Page:Greek and Roman Mythology.djvu/94

 80 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY daughter of Zeus and Hera. In Thebes Aphrodite was considered the wife of Ares, god of war and death, with whom she is associated in Homer. Their children were Harmonia (' harmony ') who resembles Aphrodite her- self when the latter is called Pandemos (' common to all/ and therefore ' unifying 7 ) and the companions of the war god, Deimos (' terror ') and Phobos (< fright '). 106. These rather vague relations and the fact that Aph- rodite appears to take the place of other goddesses (see also 117) indicate that she is not indigenous to Greece. As she is in Homer frequently called 'the Cyprian 7 (Kypris), and as the cities where her worship appears to have been first carried on, Paphos, Amanthus, and Idalium, were situated in Cyprus, probably her original home was on this island. From here her worship could afterwards easily have reached Cythera and Sparta, Corinth, Elis, and Athens, and, in the other direction, Mount Eryx in Sicily. Even in Cyprus, however, she was probably only a local form of the Assyrio-Phoenician goddess of fruit- fulness, Istar or Astarte (Ashtoreth = Aphrodet ?). Their identity appears especially in their relation to the Se- mitic representative of the vegetation of the springtime, Adonis ('lord'), who was worshiped principally in the Syrian town Byblus and in Cyprus. Fancy pictured him as a handsome youth, beloved of Aphrodite, wounded in the chase in midsummer by a wild boar (the sun). He dies immediately, and is then compelled to pass the time till spring in the lower world with Persephone, who is his Greek counterpart. 107. To Cyprus belonged originally also the myth of the double-sexed Aphroditos or Hermaphrodltus, a rep- resentative of the abundant productiveness of nature,