Yet Manoulis is a kissing fool, and his obsession may reprieve his sister from the convent! Wynn Parks was born in the southern U. Though he forayed off-island to Europe, North Africa, and Iran, it was Paros that was his haven from seventies through the mid-eighties. He currently lives in the United States, on the Gulf Coast. Categorized in Uncategorized. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
Email Address:. Create a free website or blog at WordPress. Wynn Parks. Uncle Adonis Though regarded in the village as something of a roue,Uncle Adonis is the closest thing Akis has to a father. Detienne, Dionysos mis a mort Paris, ; Detienne Our only ancient testimony on the scentlessness of the anemone seems to be Schol.
This is significant, since no flower metamorphosis is attested in Greek myth before the Hellenistic period P. Thus if the fable goes back to a dying god of theNear East W. Albright, History, Archeology, and Christian Humanism [New York, ] , its entry intoGreek ismore likely due to Hellenistic syncretism than to an original transmissionwith theTammuzian lament. Murray Viewed from the standpoint of women's laments in ancient andmodem Greece, everything about the gardens insofar as they can be compared to Adonis suggests compassion rather than contempt.
Comparison of dead youths to young plants, for example, was and remains conventional cf. Alexiou We cannot reach an interpretation that is certain, but we should look for women's understanding of the gardens of Adonis somewhere within their own culture of lamentation and its idioms.
Stehle well cautions us to take "positionality"-"awareness that in terpretationalways comes from a specific social, sexual, and intellectual place" into account. Whence ismeaning created? Although Detienne seems to assume an objectively constituted framework of signs, he is clearly scanning the scene from the viewpoint of a hypothetical Athenian male citizen.
What happens when we shift perspective? If we scrutinize for the female viewpoint our three earli est testimonia on the life and death of Adonis, we already find a split between the female poet, Sappho, who reflects the ritual lamentation frr. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibl. On account of thewrath of Aphrodite for she did not honor the goddess , Smyrna conceived a passion for her father,and taking her nurse as accomplice she sleptwith her father for twelve nightswithout his knowledge.
When he found out, he drew his sword and pursued her. Being overtaken, she prayed to the gods that shemight disappear, and the gods in pity changed her into a tree,which is called "myrrh" [avutpva].
In tenmonths' time the tree burst open and Adonis, as he is called, was born. On the other hand, On Phoenix and his role in Greek mythology see C. Tzavellas-Bonnet, EtCl 51 A nymph Alphesiboea ismetamorphosed into the river Tigris in [Plut. Panyassis, fr. REED:The Sexuality ofAdonis the intrigue is quite Herodotean-remember thatPanyassis is said to have been Herodotus' uncle-and theHellenistic poets themselves only raised into the lime light certain types of stories, previously marginalized in epic, that engaged their new sensibility.
This etiology of Adonis' birth is unlikely to have had a part in the dynamics of the cult. No evidence connects myrrh or any in cense or perfume with theAdonia. Myrrh was probably no more prominent there than at any ritual gathering; sprinkled on the fire by those who could afford it, it added exotic fragrance to any proceeding.
Notice especially, when Theias finds out the truth, the excessive violence of his punitiveness, serving as an em phatic denial of guilt. Why themyrrh tree? Because the Greeks purchased myrrh which grows in southernArabia from Phoenician merchants and originally thought it native to theLevant.
Rather Panyassis or some priorGreek mythographer has spliced a just-so story of myrrh onto thatof another eastern import,Adonis whose origins theGreeks constantly located in theOrient. On prefigurations of Alexandrianism in Panyassis see H. Lloyd-Jones, Gnomon 48 Burkert, Greek Religion, tr. Raffan Harvard, 62 does not support his statement that "Incense offerings and altars are associated particularly with the cult of Aphrodite andAdonis.
In an anonymous version reported by St. Cyril of Alexandria, Comm. Pseudo-Apollodorus' or Panyassis' "Assyria" should not be taken literally; the name was often used loosely for any region of theNear East at one time subject to theAssyrian empire.
