The Sexuality of Adonis

Jay Reed

In this essay, I argue that early modern poets saw Venus's reluctant lover as an image of their own ambivalent attraction to the irresistible but indecent charms of pagan myth as suggestively embodied in the sensual goddess of love. At their hands, the Adonis fable was transformed into a metamyth that spelled out the fundamental "Herculean" dilemma in which Christian poets found themselves when they approached the eminently appealing but morally problematic pagan material. Acknowledging the beguiling sensuality inherent in ancient myth, but at the same time circling about Adonis's more or less successful resistance to its temptation, early modern versions of the Venus and Adonis myth variously staged the poet's perennial dilemma between aesthetic pleasure and moral lecture, first diagnosed by Plato, reassumed by Homer exegetes of late antiquity, and later reappeared in medieval mythographers’ ambivalent apologies for the "Ouidianae falsitates et Virgilianae adinuentiones". Indeed, in the early modern period, the paradoxical figure who eschewed the most beautiful female in the universe to go hunting (and then got killed by a boar) acquired the status of a virtual literary foundation myth. With his combination of susceptibility and resistance to Venus's siren song, Adonis became a perfect symbol of early modern poets' wavering before the power of pagan myth and all the troubling connotations that it carried (paganism, sensuality, fatality, falseness, and, not the least, immorality).

If we follow Benedetto Croce, who claimed that Marino was being insincere when he proposed that the Adone (1623) showed how "immoderate pleasure ends in pain", then the Hercules allegory opening its second canto must needs be seen as a joke played by the poet on his readers, twisting their expectation that a mythical fable necessarily contains a moral message. For it states that, confronted with the old Herculean choice between virtue and vice, Adonis chose the former ("Al fine il piè ben consigliato ei torse/Lunge dal calle morbido ed aperto") when in fact he is just about to enter the Palace of Love. Indeed, the irony appears to be so thick it can be cut with a knife. However, if Marino's Hercules allegory is ironical, then its irony is surely a facetious double one which mocks readers' tendency to automatically moralize pagan mythology only to turn the tables on them immediately afterward when the prelude continues with an apparently wholly unironical moral reflection on how easily humans are lured away from the virtuous path by worldly temptations ("Ma spesso il corso suo stornar si vanta/Il senso adulator, ch'a sè alletta/Con l'oggetti piacevoli e giacondo"). It is now conceded that although he originally meant to choose wisely, the young man ended up fatally biting that golden apple which is the world with all its pleasures ("questo pomo d'or, che nome ha mondo"). With this re-moralizing turn readers are left entirely perplexed: should they or should they not read the canto as a moral allegory? Apparently empathizing with Adonis' human frailty yet contemplating it within a stern moral frame, the passage is impossible to commit to any one interpretation. It is as thoroughly ambivalent as the rest of the Adone.

A scholiast's note on Lysistrata mentions that there was an alternative title to the play: Adôniazousai. A close reading of the play with this title in mind reveals that Lysistrata and her allies metaphorically hold an Adonis festival atop the Acropolis. The Adonia, a festival that is typically regarded as " marginal " and " private " by modern scholars, thus becomes symbolically central and public as the sex-strike held by the women halts the Peloponnesian war. The public space of the Acropolis becomes, notionally, a private rooftop, and Adonia-like activity proliferates; boars, myrrh, Aphrodite, " gardens of Adonis, " and lamentation all play important roles. The notion that the women of Lysistrata hold an unexpected Adonis festival on the Acropolis, at the very heart of the Athenian polis, provides a more nuanced reading of the play and forces us to rethink the place of the Adonia at Athens as well as, more generally, the distinction between public and private festivals.

