Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 Excerpt:...who awards her the prize for beauty, may be as nearly identical as are Aphrodite and the beautiful Helen, whom she gives Paris as a reward for his decision. 108. Even the customary appellation of the goddess in worship, Urania ('the heavenly'), seems to have been borrowed from Astarte. For the idea that Aphrodite was a daughter of Uranus was evidently first invented in explanation of that appellation, and was based upon a false explanation of her epithet 'foam-born.' Similarly, her relation to the sea cannot be explained from her significance in Greece, nor can her worship as Euploia ('bestower of a prosperous voyage'), Pontia ('sea goddess'), and the like, in which capacity the dolphin and the swan are her symbolic attributes. 109. In earlier times Aphrodite, like all the other goddesses, was represented clothed; but after the fourth century B.c. she appears also half-nude, or entirely so, since she was conceived of as bathing, or as Anadyomene ('emerging from the sea'). The most beautiful example of a semi-nude Aphrodite is the famous Aphrodite of Melos. Praxiteles represented her as entirely undressed in the statue made for her sanctuary in Cnidus. As o symbols of fruitfulness the dove, ram, or he-goat are her special attributes. 110. Eros, on the other hand, was the masculine representative of love. He was worshiped as a real god from ancient times, probably even by the prehellenic population of Thespiae in Boeotia, Parion on the Hellespont, and Leuctra in Laconia. At Thespiae he was worshiped under the very ancient symbol of a rough stone; but he was there considered the son of Hermes, the dispenser of fruitfulness, and of the Artemis of the lower world (a goddess of earth's fruitfulness, much like Demeter and Persephone). In the Homeric poems, however...