Aphrodite and Adonis: The Goddess, the Hunter and the Anemone

Adonis is the mortal youth of extraordinary beauty in Greek mythology who was loved by two goddesses at once: Aphrodite, goddess of love, and Persephone, queen of the underworld. Born from the myrrh tree into which his mother had been transformed, he divided his life between them until a wild boar killed him on a hunt, and Aphrodite made the anemone grow from his blood. Partly rooted in the Near East, the myth is more than a love story: it was the basis of the Adonia, a festival at which Greek women mourned the young man’s death every year.

Born from a tree: the birth of Adonis

Adonis’s birth is itself a transformation. In Ovid (Metamorphoses 10.298-502), his mother is Myrrha, daughter of Cinyras, king of Cyprus and a descendant of Pygmalion. The girl falls in love with her own father, knowing the passion is monstrous. Her nurse, who catches her just as she is about to hang herself, arranges for her to share his bed at night during a festival of Ceres. When Cinyras finally brings a lamp and sees who she is, he draws his sword. Myrrha flees, pregnant, as far as the land of Sheba and begs the gods to shut her out of both the world of the living and the world of the dead. She becomes the myrrh tree, whose resin is her tears. Nine months later the bark splits open, the birth goddess Lucina helps the child out, and the naiads anoint him with his mother’s tears.

Apollodorus (3.14.3-4) shows that the family tree varied. For Hesiod, Adonis was the son of Phoenix and Alphesiboea; for the epic poet Panyassis, his mother was Smyrna and his father Theias, king of Assyria. Here it is Aphrodite herself, offended because the girl neglected her worship, who inflicts the passion. The pattern holds: incest, flight, transformation into a tree, and the birth of a child of unearthly beauty.

Aphrodite vs. Persephone: who gets Adonis?

Panyassis, as quoted by Apollodorus, gives the oldest version of Aphrodite’s love. Struck by the newborn’s beauty, the goddess hides him in a chest without the other gods knowing and entrusts it to Persephone. But once the queen of the underworld has seen him, she refuses to give him back.

Zeus is called in and splits the year into three parts: Adonis is to spend one third alone, one with Persephone and one with Aphrodite. The young man chooses to give his own third to Aphrodite as well. Hyginus (Astronomica 2.7) says Zeus refused to judge the case himself and handed it to the Muse Calliope, and that Aphrodite, unhappy with the verdict, took revenge on Calliope’s son Orpheus.

The arrangement echoes Persephone’s own, as she spends part of the year below ground with Hades and the rest with her mother, as told in the abduction of Persephone. Adonis thus becomes a figure who travels back and forth between life and death.

Venus and Adonis in Ovid

Ovid (10.503-559) prefers another opening. One day, while kissing his mother, Eros, quiver on his shoulder, accidentally grazes her with an arrow. The wound runs deeper than it looks, and Venus falls in love with Adonis, now a young man. She abandons Cythera, Paphos and even heaven, and roams mountains and forests with her robe tucked up like Diana’s, hunting at his side.

She sticks to harmless game, hares and deer, and begs her lover to steer clear of boars, wolves, bears and lions. To persuade him, she lies down in the shade of a poplar and tells him the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes (10.560-707). It was Venus who gave the young man the golden apples that let him beat the huntress in a footrace; but the ungrateful couple forgot to thank her and ended up turned into lions. That, she says, is why she hates wild beasts.

The death of Adonis

As soon as Venus drives off in her swan-drawn chariot, Adonis does exactly what she has forbidden. His hounds flush out a boar, and he wounds it with a glancing javelin throw. The beast shakes out the spear, charges the hunter and buries its tusks in his groin (10.708-716).

The goddess hears his groans from the sky, turns back and finds him dying in his own blood. She beats her breast, rails against the Fates and declares that her grief will be remembered: every year, a ritual will reenact Adonis’s death. Then she sprinkles nectar on the blood, which begins to bubble, and within an hour a flower the color of pomegranate springs up. This is the anemone, whose life is as brief as his: the wind, anemos, that gives it its name soon shakes off its loosely held petals (10.717-739).

