power that exposes the imitations of the male. Sappho's narratives may likewise have rewritten the males'—but if so, no hint of it survives in the fragments and notices. If women produced versions that subvert the male/female hierarchy, they have been lost.

By attentiveness to the contradiction and to the requirement that the narrative resolve it somehow, we can see how these narratives are inflected so as to preserve the male/female hierarchy. We can imagine how women might have made a different use of them. Yet I have not answered either of the questions I posed, namely why the pattern is so popular and what its appeal to Sappho was. Male dominance could be asserted directly without the aid of these tales, and for Sappho they appear peripheral to her emotional attachment to other women.