See T. NOldeke, Hermes 5 The bare motif of the baby in the tree, however, may have come from theNear East with Adonis: in a Sumerian text themother of Dumuzi here called Damu puts him to sleep in the bark of a tree; see Penglase Cinyras, a legendary Cypriot king as early as On Cinyras see C.
Baurain, BCH Pseudo-Apollodorus continues: While he was still a baby Aphrodite hid him from the gods in a chest because of his beauty and entrusted him to Persephone. But when Perse phone beheld him, shewould not give him back. The case coming before Zeus, the year was divided into three parts, and the god decreed that Adonis should spend one part by himself, one with Persephone, and one with Aphrodite.
But Adonis made his own share over to Aphrodite in addition. As Adonis starts out still a baby here, it is most likely that this portion of the summary represents Panyassis' own continuation; we shall indeed see that it conforms more to an Archaic than to a Hellenistic narrative pattern.
Immediate models for the story are perhaps themyths of Erichthonius the baby in the box and of Persephone the judgment of Zeus. At its core is a very ancient Sumerian season-myth about how Dumuzi spends half theyearwith Ereshkigal, thequeen of theunderworld, and half with Inanna,his divine consort; thismyth may well have been transmittedalong with the cult as its etiology.
Mere alternation between lower and upper worlds mitigates the tragedy inMesopotamian lament-texts Dumuzi is brutally murdered at the instigation of his divine lover and thus obscures the origin of the ritualmourning,54 and even if the prospect of a love affair with Adonis in eighteen or twenty years' timewas supposed to have drawnAphrodite and then Persephone to his infantile beauty, this surprising story shunts it into the background.
A final sentence inPseudo-Apollodorus "But afterwards,while hunting, he was gored and killed by a boar" reprises a version mentioned just before our testimony and is not to be considered part of Panyassis' account.
On Adonis' widely attested fatal boar-hunt, first attested after BCE, see below. InPhilodemus' list of tellers of Aphrodite's "shameful" love forAdonis Philippson restores the name of Panyassis for. In other versions Aphrodite makes Adonis her lover and disputes him with Persephone after he has been reared tomanhood: Ovid, Met. REED:The Sexuality of Adonis David Daube, observing that the story has "distinct legal overtones," analyzes it thus: "Aphrodite saves a foundling, who may thereby turn into her slave, her foster-son or her adoptive son.
Aphrodite immediately hands the child on to Persephone, who doubtless becomes a foster-mother. A foster-mother who does her duty may acquire strong rights to the child. The case, then, is rather subtle: the foster-motherwho has actually brought up the child57defending the title against the woman-owner, first foster-mother or adoptive mother-from whom she received him Perhaps the verdict in themyth establishes something like ajoint usufruct, to be exercised in rotation.
Or maybe itmakes the competing women into a kind of co-owners, defining the precise extent of each one's share. Nor would the grant of a third of the year to Adonis himself He, too, is a co-owner. Compare Aphrodite's abduction of thebeautiful child Phagthon, whom in an Archaic version of the story [Hes. Homer, too, assimilates the story of Zeus and Ganymede to this pattern-a human child is taken away to serve the gods because of his beauty-whether or not the sexual relationship between themwas yet current inmyth 1.
Hellenized, theMesopotamian tale of Tammuz has been strippednot only of its agricultural import,but also of the love affair and the lament. The connections with the rite have been downplayed and obscured through literary re-formation, and thoughwomen lamenters inGreece may have known Panyassis' version, it will not have originated with them. We do not even know if the lamenters thought of Adonis as dividing his year between upper and lowerworlds according to the Mesopotamian tradition,or how indeed they rationalized his yearly dying; since Sourvinou-Inwood, JHS 98 sees the placing of a child in a basket as a symbol of ritual adoption by a deity in theArchaic kourotrophic cult of Persephone at Locri; cf.
Athena's concealment of her "son" Erichthonius. Panyassis' account does not state, but only implies, thatPersephone has rearedAdonis by the time of Zeus' arbitration.
