The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [200]
APPENDIX ONE
HONOURING APHRODITE
Acropolis rock and Agora, 469–399 BC
Do you not see what a great goddess Aphrodite is? She, whom you can neither name nor measure, how great she is by nature, from how great a thing she comes through. She nourishes you and me and all the mortals. And as proof, so that you might not only comprehend this in words, I will show you by deed, the strength of the goddess.
On the one hand, earth desires rain when the dry barren ground is in need of moisture on account of drought; and on the other hand, the revered sky, when it is filled with rain by Aphrodite, desires that it fall on the earth; and when the two mingle into the same thing, they beget everything for us, and at the same time, they nurture everything through which the mortal race lives and grows.
Fragment from a lost play by Euripides1
BECAUSE THE PARTHENON DOMINATES ATHENS’ SKYLINE, it is easy to imagine that Athena allowed few other goddesses elbow-room in her golden city. But swathes of the Acropolis rock – the very foundation of Athena’s peacock-blue and green and gold shrine – were sacred to Aphrodite.2
Gouged out of the red limestone of the Acropolis itself are tiny pocks – little stone larders prepared for the offerings of the faithful in Athens. These niches were sacred to the goddess of love. Here, throughout the year, men and women would come to placate and honour Aphrodite and her son Eros: they left small cakes, marble replicas of genitalia (now kept modestly under lock and key in the storerooms of the Agora Museum) and terracotta figurines for the goddess. When I last visited, despite the fact that the area was cordoned off to the public, someone was coming week in, week out to leave a fresh-cut pomegranate for the erotic spirits of the place.
Two fifth-century BC inscriptions have survived next to the crumbling niches. They are so eroded now as to be almost invisible to the human eye – best to feel them out with your fingers:
FOR APHRODITE … FOR EROS
At night, pairs of two or four virgins (aged seven to eleven years old) would pick their way down to these niches. These were the Arrhephoroi, distinguished children selected by the Archon Basileus of Athens for religious service. Imagine a high-class ‘Myrtis’, the little eleven-year-old plague victim whose face has recently been re-created by a team of international scientists. Housed east of the Erechtheion, the Acropolis would be their home for almost a year.3 Both sacred and juvenile, these were children allowed to play with childish things; up on the complex was a courtyard for ball games. One can easily imagine the jointed dolls – which now sit unloved in the glass cases of museums – being dangled on knees and clutched tight up here, with the jangle of Athens and the wide reach of the Attic countryside stretched out beneath. The girls probably spent the bulk of their days tending to the needs of Athena Polias (it might be them peeping out from the skirts of the priestess on the Parthenon friezes), and then one night of the year the priestess summoned them, presented them with a basket of arrheta – secret things – which they were instructed to transport to the niches.4
But not for them the monumental sloping stairway through the Propylaia. They travelled down through the very bedrock of the Acropolis itself. Their staircase was a vulva-like cleft in the north citadel, which, following earthquake damage in the thirteenth century BC, had been scooped out by the pious Late Bronze Age inhabitants of the Acropolis and still emerges discreetly at niche-level. Slowly, slowly, with their precious load (what could these unspeakable offerings be? genitalia? – but these were common at the time, nothing to be covered up – a sacred dew for Athena’s sacred olive tree perhaps?), they climbed down deep inside the cold rock.
Now the passageway is dank and smells appropriately (given that the dove was Aphrodite’s familiar) of the guano of a colony of collared doves. Here the