The Sexuality of Adonis Author(s): Joseph D. Reed Source: Classical Antiquity, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Oct., 1995), pp. 317-347 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25011025 . Accessed: 30/07/2011 09:02 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Classical Antiquity. http://www.jstor.org JOSEPH D. REED The Sexuality of Adonis HEDEMOLITION byMarcel Detienne of theFrazerian agricultural interpre tation of theAttic rites of Adonis has enabled more recent scholars to explore a rare expression of female perspective inmale-centered Classical Athens.' His myth is that of a beautiful young man in the power of a mighty goddess; his Attic festival, the ritual lamentation of theAdonia, was celebrated exclusively by women and lay outside the civic calendar and the jurisdiction of theAthenian state religion. It is the intent of this paper to continue this work by showing, through detailed analysis of our sources, theways inwhich Adonis reveals to us the attitudes and desires of both sexes. If a close examination of Adonis and theAdonia gives a rare look into a woman-centered Athens, it also allows us to glimpse the shifting perspectives of Athenian men and their varied strategies in dealing with the other sex. Let us start with history. The cult of Adonis originated as a seventh century BCEadaptationby Greeks of theyearly lamentation for theMesopotamian god Tammuz (Dumuzi), consort of the goddess of love Ishtar (Inanna),which the expansion of theAssyrian empire had impelledwestward.2 Tammuzwas lamented in the dry summer as the personification of the failing crops and herds; he was lord and protector of the people, embodied in the kings of Sumer and Babylon. This paper originated as a talk delivered at Stanford University inMay 1992 and theOhio State University inDecember 1993 and has benefited from the criticisms and suggestions of both audiences. Inparticular Iwish to thankWill Batstone, Gail Holst-Warhaft, David Leitao, JodyMaxmin, Timothy McNiven, and KathrynMorgan. I have also profited from comments by the two anonymous readers for this journal. 1. See inparticularWinkler 1990:188-209, Stehle 1990, Holst-Warhaft 1992:99-103. Detienne 1994 was originally published in French in 1972. 2. Burkert 1979:105-108. Dumuzi and Inannaare their Sumerian names, replaced by Tammuz and Ishtarunder Akkadian rule. D 1995 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 318 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 The lament, traditionally a female rite,must have been transmitted fromwoman to woman across cultures and languages. The widespread worship of Tammuz attested later in Syro-Palestine shows that he went as far west as did Assyrian domination, with women of the easternMediterranean seaboard adopting the lament apart from connectedMesopotamian rites and celebrating it privately, side by side with the established rites of their cities. The Greek Adoniazousai have their counterparts in thewomen of Jerusalemweeping for Tammuz at the north gate of the temple, excoriated in Ezekiel 8:14-15. As his name shows, Greek women got Adonis ultimately from Syrian or Phoenician women;3 he became a Greek mythological figure (although the Greeks never forgot his Levantine provenance), and his cult spread among the poleis.4 Men of Athens, as we shall see, habitually slighted and suspected theAdonia, distancing the home-bound, emotion-filled celebration frommasculine dignity and statecraft.Testimonia that seem to includemen among theAttic celebrants turnout to be syncretistic: the male Ad6niastai attested in thePiraeus around 300 BCE(IG II2 1261 = SIG4 1098) are Cypriot expatriates of Phoenician extraction belonging to a thiasos of Syrian Aphrodite (i.e.,Astarte). Their Adoniac procession, performed xrat & narCptLa,is thus a nominalHellenization of someLevantine rite.5A lateparoemiographeruses masculine participles indescribing the "gardensof Adonis": ol Taotn (Aphrodite) ypureovtre f yputrcouaotl... ([Diogen.] 6pytidovTEs, x)xou et< &ydryi TLVa 1.14 [L-S i.183]).6Although themasculines could be generic (Winkler 1990:235 n. 7), the subordination of theAdoniac rite to a cult of Aphrodite-for which At tic sources give no warrant-probably reflects knowledge of a syncretistic Near Eastern festival like the famous civic Adonia atByblos, where a Phoenician dying and reviving god was celebrated by both men and women in the temple of his divine lover.7The absence of men from theAttic rite indicates thatAdonis did not 3. "A$ovtq < Western Semitic adn, "lord,"often used as a divine title; cf. Atallah 1966:310 18, Burkert 1979:192 n. 3. The Greeks have taken the title for a proper name. The belief popularized by W. W. Baudissin, Adonis und Esmun (Leipzig, 1911) thatGreek Adonis came from a city god of theWest Semites, rather than fromMesopotamian Tammuz via theWest Semites, does not fit the evidence. 4. On the transmission of religious practices fromNear Easterners toGreek-speakers seemost recently W. Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution (Harvard, 1992) 41-87; S. Morris, Daidalos (Princeton, 1992) 115. Both authors stress the intimate cohabitation necessary for such transmission as resulted; an anonymous reader for ClAnt suggests the kidnapping of Near Eastern women by Greek slavers as amode of transmitting theAdoniac lament. 5. On their thiasos,mentioned in IG 12 337 = SIG4 280, see P. Foucart, BCH 3 (1879) 514-15; M. N. Tod, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions (Oxford, 1948) 250-51. 6. This late antique collection of proverbs, falsely attributed to the second-century CE gram marian Diogenianus of Heraclea, exists in various redactions of a larger version, published in L-S i.180-320 ([Diogen.]), and in amore detailed epitome, published inL-S ii. 1-52 ([Diogen.], Epit.). 7. The Greeks long identified thepair atByblos with Aphrodite andAdonis: cf. themythologi cal syncretism of Cleitarchus, FGrH 137 F 3, and the description of the rites in Lucian, De dea Syr. 6-7. In another project I shall try to disentangle the different ethnic voices in our testimony on Adonis; here it is important to remember thatpost-Classical authorsmust have been largely unaware of differences between theAdonia they observed and those of Classical Athens. REED:The Sexuality of Adonis 319 come toAthens through tradewith Cyprus or Phoenicia, as has sometimes been supposed.Greek Adonis was in the hands of women from the very beginning. Evidence for theAdonia in pre-Hellenistic Greece comes only fromArchaic Mytilene (Sappho frr. 140A and 168 L-P) andAthens from the late fifth century to the end of the fourth.8 It is on Athens thatwe shall concentrate, seeking evidence inClassical texts and,more cautiously, in later authorswho use Attic sources (it is especially worth bearing inmind thatwhat may look like several independent pieces of late testimony on a Classical practice may really be several different echoes of the same source).Here theAdonia were a private festival unconnected with those of the civic religion, unfunded and unsupervised by the state,without temenos or priesthood. They were celebrated in summer on the flat roofs of the celebrants' own houses;9Menander, Sam. 46 indicates a pannykhis. Props mentioned are figurines of Adonis (Zenobius 1.49 [L-S i.19] and Plut., Alcib. 18.5 suggest a mock ekphora through the streets of Athens),'? and the "gardens of Adonis," pots of soil sown with quickly sprouting seeds." The number of days covered by the festival is uncertain;'2 this was an informal celebration outside the official calendar, and details such as its length may have been up to the participants. "We should ... imagine," suggests Winkler (1990:193), "that a gathering of women friends for the Adonia had as much a regular format as, say, amodem birthday party or a Christmas tree-trimming, at which the general course of events is known in advance but many variations of detail in conduct and style are allowable." We hear of the city filled with the funereal trappings of the rites and the sounds of lamentation,'3but also of dancing and partying.14 8. Paus. 2.20.6 mentions lamentation for Adonis by the women of Argos in the temple of Zeus the Savior; theAdonia therewere thus attached to a civic cult, perhaps early on. The month 'A8oviwv attested for theArgive colony Iasusmay indicateAdonia there (E.L. Hicks, JHS 9 [1888] 342; the Julian equivalent is unknown); but in view of the very early date of colonization the cults probably arose independently. 9. Date: J. Servais in S. Ribichini, ed., Adonis: Relazioni del colloquio inRoma (Roma, 1984) 83-93; cf. Plato, Phdr. 276B; Theophr., H.P. 6.7.3. Rooftops: Aristoph., Lys. 389 (and Schol. ad loc., with Weill 1966:669 n. 1), 395;Men., Sam. 45. This is aNear Eastern feature:Burkert 1979:192 n. 8. 10. Figurines: Plut., Alcib. 18.5, Nic. 13.7; Alciphron 4.14.8; Hesych. s.v. 'A86vt8og xtntt. Photius, Lex. s.v. 'A&6vta (whence the Suda s.v.) reports that this effigy was termed the 'A8ovtov. 11. Theophr., H.P. 6.7.3; Schol. Theoc. 15.113; Zenobius 1.49 (L-S i.19); Alciphron 4.14.8; Hesych. and the Suda s.v. 'ASvt8oo xetnot. Hesychius and the Suda list lettuce and fennel as the plants used; theTheocritus scholiast, wheat and barley. Availability and rapidityof germination may have been the criteria. The use of broken amphorae for the gardens, as pictured in LIMC pi. 47, suggests the improvised domestic nature of the festival. The term"gardens of Adonis" was also used in Imperial times for galleries of potted flowering plants unrelated to the cult: Atallah 1966:225-26. 12. When Socrates inPlato, Phdr. 276B specifies eight days as thegrowth period for thegardens of Adonis, he is improvising a length of time to parallel the eight months he specifies for crops; he is not talking about the length of the festival, as some have thought. 13. Aristoph., Lys. 393, 396; Plut., Alcib. 18.5, Nic. 13.7; cf. Pherecrates, fr. 181 PCG. 14. Aristoph., Lys. 392-96; Diphilus, fr. 42 PCG; Men., Sam. 41-46; Alciphron 4.14. On Menander's Adonia, see N. Weill, BCH 94 (1970) 591-93; Winkler 1990:191. InDiphilus, fr. 49 PCG (from a play entitled Theseus) threeSamian girls at theAdonia engage in ribald humor: they are presumably courtesans and the scene is probably inAthens. 