Books
The love machine
Peter Conrad
The Goddess of Love: The Birth, Triumph, Death and Rebirth of Aphrodite Geoffrey Grigson (Constable £6.50) Gods are picaresque characters, experts in prudent metamorphosis and startling recurrence who adopt the camouflage of new names, shelter underground, and even annually sham death, absent but omnipresent. Their existence is migratory, and in their travels they litter the map with traces of themselves. Geoffrey Grigson's pursuit of Aphrodite begins on the Cypriot beach where she is thought to have emerged from a vagrant scallop, but extends throughout the Aegean, to the Scilly Isles, and uncovers the goddess at a Roman station in Northumberland or a mosaic from Rudston in Yorkshire where a Venus with a bloated belly rallies hunters to the chase.
Mr Grigson insists that The Goddess of Love is not a work of classical scholarship. Rather it is a biography of an elusive, alluring subject who has no single identity because she is an amalgam of divergent superstitions, and because she is all things to all artists. Aphrodite is successively Homer's dimpling joker, Lucretius's generative provider, a Venetian prostitute for Titian, a feverish pervert for Swinburne, and for Auden an anarchist who mourns at the grave of her reluctant worshipper Freud. Empedocles impersonalised her, considering her 'less ... a divinity than ... a force of nature,' a philosophical principle of redemption working to heal the strife of the universe; and as Empedocles makes her an invisible impulsion, so Mr Grigson's Aphrodite sheds the appearance of individuality, and his book turns into a work of erotic detection, guessing at the meaning of Aphrodite by assembling the clues about herself which she scatters through the classical landscape.
Her birth was in a scallop: Botticelli's matutinal marine Venus stands poised on a shell. Mr Grigson's explanation of this Peculiar origin tracks her through both nature and language. He points out that she ripens in a sea-womb, which contains a 'necklace of Aphrodite' in the ring of glittering eyes around the scallop-flesh, and then discloses that Greek 'kteis' and Latin 'concha' are words meaning both shell and the female genitals. Aphrodite is also a crystallisation of the sea and its spermatic foam: at Paphos initiates were given 'cakes of salt symbolising Aphrodite's emergence from the sea.' Ferns are also evidence of her Presence: a Cypriot spring where she bathed after bouts of love is surrounded by 'that fern which came to be called in Latin capillus veneris,' her lacy pubic hair. Her lovers she commemorates with flowers: from the blood of Adonis she made the anemone. Vanishing into the earth which she replenishes, the animistic goddess leaves declarations of her character in the landscapes near her temples. Vincent Scully has argued that temple-sites were chosen as symbolic tributes to the gods they served, and Aphrodite's locations were forceful aggressive places, violent declivities, 'with a view of a sexual cleft or rocky horizon, or the sexual shape of some conical hill or the drama of an upsurge of rock.' Even her attendant birds are insidiously symbolic. Doves haunt the temples of Aphrodite because, like the birds in Henry Green's Loving, they are indefatigably flirtatious and suggestive: 'their crooning. . . is a music of the preliminaries, their comfortable quality is the languor of afterwards.'
Through nature, Aphrodite sinks into language. Folk-etymology derives her name from 'aphros,' foam. The correct derivation is from Ashtoreth, since she arrives in Greece from the Orient ; but the Greeks were incapable of pronouncing that word and lispingly altered it to Aphrodite, supposing that the first syllable of their garbled name for her was their own word for the foam of fertilising waters. But their error has a poetic justice. Another linguistic clue to Aphrodite is the pun which connects two of her attributes. She is Aphrodite Philommedes, the lover of genitals, born of the foam which boiled up round the lewd members of Ouranos when Kronos sliced them off. But this title slides into Philommeides, 'Lover of laughter, lover of the gaieties,' the unmisgiving delight of sex. The pun is a device which suits Aphrodite: a copulation of words, language's selfinsemination, it commemorates her subversion of propriety and singleness of meaning, and her invasion of all departments of
existence.
Invisible in order to be ubiquitous, Aphrodite has had to trust herself to the image-makers, so that her history is one Of misrepresentation. Among the Greeks, she remained an eastern immigrant : unable to connect her plausibly with the company of Olympos, they exiled her to Cyprus, 'just beyond the horizons of normality,' or to Dodona in the remote north-west where she was insultingly served by 'priests with unwashed feet and pigeon-priestesses.' She is, as Cavafy thought, an undomesticated Greek still perturbed by an Asian emotionalism. Like all gods, she is the victim of human error and impertinence. She rounds on Praxiteles, who, like a peeping Tom, has dared to show her naked, but has been unable to protest against her later institutionalisation as Roman Venus. Mr Grigson, her votary, does so on her behalf.
As the decorous gods of Rome, dispensers of welfare, government agencies in the sky, first doubled and then absorbed their more incontinent and imperative Greek counterparts, so Aphrodite dwindled into the chaster, neutral Venus. Even the gender of her new name was an injury: Venus is either 'a word of neuter form which was feminine, or the name of a goddess which was perversely neuter.' Mr Grigson follows the name to a root-word meaning to win or to want, and suggests that Venus had become a creature of convenience ministering to humans, not frenetically tyrannising them, benevolent and practical unlike the obsessive Aphrodite. At the same time the raging Eros forfeited his divinity and declined into the pert go-between Cupid, the ill-tempered infant of Elizabethan sonnets or the precocious adolescent of Bronzino's picture in the National Gallery, clutching the breasts of a bloodless, sinuous, reptilian Venus. Mr Grigson commends Swinburne for restoring to Aphrodite her name and her implacability, recovering her original meaning which had been suppressed by the sedate, matronly Venus. But Venus has her own interesting romantic posterity, as Wagner's spurned revenging Id in Tannhauser, as Beardsley's mannequin in Under the Hill who laps up the aperitif ejected by her pet unicorn, as Anthony Powell's Baltic adulteress in a Venusberg which is now a seedy night-club, or as Iris Murdoch's dialectical dramatist in The Nice and the Good.
Personal quirkiness is a virtue in a book like this, and Mr Grigson is an unrepentantly individualistic writer. He nicely balances lyricism and a witty earthiness in, for instance, a defence of sacral prostitution, and rebukes, on Aphrodite's behalf, `that peculiar Oxford bachelor, the late Sir Maurice Bowra.' Enthusiasm occasionally aRowses his language: he refers slangily to lustful 'goings on,' and remarks on the gusto with which Aphrodite's followers 'went to it.' But this is a fine book, and one ironically appropriate to a season celebrating the birth of Aphrodite's enemy, the 'pale Galilean,' who emerged, not from a fleshy scallop, but from a virgin womb.
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