Adonis

• 1. Introduction

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  Adonis's earliest appearance in Greek writing comes from Sappho of Lesbos, around 630 BC. In a surviving poem fragment, a chorus of young girls asks Aphrodite what they should do to mourn Adonis. The goddess replies: beat your breasts and tear your tunics. That reply reveals something already established. A mortal man beloved by two Olympian goddesses had generated his own annual ritual of collective grief. His name traces back to a Canaanite word meaning "lord." His story's roots run deeper still, through Levantine and Mesopotamian predecessors that predate classical Greece by centuries. How did a Near Eastern "lord" become the Greek ideal of male beauty? Why did his myth drive women to climb their rooftops every summer with small makeshift gardens? And why, two millennia after Sappho, was William Shakespeare still composing poems about his death?

• 2. Eastern Roots

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  The Syrian name for Adonis is Gauas, a clue to how far the deity had traveled before the Greeks adopted him. Most modern scholars trace the story of Aphrodite and Adonis to a Levantine version of the older Mesopotamian myth of Inanna and Dumuzid. Inanna and Dumuzid are also known by their East Semitic names, Ishtar and Tammuz. The Greek name Adonis descends from the Canaanite word ʼadōn, meaning "lord." That root also produced Adonai, a title for God in the Hebrew Bible and still in use in Judaism today. In chapter 8, Ezekiel names the deity under the earlier form Tammuz. The passage describes women mourning Tammuz's death near the north gate of the Temple in Jerusalem. Scholars suggest the cult may have reached the Kingdom of Judah during the reign of King Manasseh. The scholar Walter Burkert drew a direct line between the Greek and Near Eastern traditions. He noted that women in both cultures weep by the gate for the dying god, burn incense on rooftops, and plant quick-germinating greens. Burkert called these "the very features of the Adonis legend." The broad influence of Near Eastern culture on early Greek religion is now dated to the eighth century BC. At that time, archaic Greece sat on the fringes of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In Cyprus, the cult of Adonis eventually displaced an older local tradition, supplanting the worship of a deity named Cinyras.

• 3. The Adonia Festival

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  By the seventh century BC, the festival of Adonia was already established in Lesbos. It reached its greatest popularity in Athens during the mid-fifth century BC. Every midsummer, women would plant an "Adonis garden," a small collection of fast-growing plants placed in a basket or a shallow piece of broken pottery. Typical plants included lettuce, fennel, wheat, and barley. The women then climbed ladders to the roofs of their houses and set the gardens out in the full heat of the summer sun. The plants would sprout first, then quickly wither in the heat. While waiting for the withering, the women burned incense to Adonis on the rooftops. Once the plants had died, the mourning began. Women tore their clothes and beat their breasts in a public display of grief, lamenting the dead god. They then laid a statuette of Adonis on a bier and carried it down to the sea along with all the withered plants. The festival concluded when the women threw the effigy and the gardens together out into the water. Burkert saw the festival as filling a specific need in ancient women's lives. It offered a legitimate outlet for unbridled emotional expression. This stood in deliberate contrast to the official women's festivals honoring Demeter, where strict order was maintained. In Idyll 15, the early third-century BC poet Theocritus depicted the festival in verse. His Adonis is still an adolescent, described as having down on his cheeks at the time of his love affair with Aphrodite.

• 4. Birth and the Divided Year

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  The Roman poet Ovid gave the most detailed version of Adonis's birth in his Metamorphoses. Ovid lived from 43 BC to around AD 17 or 18. Aphrodite had cursed Myrrha, the daughter of King Cinyras of Cyprus, with an uncontrollable desire for her own father. The curse came as punishment for a boast: Myrrha's mother Cenchreis had told people that her daughter was more beautiful than the goddess herself. Myrrha confided her shameful passion to her nurse, with great reluctance. During a festival honoring Demeter, when Myrrha's mother was absent, the nurse arranged a secret encounter. She told Cinyras, who was half-drunk with wine, that a girl his daughter's age was in love with him, giving her a fictional name. Cinyras agreed to meet her. The truth emerged only after multiple encounters. When Cinyras finally discovered his lover's true identity, he drew his sword. Myrrha fled, was transformed into a myrrh tree while pregnant, and gave birth to Adonis from within the bark. The classicist William F. Hansen noted that the story fits a conventional classical assumption. Greeks and Romans believed women, like Myrrha, were less capable of controlling their passions than men.

  Aphrodite found the newborn and took him to the underworld, leaving him to be fostered by Persephone. When she returned for him as a young man, she found him strikingly handsome. Persephone had come to the same conclusion and refused to relinquish him. Zeus settled the dispute by dividing Adonis's time three ways. One third would go to Aphrodite, one third to Persephone, and one third to wherever Adonis himself chose. Adonis chose Aphrodite, and they remained constantly together. An alternate version, attributed to the Muse Calliope, split the arrangement more evenly, giving each goddess exactly half the year. In his satirical Dialogues of the Gods, the author Lucian imagined Aphrodite complaining to the moon goddess Selene. The complaint was that Eros had deliberately made Persephone fall in love with Adonis, forcing the goddess to share him. Classical sources also describe Adonis as having been loved by other gods, among them Apollo, Heracles, and Dionysus. Classical Greece described him as androgynous. He took the active role with Aphrodite but a receptive role with Apollo, which was understood as occupying the feminine position. Ptolemy Hephaestion mentioned Heracles' love of Adonis in passing. Another tradition held that Dionysus, god of wine and madness, simply carried Adonis away. Pseudo-Apollodorus, in the Bibliotheke section 3.182, described Adonis as the son of Cinyras of Paphos on Cyprus and his wife Metharme. Hesiod, in a work that did not survive, assigned Adonis yet another parentage. In that version, he was the son of a man named Phoenix and a woman named Alphesiboea.

