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Aphrodite Ambiguity

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The Aphrodite of early Greece is a maelstrom of ambiguity. This ambiguity stems from the fact that the Greek Aphrodite evolved in Eastern religions and entered Greek tradition with an amalgam of characteristics and foreign traditions behind her. She manifests the traits and actions of a plethora of pre-Homeric Eastern deities including the Mesopotamian Ishtar and Astarte, Avestan Mithras, and the Vedic goddess Uṣas. In Homeric epic, although Aphrodite is a singular goddess, she appears to be an amalgam of beings syncretised into one. The Homeric Aphrodite combines together a multitude of motives traditional to other goddesses in other cultural traditions into one being: just Aphrodite. With so much character, tradition, and power behind her, I argue that the intention of the Homeric tradition is to syncretize the feminine East into one finite deity and to limit the extent …show more content…

Unlike the other Greek divinities (even the latecomer Dionysus whose name shows up in 13th century BC in Linear B), her name and fame are not thoroughly established by the time of Homer. Her name, in fact, is “not attested in Mycenaean Greek,” implying that she was an unknown figure in the Bronze age. While the name “Aphrodite” itself has a relatively standard compilation of epithets in Homeric epic, her eponyms Kupris and Kuthereia “are not attested evenly throughout the [Homeric] corpus, are restricted to relatively few contexts, and have no developed epithet systems” These names “were apparently not well established in Archaic epic.” This, I believe, is because Aphrodite did not exist as herself in pre-Homeric tradition. Instead, the Aphrodite we know and love is a standardized Greek name applied to different Eastern deities as they appear in Homeric tradition. These Eastern goddesses are responsible for many of the motives Aphrodite performs in the Iliad, and yet her name is the one associated with those motives in

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