Daube, Collected Studies inRoman Law, vol. Dover "[W]e may wonder why beauty as distinct from zeal and a steady hand is a desirable attribute in a wine-pourer, but it should not be impossible for us Aphrodite's enclosing Adonis in a chest recalls Callimachus' statement that she hid him in a lettuce patch fr.
Winkler, speculating on connections between themyth of Adonis and the rite of the potted gardens, sees in the story of Adonis a pattern familiar from otherGreek myths, thatof a great goddess who takes away and conceals a mortal beloved: Aphrodite and Adonis, Selene and Endymion, Eos and Tithonus.
This is quite different from what gods do when they desire mortal women. Male deities come down and consummate their desire on the spot, then leave themaiden behind to become the founding member of an important race or noble family line, usually aftermuch suffering and disgrace" Winkler The contrast between female benevolence and the callousness of men ismisapplied.
Adonis is dead, Endymion is permanently unconscious, Tithonus spends his endless senility locked away in a cabinet are these exemplars of the ideal husband seen through female eyes, or men's nightmares of what will happen to them should they fall under the spell of a powerful woman?
As Winkler stresses, Sappho told all of these stories, and she, perhaps, elaborated them as fantasymarriages; but themyths have come down to us elaborated and interpretedby male writers, and we should be skeptical of automatically seeing in them the female point of view.
Selene, Eos, andCalypso promise an immortality that turnsout tobe not an eternal life of divine splendor,but an endless languor or senescence. Winkler assumes that stories of the loves of male gods reflectmale desires, and stories of the loves of goddesses the desires of women. The fallacy is obvious. In stories toldby men, both reflectmale feelings: brute lust temperedby historical consciousness, and abject fear of woman's power were she See P. Such passages as Theoc.
Winkler , working from a paper by Eva Stehle published in revised form as Stehle cf. Aphrodite and Phaon, also listed by Winkler, are a dubious case; cf. Stehle Winkler is duly skeptical cf. Stehle , but still sees themiserable fates of the young paramours as part of the fantasies of women. As we have them the stories may well be entirely the creations of men. If such a sentiment lies behind the proverb-and the connection with Aphrodite's beautiful, short-lived lover makes some such equation at least plausible-are we dealing with a joke of Athenian women, or the anxiety of Athenian men?
I know of only one interpretationof such amyth that is carefully grounded in the presumptive perspective of themyth's telling.
Winkler himself, in an article that should be better known, convincingly interpretsSappho'smyth of Tithonus in her badly damaged fr. The "fantasy marriage"motif is applied quite differently and says nothing aboutwomen's self image vis-A-vis men inArchaic Mytilenean society.
Men are irrelevanthere; the myth, asWinkler interprets it, is truly gynecocentric. The other myths of this kind Sappho may well have treated in like fashion. Bion's lateHellenistic Epitaph on Adonis, for instance, is suffused with the fear of being smothered by female power. Pritchard, ed. Winkler summarizes this article.
For the prospect of immortality through song cf. Sappho, fr. Sappho's Adonis-odes arementioned by Dioscorides, A. On this fragment see J. Herington, Poetry intoDrama Berkeley, ; M. Lardinois, TAPA Our single other testimonium onAdonis definitely by a female author,Praxilla of Sicyon mid fifth century , may reflect the ritualmore obliquely. According to its preserver, Zenobius 4.
The seeming bathos in the last line gave rise to the proverb "More foolish thanPraxilla's Adonis," but in context a wistful remembrance of fresh garden produce on the part of the dead youth, consigned to theUnderworld, is poignant. If Praxilla took part in the ritual lamentation herself evidence for Adonia inmid-fifth-century Sicyon?
There is thus little direct evidence for a genuinely female perspective on the myth of Adonis. The early versions of Adonis' life-story that have come from theminds and pens of men should not be expected to reflect, nor indeed seem to reflect, the viewpoint of his worshippers, and the two fragmentary accounts by women frustratingly give only the expected sense of grief and tenderness. Extant later versions come from male comic poets, Hellenistic show-offs and pedants, Roman spoofers, and beetle-browed church fathers.
