The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [202]
Unfortunately for those on the wrong side of her clever little tongue, Peitho’s (Persuasion’s) force could be malevolent. But she did have her good days. The great goddess Aphrodite was, remember, family. Aphrodite added passion to Peitho’s persuading power. The goddess of love could herself persuade Peitho to persuade men to act harmoniously, to seek concord. Peitho’s goddess-mistress-mother Aphrodite was thought capable of promoting an important sensation in the democracy – harmonia/homonoia, harmony/union: qualities vital to the variegated political entity that was fifth-century Athens.
Kleisthenes himself recognised the potency of the Aphrodite-Peitho combination. When he advanced his reforms and set Athens on the road to democracy, around 507 BC, he cast Athena on the front of his triobol coins and on the obverse a female Janus – a woman with two faces – the potent Aphrodite-Peitho, Love and Persuasion, hybrid.14
Socrates too promoted the unifying power of love within human society. Aphrodite was one of the goddesses that he worshipped with most reverence. In fact the philosopher suggested that it is only when you look for your own goodness in others, and find it – in other words, allow yourself to love others – that you yourself can be a truly good person:
As the effluence of beauty enters him through the eyes, he is warmed; the effluence moistens the germ of the feathers, and as he grows warm, the parts from which the feathers grow, which were before hard and choked … become soft … as nourishment streams upon him.
Love is the one thing in the world I understand.
I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not in love with someone.15
APPENDIX TWO
MYSTERIA – THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES
GREEK RELIGION MADE A LOT OF NOISE.
Just imagine one of the most secretive of rituals, the procession out of Athens from the Sacred Gate along the Sacred Way to Eleusis. Beginning in the Kerameikos, and striding the 14 miles to Demeter’s lauded sanctuary, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands (Herodotus tells us there were 30,000 in one parade) of Athenians would travel – each in search of enlightenment. Aeschylus had journeyed here, Sophocles, Herodotus and Aristophanes. Centuries later Plutarch and Pausanias too will be Eleusinian mystoi, initiates. Participants would cry out to the spirit of Iacchus (almost certainly a mutated form of the god of drink, Dionysos) a haunting chant that could be heard for many miles around. They carried with them blazing pine torches. A clanging gong marked their search for Kore, Demeter’s daughter. The spirits of the Underworld were believed to accompany the initiates along the way.
As with the cult of Bendis down at Piraeus, these votaries are doing something that is less than normal in Greek religion. They are part of a travelling cult. The Eleusinian cult in particular is concerned with individuals; it speaks to each man and woman about the possibilities of a mystical, eternal life. The rituals have their own name, they are mysteria, mysteries. The word comes from the Greek and means ‘with mouth, and/or eyes closed’. And indeed these were rituals that should be neither spoken of nor seen by non-initiates. In the museum at the Eleusis site there is a large bronze cinerary urn, packed with the semi-burnt remains of a woman. We don’t know her name,1 just that she requested to be buried at Eleusis’ sacred site, so that she could take her secrets not just to her grave, but into the very clods of Demeter’s earth itself.
To be an Eleusinian initiate, you had to be Greek-speaking, pure (untainted by a blood-crime, a murder) and it helped if you