The Goddess of Love"s Not-So-Secret Love Children
Considering Aphrodite was the goddess of love and beauty, it’s no surprise that a lot of men – human and divine – found her irresistible. As it turns out, she wasn’t exactly immune to their charms, either. As a result of her passionate affairs, Aphrodite had quite a few kids. But aside from Cupid/Eros and Aeneas, who were Aphrodite’s babies? Not every one of them was a straight-A student, but they mostly made their mom proud.
Among the most famous of Aphrodite’s children is Hermaphroditus. Not surprisingly, given his name, he was her son with Hermes, god of shepherds, travelers, thieves, and mischief, as well as the divine messenger.
In the Odyssey, after Hephaestus, Aphrodite’s husband, traps her in bed with Ares, Hermes and the other gods smirk at her misfortune. Hermes also enthuses about the goddess, saying he’d endure chains thrice as strong as those Hephaestus wrought and an audience to be in bed with her. So she seduced him. How did their kid get his moniker? “His features were such that, in them, both mother and father could be seen: and from them he took his name, Hermaphroditus,” says Ovid.
So what made Hermaphroditus so renowned? He eventually bore both male and female reproductive parts, from which modern language derives the term “hermaphrodite,” as Pliny the Elder explains in his Natural History (albeit in a really rude fashion). His big adventure, as the Roman poet Ovid recounts in the Metamorphoses, was because of a girl. Like any upper-class woman, Aphrodite didn’t nurse her son herself; she gave him to the Naiads, water nymphs, to rear.
Trouble started when he became a teenager and left the Naiads. At fifteen, Hermaphroditus ventured further into Anatolia and saw the most beautiful spring of water. No, this isn’t Narcissus’s story, but this pool didn’t let him off easily. There lived a beautiful nymph named Salmacis in the spring – and she knew what she wanted: “… when she saw the boy, and what she saw, she longed to have.”
Hermaphroditus was still really young and didn’t know much about love. He told Salmacis he wasn’t interested. She pretended to leave him so he could bathe in the spring, but secretly stayed and watched in a creepy way. Salmacis got so turned on by naked Hermaphroditus that she jumped into the water after him. Despite his resistance, she clung to him so much and asked the Olympians, “Grant this, you gods, that no day comes to part me from him, or him from me.” As a result, two became one — “they were not two, but a two-fold form, so that they could not be called male or female, and seemed neither or either.”
Annoyed at his transformation – naturally! – Hermaphroditus asked his mom and dad to make any man who dunked in Salmacis’s spring half a man. Thereafter, if you went for a swim there, you ended up having less testosterone, apparently, than you did before. Not the best-tosterone way to bathe.More »
Priapus is a god of gardening, the son of Aphrodite and Dionysus. This makes sense, says Diodorus Siculus, “for men when under the influence of wine find the members of their bodies tense and inclined to the pleasures of love.”
But he is best known for his giant genital. After all, he’s a god of fertility and wilderness, so it makes sense he’s well-hung! Priapus is exaggerated all over – he’s often ugly, “a child with the head of an old man.” Some say he’s unattractive because Hera, who disapproved of Aphrodite’s loving ways, cursed him in the womb.
What did Priapus really do? He made his money in the fields and gardens. In Vergil’s Georgics, a poem with a focus on pastoral life, Priapus is dubbed “wielder of the willow-scythe.” In his Description of Greece, Pausanias writes that, “This god is worshipped where goats and sheep pasture or there are swarms of bees; but by the people of Lampsacus [in Asia Minor] he is more revered than any other god, being called by them a son of Dionysus and Aphrodite.” Also, “men set up his statue to watch over their vineyards and garden,” adds Diodorus Siculus.
Priapus was not a great guy. According to Ovid in the Fasti, this god, although he was dubbed “glory and guard of gardens,” fell in love with a nymph named Lotis. She wasn’t into him, but, after a party where everybody got drunk, Priapus tried to rape her. Thankfully, the satyr Silenus spotted him in time and “gave out an ill-timed roar,” so Lotis woke up before he could violate her. He’s often accused of attempted rape in mythology. So associated with sexuality was Priapus that he lent his name to the title of a comedy by Xenarchus.More »
Although sometimes called the son of Poseidon (as Pseudo-Apollodorus says), this Sicilian king is also known as the son of the Argonaut Butes and Aphrodite. When Heracles was completing his Labors, he strutted around Sicily while driving the cattle of Geryon before him, and came across Eryx.