What we have in all these stories, as in theproverb based on thegardens, is amale-oriented Adonis proceeding from the facts of the rite as theywere observed bymen, but elaborated into new traditions. We should admit a priori thatonce Adonis got into the hands of men, theymight have found uses for him quite unrelated to the ritual context whence he came, or to their feelings toward it. Whatever female attitudes these male authorsmay have absorbed from observing the celebrants we must expect to find transformed and transgendered.
So what of themale attitude towardAdonis in the Classical period? The motif of Adonis' death, obviously inferred from the yearly mourning over him, lends itself to the anxiety-ridden perspective we noted in similar stories of mortals The statement of Athenaeus, Deipn.
Zenobius finds these lines Iv Toti? REED: ofAdonis TheSexuality and their goddess-lovers, and thewell-known version inwhich he is killed by a wild boar that he is hunting reinforces that perspective by assimilating Adonis to a type of failed hunter. Soft Adonis, grown effeminate in the chambers of Aphrodite, would naturally lose to his prey, in binary opposition to the stalwart ephebes who battle boars in solitary combat on red-figuredvases. Detienne ; the boar-wound, which he will have sustained in the vicinity of thegroin, could symbolize emasculation71 support forDetienne's view of Adonis as infertile?
Giulia Piccaluga sees inAdonis a parable of the end of serious hunting and the advent of an agricultural way of life, whose antithesis he will embody. Its source, however, probably is Classical: contamination fromAttis, who in one version of his Greek legend seemingly as old as the fifth century was killed by a wild boar that he was hunting. Again, this contamination did not necessarily originate among the women celebrants, who would hardly have confused the object of their lamentationwith the prototype of the eunuch priests of Cybele, but more likely in themale-dominated discourse of dramatic fiction.
Comedy was a fertile producer of new myths, and in addition to that of Araros we know of comedies titledAdonis by Nicophon, Antiphanes, Philiscus, and Plato Comicus. The last, according toAthenaeus, Deipn.
The comic element found by Athenians here lies in the undignified On this figure see especially Piccaluga ; N. Rubin andW. Sale, Arethusa 16 Schnapp, RA Adonis' wound is on his thigh or groin in Bion 1. Piccaluga On Araros' fragment see Atallah On Glycon and his date seeW. Koster, Philologus 80 Two early fourth-century vase paintings, described inUMC i.
Adonis nos. The story of Atys inHdt. Nicander, Alex. The binarism is established, the system of associations is well marked out, the semantic net is cast-but once again Adonis slips through. This use of the hunting motif is pure hypothesis. Classical and laterversions that survive give no hint thathe was thought to be anything but a brave young hunter who met a tragic end. This is the impression given, for example, by his story as depicted in relief on numerous Roman sarcophagi.
Comedies like that of Araros, of course, may have presented him as a coward for their special purposes, and the story recounted by Nicander, fr.
On the other hand, the very fact that Adonis was the subject of Dionysius' tragedyAdonis, presumably performed in Athens like Dionysius' other plays, suggests that he could accommodate more for Classical audiences than a mere target for contempt, and the speaker of our only fragment-a boar-hunter, probably Adonis himself-sounds overconfident, if anything Dionysius, fr.
Bion 1. That very boldness, to be sure,might have been used as a kind of "tragic flaw" to sound a warning, a sign of a hot-headed young man's hubris, inexorably to be punished; but such interpretationsof Adonis' downfall-either from cowardice or its opposite-are valuable for showing how theGreeks could have characterized him, not how they must have characterized him.
Extant references toAdonis' hunting, in fact, are so scrappy that it is hard to tell what mythological type if any it assimilated him to. His hunting might have borne little semantic weight at all: the etiological emphasis on Aphrodite's mourning and the cursory treatmentof the accident itself in our few full literary versions of Adonis' death Bion 1; Ovid, Met.
The Muses Lycophron, Alex. Atallah LIMC pl. Aymard, Essai sur les chasses romaines Paris, Hyas is killed by a snake, a boar, or a lion; for the extant versions see RE 9.