Why a boar? The variants

Ancient sources disagree about where the boar came from.

• Apollodorus (3.14.4) says Adonis, still a youth, died of a wound from a boar while hunting, through the anger of Artemis, mistress of wild animals.
• A later tradition, found notably in Servius, the commentator on Virgil, makes the boar Ares himself, or a beast he sent: Aphrodite’s established lover takes revenge on his mortal rival.
• Ovid names no culprit. The boar is just a boar, and the fault is Adonis’s for not listening.

Even the flowers vary. Bion of Smyrna, in his Lament for Adonis, divides them: the rose springs from Adonis’s blood, the anemone from Aphrodite’s tears.

The Adonia: a women’s festival

Adonis is one of the few mortals in Greek myth to receive a real cult of mourning. As early as the 6th century BC, Sappho (fr. 140 Voigt) stages a dialogue between young women and the goddess: “Delicate Adonis is dying, Cytherea; what are we to do? Beat your breasts, girls, and tear your tunics.”

In Athens, the Adonia were a private festival, celebrated by women on the rooftops of their houses in midsummer. There they set out the gardens of Adonis: pots or potsherds sown with wheat, barley, lettuce or fennel, which sprouted quickly in the heat and withered almost at once. Aristophanes (Lysistrata 387-398) and Plutarch (Life of Nicias 13) recall that in 415 BC the departure of the Sicilian Expedition coincided with the Adonia, and that the women’s laments were taken as a bad omen. Plato (Phaedrus 276b) uses these gardens as an image of barren sowing, sprung up in eight days just to please the eye.

In Alexandria the festival became royal spectacle. In Theocritus’s Idyll 15, two Syracusan housewives, Gorgo and Praxinoa, push through the crowds to see, in Queen Arsinoe’s palace, the ceremonial couch on which Aphrodite and Adonis lie, and to hear a singer celebrate his return.

Adonis and the Near East

Adonis’s name recalls the Semitic word adon, “lord”, and the Greeks themselves placed the cult’s origins in Cyprus and Phoenicia. Lucian (On the Syrian Goddess 6-8) describes the rites of Adonis at Byblos and the river named after him, whose waters were said to turn red every year with the young man’s blood; a local man offers him a more down-to-earth explanation, red Lebanese soil washed in by the winds.

Historians often compare Adonis to the Mesopotamian god Dumuzi, or Tammuz, lover of Inanna-Ishtar, who was also mourned by women; the prophet Ezekiel (8:14) condemns the women of Jerusalem “weeping for Tammuz”. The parallel illuminates the shape of the myth, a powerful goddess and a young lover doomed to die, even if the exact line of descent is still debated.

Why the myth of Adonis matters

The Adonis myth brings together two themes that run through Greek mythology: fleeting beauty, made visible by the flower and the rooftop gardens, and the division between the upper and lower worlds, which he shares with Persephone. It also shows the limits of Aphrodite’s power: the goddess who can overwhelm gods cannot keep a mortal from dying.

The story inspired Titian (Venus and Adonis, 1554, Prado), who painted Venus clinging to the hunter as he sets off, and Shakespeare, whose poem Venus and Adonis (1593) flips the roles: the goddess chases a young man who cares only for hunting. His name has stayed in the language for a strikingly handsome young man, “an Adonis”.

Further reading

The profile of Aphrodite covers the goddess and her other loves, and Persephone the queen of the underworld who claimed Adonis. Adonis’s Cypriot family line goes back to Pygmalion, and the Muse’s ruling is told in the profile of Calliope. For the story Venus tells her lover, read Atalanta; for another love broken by death, Orpheus and Eurydice. The comparison of gods of love sets Aphrodite beside her counterparts in other mythologies.