A gutsy goddess
CATHERINE NIXEY applauds a marvellous biography of a goddess that delves beneath her passive modern image
Venus & Aphrodite: History of a Goddess
by Bettany Hughes Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288 pages, £12.99
On 10 March 1914, a woman named Mary Richardson walked into the National Gallery in London carrying a meat cleaver. The suffragette walked up to Velázquez’s famous Rokeby Venus, which shows Venus’s naked back as she gazes into a mirror, and plunged the meat cleaver straight through Venus’s bottom. “I couldn’t stand,” Richardson stated later, “the way men gawped at it all day long.”
The world was appalled. Read Bettany Hughes’s marvellous new book, Venus & Aphrodite, and you suspect that Aphrodite herself would probably have rather approved. Picture Aphrodite today and you tend to imagine a typical pre-Raphaelite pretty: plump, pink, passive. Don’t be fooled. That might be how the Edwardians and Victorians imagined her, but Hughes argues this goddess is “a barometer” of our lust. And she wasn’t always such a sap.
Take Inanna, Aphrodite’s Sumerian forebear. From the third millennium BC, this goddess presided over lives of the nasty, brutish and short variety. This was a time when women were “mothers at 12, grandmothers at 24, dead by 30”. Aphrodites of more refined eras might have enjoyed being coy, but this age had no time for such nonsense – and it shows. “Who will plough my vulva?” Inanna demands in a contemporary poem. “Who will plough my wet ground?”
Darwinian selection pressures apply to gods as much as animals, and Hughes’s account of Aphrodite’s early evolution forms the most fascinating sections of this superb book. As women became more passive, so the bellicose goddess’s weapons (and clothes) were gradually stripped from her. Increasing coyness and Christianity took their toll until finally the only weapon she held was a mirror. In the case of the Venus de Milo, she couldn’t even manage that. The goddess had been disarmed in the most final way possible.
One might think that such a goddess would have little to say to our own age.
On the contrary, says Hughes. Not only is Aphrodite a past master of sexual fluidity (her child with Hermes was the original ‘Herm-aphrodite’) but her influence is everywhere still. Walk into a toilet and the sign you see on the door – that circle with a cross beneath – is the ancient astrological sign for Venus, thought perhaps to represent the goddess’s looking glass. Even now, Aphrodite holds a mirror up to us all. Catherine Nixey is the author of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (Macmillan, 2017)