They do not, like him, actually fail at hunting; they are hunters who die in some other way. Mythological boar-hunters killed by theirquarry are not necessarily constructed as social failures. The people of Tegea inArcadia seem to have representedAncaeus' death by the Calydonian boar as a heroic last stand Paus. Apollonius' tale of the death of Idmon, the seer of the Argonauts ambushed by awild boar in the landof theMariandyni Arg. These honorable deaths attested in ancient poets and historians, rather than the contemptible deaths hypothesized by modern critics, would have been readymodels for the hunting-myth of Adonis.
Permit me, as a kind of devil's advocate, to proffer a new interpretationof Adonis' death by the boar, only to retract it for lack of contextual confirmation. My intent is simply heuristic.
A youngman's hunt, even where it is not actually an initiatory rite as it apparentlywas in Crete: Ephorus, FGrH 70 F , always carries overtones of a coming-of-age.
In this light,Adonis' boar hunt might brand him as the pathetic antithesis of all a boy must do to become aman. On the other hand, death is also a commonmotif in initiation ritualsand relatedmyths: symbolic death in the rituals themselves, mythopoetically transformed into the actual demise of fictional youths likeDionysus, Hyacinthus, andOrion, followed by resurrection, posthumous honors, or translation to a higher existence.
To support this interpretation,however, we would search our sources in vain for references to a "new"Adonis, cleansed by death of pre-initiatory folly, or indeed for any real sequel to his yearly resurrection,which does not seem to have engaged the imagination of theGreeks anywhere near as much as his death did.
Nevertheless, the interpretationIhave just sketched should On hunting as an initiatory idiom inGreek mythology seemost recently Leitao , who follows M. Bloch, Prey intoHunter Cambridge, Vidal-Naquet discusses adolescent hunting in ancient Greece as a preliminary inversion of adultwarfare: The Black Hunter Baltimore, ; cf.
PCPS See V. Turner, The Forest of Symbols Ithaca, 96 on death as a metaphor for vanGennep's "liminal" stage of rites of passage; Bloch n. The interpretation of the potted gardens of Adonis as dramatizations of failed agriculture, although it does not illuminate the ritual itself, may at least illuminate themotivation behind theproverb, and thusmen's attitudes. Detienne exhaustively lists the authorswho rank the gardens with sterility against fertility, with precocity against maturity, with women and children against adult men, and concludes that "from Plato to Simplicius an entire tradition condemns the Adonian gardens for being cultureswithout crops and essentially sterile.
Although extant writers who use the gardensmetaphorically aremostly late,8'we may assume that theymodel theircensoriousness on theClassical authors fromwhom they adopted themaxim. Caution, however, is in order, since Imperialprosaists, while addicted toClassical proverbs and other such flosculi, had theirown programs, and theAtticizing lexica that served themmust reflect post-Classical impressions of the bygone heyday of Athens.
Our only Classical attestation comes from Plato, Phdr. For things he was serious about, would he not use his farmerly craft, plant them in a suitable environment, and be content if everything he planted came tomaturity in the eighthmonth?
Recent scholarship on theAdonia seems tobe unanimous inholding thatPlato, speaking throughSocrates, disparages and despises the rite as "anti-agricultural. The gardens here are a byword for potted plants in general, and Socrates is simply drawing a contrast between planting that you do seriously and planting that you do just for fun.
Detienne , Citations above, n. Elsewhere potted plants are similarly reviled without mention of theAdonia e. There is a tendency in recent scholarship to extend the disdain thatGreeks felt for "things that do not last long enough to produce anything of value" not only to the ritual potted plants, but to the entire festival and toAdonis himself. In comedy the Adonia do represent the realm of the unworthy or unmanly.
A character in the Boukoloi of Cratinus fr. As Stehle observes, the hetairas' Adonia inDiphilus, fr. Fissures appear in the even, monolithic planes of meaning thatDetienne assumes when we ob serve that for Roman-era intellectuals, among whom the proverbial use of the Balleriaux in J. Servais et al. An anonymous commentator anthologized in Stobaeus 2.