Heracles challenged Eryx to a wrestling contest. “The story is that Heracles wrestled with Eryx on these terms: if Heracles won, the land of Eryx was to belong to him but if he were beaten, Eryx was to depart with the cows of Geryon,” says Pausanias. Pseudo-Apollodorus claims that Eryx “borrowed” one of Heracles’ bulls and wouldn’t give it up unless Heracles beat him at wrestling.
But Diodorus Siculus – who’s the guy who supports Eryx’s divine parentage from Aphrodite - claims Eryx was the one to challenge Heracles. The bargain was the same as the one mentioned above, but Eryx here thinks that cows are worth less than land. Heracles points out he’ll probably lose his immortality if he loses the cows, which Eryx agreed is a fair trade.
Unfortunately for Eryx, Heracles was an awesome wrestler, so the Sicilian king was defeated and killed. Heracles won and his descendants eventually laid claim to the land. But the area continued to be called “Eryx” after its former monarch.More »
Aphrodite’s most famous lover was Adonis. With him, she had Beroe. In Nonnius’s Dionysiaca, which dates from the fifth century A.D., the poet praises Beroe, a wondrous ancient city in Lebanon that’s the mythical antecedent of modern Beirut. But the city was named for a beautiful woman who founded the place! Some say, as Nonnius claims, “that her mother was Cythereia [Aphrodite] herself, the pilot of human life, who bore her, all white, to Assyrian Adonis.”
Beroe had a really royal crowd there – gods and Titans alike celebrated. Even the lions nearby jumped for joy. A “horse rattled off, scraping the ground with thuds of
galloping feet, as he beat out a birthday tune.” Beroe ate and drank wisdom – literally – as an infant and wore the stars as a necklace.
Eventually, Beroe became an attendant of Artemis. She was so beautiful that Thetis, Achilles’s mother, got jealous, and even Zeus wanted to have sex with her! To honor her lovely child, Aphrodite wanted to name a city after her own daughter, so she built Beroe. It was prophesied the city would be called Berytos, and that the area would prosper under Rome.
When she got older, Beroe became so gorgeous that both Dionysus and Poseidon wanted her. Eros used his arrows to make both guys really into her and give her gifts only they could provide (grapes and powers of the sea). Aphrodite bid them duel for her hand, but Dionysus saw an omen that said he wouldn’t win; he still fought, though, and Beroe married Poseidon. The end!More »
By her lover Ares, Aphrodite had a few kids, including Harmonia, who's best known for having the most infamous wedding this side of Kimye. To make a long story short, a guy named Cadmus founded the city of Thebes after killing a big snake. That serpent was a servant of Ares, however, and, “to atone for the slaughter, [he] served Ares for an eternal year; and the year was then equivalent to eight years of our reckoning,” according to Pseudo-Apollodorus.
After that, Cadmus became a favorite of the gods. Athena made him king of Thebes, while “Zeus gave him to wife Harmonia, daughter of Aphrodite and Ares.” And all of the gods came to the wedding. One big gift was a robe and magic necklace that went on to cause a whole lot of trouble for her descendants. Check out some tragedies for more info on that.
Harmonia had a whole bunch of kids with Cadmus: “Autonoe, Ino, Semele, Agave, and a son, Polydorus,” says Pseudo-Apollodorus. This was one unlucky in love family. Zeus fell in love with Semele, but Hera got jealous and tricked the unwise princess into getting the god to reveal his true self to her. Semele burned to a crisp. But Zeus saved their unborn child, a god to be named Dionysus, whom Hera drove mad. Ino tried to protect her nephew Dionysus from his jealous stepmother, but as Euripides reveals in Medea, she was “driven mad by the gods when Hera sent her forth to wander in madness from the house.”
As punishment for seeing her naked, the goddess Artemis turned Autonoe’s son Actaeon into a deer and ordered his own hunting dogs to devour him. Agave also had a baby boy, Pentheus, who became king of Thebes. Foolishly, Pentheus didn’t believe that his cousin Dionysus was a god, so the lord of grapes drove his cuz and aunts insane. Agave ended up tearing her son limb from limb. Polydorus ended up being the ancestor of the ill-fated Laius and Oedipus.
Depressed about their family’s fate, Cadmus and Harmonia left Thebes behind in their old age. Dionysus turned them into serpents out of mercy, as he announces in Euripides’s Bacchae: “You will become a dragon, and your wife, Harmonia, Ares' daughter, whom you though mortal held in marriage, will be turned into a beast, and will receive in exchange the form of a serpent.” Cadmus ended up ruling over the Illyrians – a people who lived to the ill-defined lands east of Greece -. They even had a late in life baby, aptly named Illyrius, and then were “sent away by Zeus to the Elysian Fields,” according to Pseudo-Apollodorus.More »
1. Hermaphroditus
Among the most famous of Aphrodite’s children is Hermaphroditus. Not surprisingly, given his name, he was her son with Hermes, god of shepherds, travelers, thieves, and mischief, as well as the divine messenger.
