Classical Mythology Training

Aphrodite (Venus):
In Greek mythology, Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture. According to
Hesiod, she was born when Uranus (the father of the gods) was castrated by his son Cronus.
Cronus threw the severed genitals into the ocean which began to churn and foam about them.
From the aphros ("sea foam") arose Aphrodite, and the sea carried her to either Cyprus or
Cythera. Hence she is often referred to as Kypris and Cytherea. Homer calls her a daughter of
Zeus and Dione.
After her birth, Zeus was afraid that the gods would fight over Aphrodite's hand in marriage so
he married her off to the smith god Hephaestus, the steadiest of the gods. He could hardly
believe his good luck and used all his skills to make the most lavish jewels for her. He made her
a girdle of finely wrought gold and wove magic into the filigree work. That was not very wise of
him, for when she wore her magic girdle no one could resist her, and she was all too irresistible
already. She loved gaiety and glamour and was not at all pleased at being the wife of sooty, hard-
working Hephaestus.
Aphrodite loved and was loved by many gods and mortals. Among her mortal lovers, the most
famous was perhaps Adonis. Some of her sons are Eros, Anteros, Hymenaios and Aeneas (with
her Trojan lover Anchises). She is accompanied by the Graces.
Her festival is the Aphrodisiac which was celebrated in various centers of Greece and especially
in Athens and Corinth. Her priestesses were not prostitutes but women who represented the
goddess and sexual intercourse with them was considered just one of the methods of worship.
Aphrodite was originally an old-Asian goddess, similar to the Mesopotamian Ishtar and the Syro-
Palestinian goddess Ashtart. Her attributes are a.o. the dolphin, the dove, the swan, the
pomegranate and the lime tree.
In Roman mythology Venus is the goddess of love and beauty and Cupid is love's messenger.
http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/europe/greek/articles.html
http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195170726.001.0001/acref-
9780195170726-e-82?rskey=Q0IMBs&result=82
pg. 57 Gods and mortals in classical mythology BL 715 .G67 1973



Achilles:
Achilles was the son of the mortal Peleus and the Nereid Thetis. He was the mightiest of the
Greeks who fought in the Trojan War, and was the hero of Homer's Iliad.
Thetis attempted unsuccessfully to make her son immortal. There are two versions of the story.
In the earlier version, Thetis anointed the infant with ambrosia and then placed him upon a fire to
burn away his mortal portions; she was interrupted by Peleus, whereupon she abandoned both
father and son in a rage. Peleus placed the child in the care of the Centaur Chiron, who raised
and educated the boy. In the later version, she held the young Achilles by the heel and dipped
him in the river Styx; everything the sacred waters touched became invulnerable, but the heel
remained dry and therefore unprotected.
When Achilles was a boy, the seer Calchas prophesied that the city of Troy could not be taken
without his help. Thetis knew that, if her son went to Troy, he would die an early death, so she
sent him to the court of Lycomedes, in Scyros; there he was hidden, disguised as a young girl.
During his stay he had an affair with Lycomedes' daughter, Deidameia, and she had a son,
Pyrrhus (or Neoptolemus), by him. Achilles' disguise was finally penetrated by Odysseus, who
placed arms and armor amidst a display of women's finery and seized upon Achilles when he
was the only "maiden" to be fascinated by the swords and shields. Achilles then went willingly
with Odysseus to Troy, leading a host of his father's Myrmidons and accompanied by his tutor
Phoenix and his close friend Patroclus. At Troy, Achilles distinguished himself as an
undefeatable warrior. Among his other exploits, he captured twenty-three towns in Trojan
territory, including the town of Lyrnessos, where he took the woman Briseis as a war-prize. Later
on Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, was forced by an oracle of Apollo to give up his own
war-prize, the woman Chryseis, and took Briseis away from Achilles as compensation for his
loss. This action sparked the central plot of the Iliad, for Achilles became enraged and refused to
fight for the Greeks any further. The war went badly, and the Greeks offered handsome
reparations to their greatest warrior; Achilles still refused to fight in person, but he agreed to
allow his friend Patroclus to fight in his place, wearing his armor. The next day Patroclus was
killed and stripped of the armor by the Trojan hero Hector, who mistook him for Achilles.
Achilles was overwhelmed with grief for his friend and rage at Hector. His mother obtained
magnificent new armor for him from Hephaestus, and he returned to the fighting and killed
Hector. He desecrated the body, dragging it behind his chariot before the walls of Troy, and
refused to allow it to receive funeral rites. When Priam, the king of Troy and Hector's father,
came secretly into the Greek camp to plead for the body, Achilles finally relented; in one of the
most moving scenes of the Iliad, he received Priam graciously and allowed him to take the body
away.
After the death of Hector, Achilles' days were numbered. He continued fighting heroically,
killing many of the Trojans and their allies, including Memnon and the Amazon warrior
Penthesilia. Finally Priam's son Paris (or Alexander), aided by Apollo, wounded Achilles in the
heel with an arrow; Achilles died of the wound. After his death, it was decided to award Achilles'
divinely-wrought armor to the bravest of the Greeks. Odysseus and Ajax competed for the prize,
with each man making a speech explaining why he deserved the honor; Odysseus won, and Ajax
then went mad and committed suicide.
During his lifetime, Achilles is also said to have had a number of romantic episodes. He
reportedly fell in love with Penthesilia, the Amazon maiden whom he killed in battle, and it is
claimed that he married Medea. http://www.pantheon.org/areas/heroes/articles.html
http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195170726.001.0001/acref-
9780195170726-e-4?rskey=wcihyN&result=4
pg. 11 Gods and mortals in classical mythology BL 715 .G67 1973 (Pyrrhus/Neoptolemus
mentioned pg 12)