Cratinus' joke does not, of course, imply thatmen were actually engaged to compose Adonis-odes atAthens like those of Sappho inMytilene. On the reflection of Classical Athenian xenophobia in theHorai and its part inAthenian self-definition see Hall Winkler on this passage. For contemptuous references to later Adonis-worship coupled with Attis-worship see Callim. Only Pseudo-Diogenianus 1. The Greeks of Classical times, too, must often have constructed meaning in despite of mere homonymy; clearly,we must resist extrapolating their characteri zation of Adonis simply from their apparentdisdain for his eponymous gardens.
We shall soon discern quite a different attitude towardAdonis on the part of Athenian men. Nevertheless, he would probably have attracted censure. Itwas typical for Greek men to despise youths who sought to attract women. Hector hectors Paris for being woman-crazy II. Pentheus derides Dionysus as a fair skinned gigolo "on the prowl forAphrodite" Eur. A few passages in extant ancient literature do suggest a conception of him as a hopeless molly-coddle, a slave to love, incapable of manly behavior.
The earliest, probably derived from a Classical source, is fromAristotle's studentClearchus of Soli, who explained the proverb o6iv teipv "worthless, good-for-nothing" by a story thatHeracles, upon seeing the worship of Adonis, coined it as an expression of his disgust Clearchus, fr. Again, behind this disapprobation lies masculine fear lest a youth fall under a woman's power and thus fail ever to become a man.
Classical Athenian boys were discouraged from relationswith women before the darkening of theirbeard Or because having acquired a rocky garden, he got no profit of it. Compare the proverbial-sounding remark used in a scholium on The unusual form of Adonis' name recurs inAusonius, Ep. Men saw mythical Adonis as dominated by a powerful goddess-lover, and scarier-ritual Adonis as dominated by their own wives and mothers.
Their presumptive belittling of him would be a defense against identifying him with theirown youthful selves, a defensive tactic againstwomen's power in the sexual and social realms. This web of prejudices and apprehensions is thematrix of a four-line frag ment of the comic Plato's Adonis, an oracle delivered to Cinyras, king of the 8a6itp oxot i.
As noted above, Athenaeus, who may well have had Plato's text before him, identifies the goddess as Aphrodite of course and the god as Dionysus. The humor here, apart from the bawdy metaphor, lies in the depiction of Adonis as a youth involved in heterosexual and pederastic relations simultaneously, spending his precious energies on a woman before he has been made aman.
The perils of such activity aremade explicit by thegenerally accepted emendation of Jacobs: the two deities will thus destroy the son of Cinyras. This attitude does not enter the other Classical treatments of Adonis that we possess, and it is risky to project it into them universally. The qualities that are supposed to have marked Adonis for contempt-early death, wifelessness, childlessness-are rathergrounds for compassion in themain traditionof Greek epitaphic literature and underlie themost hackneyed conventions of grave inscriptions and epicedic verse.
Antimachus, fr. Pretty-boy though he might have seemed from some perspectives, could Adonis not have embodied all the complexity and ambivalence of aHippolytus, inviting both censure for the foolhardy boy that he had been, yet the deepest sympathy for theman that he would never become?
We are speculating now, but we are speculating within legitimate boundaries of Greek thought,where the cognitive oppositions are always shifting. If on one and the same stageHeracles could be both a paragon of noble suffering and a buffoon, Leitao Segal's interpretationof theAdonis-myth, tempering the social criticism of Detienne with Jung's archetype of the puer aeternus, faults Adonis' youth in D.
Pozzi and J. Wickersham, Myth and thePolls [Ithaca, ] Griessmaier, Das Motiv der mors immatura in den griechischen metrischen Grabinscriften Innsbruck, Sergio Ribichini haswritten a book discussing Adonis as aGreek formulation of "the Oriental," "the anti-Greek," "the Other," a figure onto which a Greek man could project all the qualities he considered-or desired-to be foreign to himself.
Despite Detienne's tour through the fabulous landscape that forHerodotus was theOrient , Classical Adonis seems not to have been much of an exotic: our scanty literary treatments do not emphasize this quality, and in the visual arts he wears only the vaguely Ionian style that at Athens had long passed for luxury, both good and ill.