In the Odyssey, after Hephaestus, Aphrodite’s husband, traps her in bed with Ares, Hermes and the other gods smirk at her misfortune. Hermes also enthuses about the goddess, saying he’d endure chains thrice as strong as those Hephaestus wrought and an audience to be in bed with her. So she seduced him. How did their kid get his moniker? “His features were such that, in them, both mother and father could be seen: and from them he took his name, Hermaphroditus,” says Ovid.
So what made Hermaphroditus so renowned? He eventually bore both male and female reproductive parts, from which modern language derives the term “hermaphrodite,” as Pliny the Elder explains in his Natural History (albeit in a really rude fashion). His big adventure, as the Roman poet Ovid recounts in the Metamorphoses, was because of a girl. Like any upper-class woman, Aphrodite didn’t nurse her son herself; she gave him to the Naiads, water nymphs, to rear.
Trouble started when he became a teenager and left the Naiads. At fifteen, Hermaphroditus ventured further into Anatolia and saw the most beautiful spring of water. No, this isn’t Narcissus’s story, but this pool didn’t let him off easily. There lived a beautiful nymph named Salmacis in the spring – and she knew what she wanted: “… when she saw the boy, and what she saw, she longed to have.”
Hermaphroditus was still really young and didn’t know much about love. He told Salmacis he wasn’t interested. She pretended to leave him so he could bathe in the spring, but secretly stayed and watched in a creepy way. Salmacis got so turned on by naked Hermaphroditus that she jumped into the water after him. Despite his resistance, she clung to him so much and asked the Olympians, “Grant this, you gods, that no day comes to part me from him, or him from me.” As a result, two became one — “they were not two, but a two-fold form, so that they could not be called male or female, and seemed neither or either.”
Annoyed at his transformation – naturally! – Hermaphroditus asked his mom and dad to make any man who dunked in Salmacis’s spring half a man. Thereafter, if you went for a swim there, you ended up having less testosterone, apparently, than you did before. Not the best-tosterone way to bathe.More »
2. Priapus
Priapus is a god of gardening, the son of Aphrodite and Dionysus. This makes sense, says Diodorus Siculus, “for men when under the influence of wine find the members of their bodies tense and inclined to the pleasures of love.”
But he is best known for his giant genital. After all, he’s a god of fertility and wilderness, so it makes sense he’s well-hung! Priapus is exaggerated all over – he’s often ugly, “a child with the head of an old man.” Some say he’s unattractive because Hera, who disapproved of Aphrodite’s loving ways, cursed him in the womb.
What did Priapus really do? He made his money in the fields and gardens. In Vergil’s Georgics, a poem with a focus on pastoral life, Priapus is dubbed “wielder of the willow-scythe.” In his Description of Greece, Pausanias writes that, “This god is worshipped where goats and sheep pasture or there are swarms of bees; but by the people of Lampsacus [in Asia Minor] he is more revered than any other god, being called by them a son of Dionysus and Aphrodite.” Also, “men set up his statue to watch over their vineyards and garden,” adds Diodorus Siculus.
Priapus was not a great guy. According to Ovid in the Fasti, this god, although he was dubbed “glory and guard of gardens,” fell in love with a nymph named Lotis. She wasn’t into him, but, after a party where everybody got drunk, Priapus tried to rape her. Thankfully, the satyr Silenus spotted him in time and “gave out an ill-timed roar,” so Lotis woke up before he could violate her. He’s often accused of attempted rape in mythology. So associated with sexuality was Priapus that he lent his name to the title of a comedy by Xenarchus.More »
3. Eryx
Although sometimes called the son of Poseidon (as Pseudo-Apollodorus says), this Sicilian king is also known as the son of the Argonaut Butes and Aphrodite. When Heracles was completing his Labors, he strutted around Sicily while driving the cattle of Geryon before him, and came across Eryx.
Heracles challenged Eryx to a wrestling contest. “The story is that Heracles wrestled with Eryx on these terms: if Heracles won, the land of Eryx was to belong to him but if he were beaten, Eryx was to depart with the cows of Geryon,” says Pausanias. Pseudo-Apollodorus claims that Eryx “borrowed” one of Heracles’ bulls and wouldn’t give it up unless Heracles beat him at wrestling.
