The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [201]
And Aphrodite did not just walk the Athenian streets at night. She was there too at the grand entrance to the Acropolis complex. Today tourists shuffle past the polished stones oblivious to their significance – happy only that they will soon be reaching the summit. For this was where Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite of all the people) was worshipped together with the goddess Peitho – Persuasion.5 The fifth-century Athenians knew only too well that they inhabited a fragile city-state. Where there were so many political players, each with a vested interest, how could they possibly stop the body politic from fracturing? Aphrodite’s stock-in-trade – love, desire, communality – were all vital in a political system that had suddenly given each citizen equal rights.
And so Aphrodite’s unions were not all thought to be sexual. When we think of the goddess of love, we should banish the voluptuous Venus figure that inhabits many imaginations. As well as bodies, the goddess of love also joined hearts and minds. And for this reason the flow of the faithful to her shrine was steady. At the very least the love goddess has eight altars in and around Attica, including one – as recent excavations have shown – in the heart of the Agora itself.6 Damaged by the Persians, this love-zone in the Athenians’ marketplace kept functioning through the Peloponnesian and civil wars. The epistyle of her temple at the edge of the Acropolis was discovered in 1968, and on it an inscription. ‘This to you, O great August Aphrodite Pandemos we honour you with our twenty gifts.’7 In the summer, at the festival of Aphrodisia, thimblefuls of the blood from the breasts of sacred doves were spilled onto her altar here.
And in the Agora itself more sacrifices were regularly made to the goddess of unions.8 Between 1980 and 1982 the American School of Classical Studies at Athens unearthed a wide altar, just at the northern limit of the Pan-Athenaic Way, a stone’s throw from the court of the Archon Basileus and within spitting distance of the Altar of the Twelve Gods (the Centre-point of Athens), and here were burned offerings of sheep and goats, because horned creatures were the animals most sacred to the goddess of desire. As Socrates walked through the Agora – particularly on the fourth days of the month9 – he would have seen, month in, month out, these habitual, desperate measures to keep these goddesses on-side.10
Did the banality of such practices trouble Socrates? Did he look at priestesses catching thimblefuls of blood or at priests faffing around with the slippery tongue of a goat and think, quietly: why are we going through such futile gestures? Love and harmony are vital, but can we really ensure them only by sending burnt offerings to the sky, or by sending out children to scramble around on rock staircases at night?
If you read between the lines of Plato’s Dialogues, it seems that Socrates offers an alternative when it comes to the matter of love.
DIOTIMA: [The] right way of approaching or being initiated into the mysteries of love [is] to begin with examples of beauty in this world, and using them as steps to ascend continually with that absolute beauty as one’s aim, from one instance of physicial beauty to two and from two to all, then from physical beauty to moral beauty, and from moral beauty to the beauty of knowledge, until from knowledge of various kinds one arrives at the supreme knowledge whose sole object is that absolute beauty, and knows at last what absolute beauty is.11
Socrates sees in the power of human wisdom, of will, the potential to hold together societies, however disparate. For him, love = virtue = knowledge = social cohesion and happiness. Socrates sought some kind of universal union in human affairs. He invokes the wise men who ‘claim that community and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and