Adonis' incestuous parentage might have signified barbarian incontinence,4 but thatmotif would have indictedMyrrha rather than Adonis himself. Some of Ribichini's suggestions aremisleading. He believes, for example, thatAdonis' homosexuality places him "aimargini della normality. Versions preserved by Ptolemy Chennus make Heracles and Apollo Aphrodite's rivals for Adonis' favors; these too may come from Attic comedy or Hellenistic works derived from or modeled after it.
It is ratherhis pathological heterosexuality that would putAdonis, like Paris forHector andDionysus for Pentheus, at the limits of acceptable behavior-would put him there, if we had evidence thatGreek men thought of him this way.
In any case, there is no reason to think that an Athenian man was always concerned tomake his feelings about a mythological character absolutely consistent-that if he sneered at Adonis in one context he was forbidden to slaver over him in another.
For if vase-paintings, created and purchased by men, are any indication of male attitudes,Athenian men of the later fifth century rather likedAdonis. Clas sical iconography gives him-and other youths beloved of goddesses, like Phaon, Cephalus, Tithonus, and Endymion-the flowing hair, the beardless profile, and the smooth Polyclitean physique of the paradigmatically beautiful paidika, what Ribichini this interpretation is anticipated by Detienne The use of eastern peoples as an alter ego or foil, studied for themodern West by E.
Hartog, TheMirror of Herodotus, tr. Lloyd Berkeley, ; Hall Ribichini ; cf. Hall Ribichini Ptolemy Chennus' stories arepreserved inPhotius, Bibl. See K. Bonn, on Ptolemy earlyRoman period and his compendium of bizarre exegeses, many of which may be the improvisations of commentators, like the story thatmakes Adonis beloved of Zeus Schol.
Wolbergs, Griechische religiose Gedichte der ersten nachchristlichen Jahrhunderte [Meisenheim amGlan, ] This was an aristocratic tradition, known first and best from the pederastic effusions of Ibycus and Anacreon, but one thatwas paralleled more andmore in popular art toward the end of the fifth century, as by thepainterParrhasius,whose Theseus "appeared to have been fed on roses.
The gaze-theory towhich Stehle appeals, based on the assumption that "themale figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectifi cation" since "[m]an is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like,"'02is helpless to explain such images as these.
Stehle sees in vase-paintings of a goddess and her mortal beloved, and in the legend they illustrate, "an irreconcilable conflict between two established hierarchies, thatof male and female and that of divine and human,"'03and she finds one way around this impasse by approaching the scene from a hierarchy-dissolving female viewpoint, though allowing that certain motifs could divert amale gaze into a subliminalmother-and-child fantasy.
What resolves the con Dover See Dover on how "the attributes which made a young male attractive to erastai were assumed tomake him no less attractive towomen," with special reference to paintings of the er6menoi of goddesses. For such depictions of Adonis see e. Wehgartner On the lyre as a standard part of the equipage of beautiful young men on vase paintings, including the inamoratiof deities, see Dover First Sappho, fr. See L.
Kurke, ClAnt 11 on the double-edged semantics of habrosyne in the Archaic and Classical periods. This changing tastewas no doubt connected to the increased value placed on private sentiments:men could appreciate habrosyne as a private ideal,while scorning it as a civic one. Wehgartner notes the aristocratic-not to say oligarchic-motifs present inmany late fifth-century representations of Adonis e.
Burn Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures Bloomington, Mulvey's distinction derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis between scopophilic spectation of a woman as erotic object and ego-forming spectation of aman is too limited for our purposes.
She is pleased to find that in such paintings "the scene has been detached from the narrativewhose closure determines its ideological shape" Stehle , but a student of cultural poetics would take the circumstances of the paintings' conception, production, and use as the unavoidable matrix of their content, and so interpret text and context as a continuum thatprovides more than enough ideological closure.
Artistic depictions of Adonis begin appearing inAthens indeed, anywhere in the late fifth century. Itmay have been designed as a gift for an Athenian bride: male iconographers are creating a female gaze in the image of their own. Adonis is shown in left profile, wearing shoulder-length curling hair, a fringed headband, and an expression of almost torpescent bliss: this is the living face of habrosyne.
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