But Diodorus Siculus – who’s the guy who supports Eryx’s divine parentage from Aphrodite - claims Eryx was the one to challenge Heracles. The bargain was the same as the one mentioned above, but Eryx here thinks that cows are worth less than land. Heracles points out he’ll probably lose his immortality if he loses the cows, which Eryx agreed is a fair trade.
Unfortunately for Eryx, Heracles was an awesome wrestler, so the Sicilian king was defeated and killed. Heracles won and his descendants eventually laid claim to the land. But the area continued to be called “Eryx” after its former monarch.More »
4. Beroe
Aphrodite’s most famous lover was Adonis. With him, she had Beroe. In Nonnius’s Dionysiaca, which dates from the fifth century A.D., the poet praises Beroe, a wondrous ancient city in Lebanon that’s the mythical antecedent of modern Beirut. But the city was named for a beautiful woman who founded the place! Some say, as Nonnius claims, “that her mother was Cythereia [Aphrodite] herself, the pilot of human life, who bore her, all white, to Assyrian Adonis.”
Beroe had a really royal crowd there – gods and Titans alike celebrated. Even the lions nearby jumped for joy. A “horse rattled off, scraping the ground with thuds of
galloping feet, as he beat out a birthday tune.” Beroe ate and drank wisdom – literally – as an infant and wore the stars as a necklace.
Eventually, Beroe became an attendant of Artemis. She was so beautiful that Thetis, Achilles’s mother, got jealous, and even Zeus wanted to have sex with her! To honor her lovely child, Aphrodite wanted to name a city after her own daughter, so she built Beroe. It was prophesied the city would be called Berytos, and that the area would prosper under Rome.
When she got older, Beroe became so gorgeous that both Dionysus and Poseidon wanted her. Eros used his arrows to make both guys really into her and give her gifts only they could provide (grapes and powers of the sea). Aphrodite bid them duel for her hand, but Dionysus saw an omen that said he wouldn’t win; he still fought, though, and Beroe married Poseidon. The end!More »
5. Harmonia
By her lover Ares, Aphrodite had a few kids, including Harmonia, who's best known for having the most infamous wedding this side of Kimye. To make a long story short, a guy named Cadmus founded the city of Thebes after killing a big snake. That serpent was a servant of Ares, however, and, “to atone for the slaughter, [he] served Ares for an eternal year; and the year was then equivalent to eight years of our reckoning,” according to Pseudo-Apollodorus.
After that, Cadmus became a favorite of the gods. Athena made him king of Thebes, while “Zeus gave him to wife Harmonia, daughter of Aphrodite and Ares.” And all of the gods came to the wedding. One big gift was a robe and magic necklace that went on to cause a whole lot of trouble for her descendants. Check out some tragedies for more info on that.
Harmonia had a whole bunch of kids with Cadmus: “Autonoe, Ino, Semele, Agave, and a son, Polydorus,” says Pseudo-Apollodorus. This was one unlucky in love family. Zeus fell in love with Semele, but Hera got jealous and tricked the unwise princess into getting the god to reveal his true self to her. Semele burned to a crisp. But Zeus saved their unborn child, a god to be named Dionysus, whom Hera drove mad. Ino tried to protect her nephew Dionysus from his jealous stepmother, but as Euripides reveals in Medea, she was “driven mad by the gods when Hera sent her forth to wander in madness from the house.”
As punishment for seeing her naked, the goddess Artemis turned Autonoe’s son Actaeon into a deer and ordered his own hunting dogs to devour him. Agave also had a baby boy, Pentheus, who became king of Thebes. Foolishly, Pentheus didn’t believe that his cousin Dionysus was a god, so the lord of grapes drove his cuz and aunts insane. Agave ended up tearing her son limb from limb. Polydorus ended up being the ancestor of the ill-fated Laius and Oedipus.
Depressed about their family’s fate, Cadmus and Harmonia left Thebes behind in their old age. Dionysus turned them into serpents out of mercy, as he announces in Euripides’s Bacchae: “You will become a dragon, and your wife, Harmonia, Ares' daughter, whom you though mortal held in marriage, will be turned into a beast, and will receive in exchange the form of a serpent.” Cadmus ended up ruling over the Illyrians – a people who lived to the ill-defined lands east of Greece -. They even had a late in life baby, aptly named Illyrius, and then were “sent away by Zeus to the Elysian Fields,” according to Pseudo-Apollodorus.More »
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