• 5. Death and the Flowers

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  One day while hunting, Adonis was mortally wounded by a wild boar and died in Aphrodite's arms. Three competing versions name three different divine agents responsible for sending the boar. In the first, it was Ares, who was jealous that Aphrodite was spending so much time with Adonis. In the second, Artemis sent the boar to take revenge against Aphrodite for having killed Hippolytus, a devoted follower of Artemis. In the third, Apollo sent it to punish Aphrodite for blinding his son Erymanthus. Each version implicates a different Olympian, and each attributes the killing to a separate divine grievance.

  As Aphrodite mourned, she caused anemone flowers to grow wherever Adonis's blood fell, and declared a festival on the anniversary of his death. A late account said his blood became roses instead. Another version has Aphrodite injuring herself on a thorn from a rose bush as she ran to Adonis. The previously white rose was permanently stained red by her blood. The third-century BC poet Euphorion of Chalcis offered a bleaker image in his poem Hyacinth, writing that "only Cocytus washed the wounds of Adonis." Cocytus was one of the rivers of the underworld.

  A very different account, preserved by the fifth-century AD grammarian Servius and possibly originating in Cyprus, inverts the usual narrative. In that version, Aphrodite herself made Adonis fall in love with a mortal girl named Erinoma, acting on Hera's orders. Erinoma, a virgin favored by Artemis and Athena, rejected his advances. Adonis forced himself on her, then fled and hid from Zeus, who also loved Erinoma and would have sought revenge. Hermes lured Adonis out of hiding through a trick. Ares then wounded him mortally in the form of a boar. He died but was eventually restored to life after Aphrodite pleaded with Zeus. Erinoma bore Adonis a son, who was named Taleus. According to Lucian's De Dea Syria, the Adonis River in Lebanon ran red with blood each year during the festival. The river is now called the Abraham River.

• 6. From Courts to Print

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  The medieval French poet Jean de Meun brought the story of Adonis into his additions to the Roman de la Rose, written around 1275. De Meun used it as moral instruction: men, he argued, should heed the warnings of the women who love them. Pierre de Ronsard's poem simply titled "Adonis," published in 1563, has Venus lamenting that her beloved ignored her warnings. In the poem, Venus ultimately blames herself for his death, declaring: "In need my counsel failed you." In the same poem, Venus quickly finds a replacement shepherd, reflecting the medieval belief in the fickleness and mutability of women. Edmund Spenser wove the story into his epic The Faerie Queene, published in 1590. Tapestries depicting Adonis decorate the walls of Castle Joyous in that poem. Venus later takes the character Amoretta to raise her in the poem's "Garden of Adonis."

  Three years after Spenser's poem appeared, William Shakespeare published Venus and Adonis in 1593. It was the most popular of all his works printed during his lifetime. Six editions appeared before Shakespeare's death, more than any of his other works. In 1605, the poet Richard Barnfield praised it, writing that the poem had placed Shakespeare's name "in fames immortall Booke." The poem attracted sharply divided criticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defended it; Samuel Butler complained it bored him; C. S. Lewis described an attempted reading as "suffocating." In 1623, the Italian poet Giambattista Marino published his mythological epic L'Adone. It outsold Shakespeare's First Folio. Shakespeare's homoerotic descriptions of Adonis inspired the French author Rachilde, whose legal name was Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, to write the erotic novel Monsieur Venus in 1884. The novel follows a noblewoman named Raoule de Venerande as she pursues Jacques, a young effeminate man who works in a flower shop. Jacques is ultimately shot and killed in a duel, following the model of Adonis's tragic death.

• 7. The Dying God

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  James George Frazer, a Scottish anthropologist, made Adonis the centerpiece of a sweeping theory in The Golden Bough, first published in 1890. Frazer argued that Adonis was a prime example of the archetypal "dying-and-rising god," a figure found across all world cultures. The pattern was a deity who dies and returns to life, whose story encodes the cycle of seasons. The argument was enormously influential for decades. In the mid-twentieth century, however, scholars began to question whether the "dying-and-rising god" was a useful category. Some argued that deities previously grouped together should be split into "dying gods" and "disappearing gods." Those who died did not return, went the argument, and those who returned had never actually died.

  Biblical scholars Eddy and Boyd, writing in 2007, applied this critique directly to Adonis. They argued that Adonis's time in the underworld is not a death and resurrection. It is simply a period when a living person stays below the earth. They also noted that no extant classical Greek text explicitly describes Adonis as rising from the dead. The evidence for such a belief was preserved in later sources. Origen, the early Christian scholar, discussed Adonis in his Selecta in Ezechielem. He noted that the rites surrounding Adonis involved two phases. First, mourners wept because the god "has died." Second, they rejoiced because "he has risen from the dead," using the Greek phrase apo nekron anastanti. Some scholars continue to cite Adonis and Tammuz as examples of a dying-and-rising god. Their argument is that the pattern of descent and return is a functional analogue for death and resurrection. Under this view, it does not matter that no physical cause of death is depicted. Frazer's classification may remain contested, but the name Adonis itself has long outlasted the debate. In everyday speech, it still means what it meant in classical antiquity: the archetype of a strikingly handsome young man.