Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides

by Jane Ellen Harrison

‘This for thee, O great and holy Pandemos Aphr[odite,

We adorn with gifts, our statues.’

Beneath in prose and in smaller letters come the names of the dedicators. Pandemos is here quite plainly the official title of the goddess.

The third and latest inscription[248] is carved on a stele of Hymettus marble. It is exactly dated (283 B.C.) by the archon’s name, the elder Euthios. It records a decree made while a woman called Hegesipyle was priestess. The decree, which is too long to be here quoted in full, ordains that the astynomoi should at the time of the procession in honour of Aphrodite Pandemos ‘provide a dove for the purification of the temple, should have the altars anointed, should give a coat of pitch to the roof and wash the statues and prepare a purple robe.’

Aphrodite Pandemos was a ‘great and holy goddess,’ giver of increase. She was no private divinity of the courtesan; the second inscription tells us that she was worshipped by a married woman, who is her priestess. It is literature and not ritual that has cast a slur on the title Pandemos; the state honoured both her and Ourania alike ‘according to ancestral custom.’ Plato[249] in his beautiful reckless way will have it that because there are two Loves there are two Goddesses, ‘the elder one having no mother, who is the Heavenly Aphrodite, the daughter of Ouranos; to her we give the title Ourania, the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and her we call “Of-all-the-People,” Pandemos.’

The real truth was that Aphrodite came to the Greeks from the East and like most Semitic divinities she was not only a duality but a trinity.

When Pausanias[250] was at Thebes he saw the images of this ancient Oriental trinity and he knew whence they had come. ‘There are wooden images of Aphrodite at Thebes so ancient that it is said they were dedicated by Harmonia and that they were made out of the wooden figure-heads of the ships of Cadmus. One of them is called Heavenly, another Of-all-the-People, and the third the Turner-Away.’ The threefold Aphrodite came from the Semitic East bearing three Semitic titles: she was the Queen of Heaven[251], she was the Lady of all the People, Ourania and Pandemos, what the third title was which the Greeks translated into Apostrophia we do not know; as already noted it took slight hold. At Megalopolis[252] we see how the third title of the trinity faded. There close to the house where was an image of Ammon made like a Herm and with the horns of a ram, there—significant conjunction—was a sanctuary of Aphrodite in ruins, with the front part only left and it had three images, ‘one named Ourania the other Pandemos, the third had no particular name.’ So it was that the Greeks lost the trinity and kept, all they needed, the duality.

The Greeks themselves always knew quite well whence came their Heavenly Aphrodite, she of Paphos, and she of Kythera. Herodotus[253] is explicit. He is telling how some of the Scythians in their passage through Palestine from Egypt pillaged the sanctuary of Aphrodite Ourania at Ascalon. ‘This sanctuary,’ he says, ‘I found on enquiry is the most ancient of all those that are dedicated to this goddess, for the sanctuary in Cyprus had its origin from thence, as the Cyprians themselves say, and that in Kythera was founded by Phenicians who came from this part of Syria.’ Pausanias[254] says ‘the first to worship Ourania were the Assyrians, next to them were the dwellers in Paphos of Cyprus, and the Phenicians of Ascalon in Palestine. And the inhabitants of Kythera learnt the worship from the Phenicians.’

The Oriental origin[255] of Ourania, Queen of Heaven, the armed goddess, the Virgo Caelestis, was patent to all; but Aphrodite in her more human earthly aspect, as Pandemos, goddess of the people and of all increase, was so like Kourotrophos, like Demeter, that she might easily be thought of as indigenous. Yet her ritual betrays her. For the purification of her sanctuary we have seen there was ordered a dove. Instinctively we remember that when Mary Virgin[256] went up to the temple of Jerusalem for her purification she must take with her ‘a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons.’ In the statuettes of Paphos, Aphrodite holds a dove in her hand; the coins of Salamis in Cyprus are stamped with the dove[257]. At the Phenician Eryx when the festival of the Anagogia[258] came round, and Aphrodite Astarte went back to her home in Libya, the doves went with her, and when they came back at the Katagogia, a white multitude, among them was one with feathers of red gold, and she was Aphrodite.