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1. Venus and Adonis: Summary Adonis is a youth of striking beauty. (That is the one fact of the myth still popularly remembered-we still, if often ironically, call a handsome man ‘an Adonis’.) Aphrodite or Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, falls in love with him, and they become lovers. Against her advice, he goes out hunting, and is gored to death by the tusks of a wild boar (or sometimes by a jealous god, Aphrodite’s lover Ares/Mars, or her husband Hephaestus/Vulcan, in the form of a boar). Aphrodite mourns his death, and changes his body into a flower, the lovely but fragile anemone. 2. Ovid’s version focused on the parentage and birth of Adonis A fuller version extends the story to include Adonis’s parentage and birth. He is the child of an incestuous union between a king and his daughter. The most familiar version, Ovid’s, names them as Cinyras, king of Cyprus, and his daughter Myrrha. Myrrha is seized by an incestuous desire for her father (unexplained in Ovid, but said by others to be a punishment from Aphrodite for Myrrha’s neglect of her worship or her parents’ hubristic boasting about her beauty). With the help of her nurse, she smuggles herself in disguise into his bed. When Cinyras discovers the trick, he tries to kill her, but some friendly deity saves the pregnant Myrrha by transforming her into a myrrh tree; her tears become myrrh, the aromatic resin valued by the ancients for its perfume (and familiar to modern readers as one of the gifts brought by the three Wise Men to the infant Jesus-gold, frankincense, and myrrh). Adonis is then born, miraculously, from the trunk of the tree. 3. The Cult of Adonis Every year in spring or midsummer, in the Greek world and round the eastern Mediterranean, the death, and sometimes the resurrection, of Adonis were re-enacted. Almost always women took the chief role in the mourning. At Byblos in Syria, where the River Adonis (swollen in spring with red earth washed down from the mountains) was said to run red with the young hero’s blood, women wept and lamented to the sound of flutes, but next day celebrated his resurrection and ascent to heaven. In Alexandria the pattern was reversed: the first day of the festival celebrated the sacred marriage of Aphrodite and Adonis, with images of the lovers laid on couches and surrounded by offerings of food and flowers; on the second day the image of Adonis was carried through the streets by mourners and cast into the sea-but with the promise that he would return again next year. At Athens in midsummer women climbed on to the flat roof-tops to mark Adonis’s love and death with celebration and grief; Athenian men looked askance at these unofficial female rites, and a character in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata compains of serious government business being interrupted by drunken women howling ‘garden of Adonis!’ on the roof. As part of the ritual and women prepared ‘gardens of Adonis’: shallow pots of earth planted with grass and flowers, set on the roof-top to grow and wither rapidly, and finally cast out to sea with the effigy of the dead god. 4. Dumuzi or Tammuz, the Asian origin of Adonis In Mesopotamian myths, Dumuzi/Tammuz was the lover and consort of the great mother goddess, variously known to different peoples as Ishtar or Astarte or Inanna. The sexual union of the goddess and her lover represented and maintained the fertility of the whole world, human, animal, and vegetable. Tammuz’s death and Ishtar’s grieving descent into the underworld brought famine and barrenness upon the world, averted only when the underworld gods released both the goddess and her lover to return to the upper world. Each summer throughout the Middle East women lamented Tammuz’s death and prayed for his return. 5. The Dumuzi/Tammuz legend as a seasonal myth in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Like the Greek myth of Persephone, it represents the yearly death and renewal of the crops on which human life depends...this reading was put into its classic form in the early twentieth century in Sir James Frazer’s enormously influential The Golden Bough. For Frazer the stories of Tammuz and Adonis and many other mythological figures were manifestations of a single grand, world-spanning myth of the dying and reviving vegetation god. His reading in turn shaped some of the major twentieth-century versions of the myth. 6. Conflicting strains of the story of Venus and Adonis On the one hand, an allegorical strain which treats the union of Venus and Adonis primarily as a symbol of natural fertility and renewal, with Adonis’s resurrection as the key fact of the story; on the other hand, a tradition which focuses on the human love story, as embodying the joy and pain of sexual love, and ending with the tragic waste and fruitlessness of Adonis’s death. 7. Venus and Adonis in Classical Literature Theocritus: Theocritus’s fifteenth Idyll describes the festival of Adonis in Alexandria at the court of his patrons, the Hellenistic rulers of Egypt: the images of Aphrodite and Adonis laid out on their marriage bed amid a profusion of splendid tapestries, miniature gardens, purple blankets, perfumes, cakes and puddings, music and song, to celebrate a night of love before the morning when Adonis must be carried out and drowned. Theocritus’s sophisticated and witty twist is to portray the festival though the eyes of a pair of Alexandrian housewives. Their grumbling conversation about their mundane problems-the price of shopping, incompetent servants, traffic jams and street crime, above all the deficiencies of their husbands and the frustrations of married life provides a comically down-to-earth counterpoint to the idealised serenity of the divine union. Bion and Moschus: Bion’s ‘Lament for Adonis’ takes a very different approach, recreating the original mythic scene-Adonis’s death, the grief of Aphrodite, the mourning of her followers and of the whole natural world-with vivid sensuous images and stark pathos. We have the sense of viewing a tragic event as it happens, but also the first enactment of a ritual that will be re-enacted over and over in years to come: 'There is time enough to come for your grief,/time to weep, time to sorrow, as year succeeds year.' Bion’s ‘Lament’, combined with the elegy, for Bion himself traditionally attributed to Moschus, inaugurates the traditional association between the Adonis myth and the genre of pastoral elegy. Ovid: The Venus and Adonis story is one of the narratives of tragic or forbidden love sung by the bereaved Orpheus, but it is told quickly and simply; Ovid seems more interested in the melodramatic tale of Myrrha’s incest and the inset romantic tragedy of Atalanta and Hippomenes. The story itself is told with charm, quiet humour (especially in the image of Venus, in the classical equivalent of a tracksuit, trying to keep up with her athletic toy boy), and gentle pathos at the end. There is no sense of ritual, or of religious or allegorical meaning: Ovid initiates the treatment of the story as a merely human one, unencumbered with symbolic significance.
 
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