320 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 An early fourth-century lekythos (LIMCpl. 47) emphasizes the convivial aspects of the festival, fancifully depicting a beautifully coifed and bejeweled semi nude woman on a ladder (Aphrodite herself?) receiving a garden of Adonis from a chubby, curly-headed Eros while celebrants as elegant as herself look on with delight.15 The Attic Adonia reveal theirMesopotamian origins in such features as the summer date and the potted gardens. The purpose and nature of the rite have nevertheless undergone radical change. The private celebration had no place in the cycles of thewhole community; indeed, the agricultural connection has disappeared. Although Tammuz and similar Near Eastern dying gods (e.g., Ba'al-Hadad in Ugarit, Osiris in Egypt) embody the agricultural cycle of the communities thatworshipped them, there is no evidence thattheGreeks connected theirAdonis with the growth of fruit or crops until the syncretistic religions of theRoman Empire.'6 The original, Near Eastern importance of the gardens had probably been agricultural: "Sie stellen eine sympathetischen Zauber dar, der in der Zeit, wo die Erde ersch6pft ist, deren Fruchtbarkeit fiir das kommende Jahr sichem soll"; this significance, however, "den attischen Frauen schwerlich gegenwartig war."'7 A redaction of the second-century CE paroemiographer Zenobius reports that the pots "are carried out together with the dead god and thrown into springs" (1.49 [L-S i.19]). If this custom was Attic, itmay representa fossilization of someNear Eastern agriculturalmagic.'8 TheMesopotamian love goddess was naturally replaced by Aphrodite, whose concernAdonis is since our oldest testimony (Sappho, fr. 140A). But no Attic evidence attaches theAdonia to her cult, and inmyth Adonis is for her only a romantic diversion, not a consort.9 15. A clusterof similarmid-fifth- tomid-fourth-century paintings without thegardens, discussed by Atallah 1966:177-93 and Weill 1966:664-74 (including UMC pl. 45-46, 48-49), are not demonstrably Adoniac; C. M. Edwards, Hesperia 53 (1984) 62-72, warning that themere presence of women with a ladderdoes not automatically signify theAdonia, identifies them asmarriage scenes involving Aphrodite Urania. A red-figured lekythos on which A. P.Zarkadas,Horos 7 (1989) 137-43 sees a representation of theAdonia (including the gardens) also more probably depicts a marriage scene (LIMC ii.2 s.v. Aphrodite pl. 210). 16. Thus the lateness of the scholium on Theoc. 3.48, stating thatAdonis is "really the grain," remaining six months in the ground before growing. Cf. Cornutus, Theol. gr. 28; [Orph.],H. 56; Origen, Sel. in Ezech. 9 (13.797 Migne); Porphyry in Euseb., P.E. 3.11.9 = Porph., Agalm. 7 Bidez; Sallustius, De deis 4.3; Amm. Marc. 19.1.2, 22.9.15; Macrob., Sat. 1.21.1-4; [Clem. Rom.], Hom. 6.9; Jo. Lyd., Mens. 4.64. 17. L. Deubner, Attische Feste (Berlin, 1932) 221. On analogues from Palestine and Egypt see M. Delcor, Syria 55 (1978) 371-94 (discussing Isaiah 17:10 and Ezekiel 8:17); J.G. Griffiths, Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride ([Cardiff], 1970) 37. Cf. N. Robertson, HThR 75 (1982) 348. 18. Eustathius' unique report that thegardens were thrown into the sea (Od. 1701.45-50) sounds like a confusion of Zenobius' testimony with theAlexandrian practice of committing an effigy of Adonis to the sea, perhaps Osirian in origin (Theoc. 15.133 with schol.; Dioscorides, A.P. 5.53 and 193; cf. Plut., De Is. 13). 19. Whether Aphrodite herself hadNear Eastern origins is irrelevant for our purposes, since she was established as aGreek goddess well before the arrivalof Adonis. On theorigins of Aphrodite see most recently Penglase 1994:159-79. REED:The Sexuality of Adonis 321 Mesopotamian Tammuz has fallen from his high estate, lost the trappingsof royal might and cosmic power, and even left behind his godhead, since we have no evidence that theAttic celebrants ever prayed to Adonis or expected anything from him. Some vestiges of the old myths and customs have clung to him in transit, but their patchy survival has compelled shifts in their functions. He has become a fict forAthenian lamentation. Sir James Frazer,misled by the similarNear Eastern figures, endowed Attic Adonis with all thewaning and reviving grandeur of an eniautos-daimtn.? The structuralist interpretation of Marcel Detienne has done much to uproot that influential fallacy and to clear the way for a proper assessment of the social function of the Adonia in Classical Athens. Detienne, taking as his key the well-known myth thatAdonis' pregnantmother Myrrha or Smyrna (bothGreek words for myrrh) was metamorphosed into a myrrh tree, from whose trunk the newborn in due time emerged, sees Adonis as essentially the fruit of an aromatic shrub, a perfume, an anti-agricultural product.2 His method is to find a counter-phenomenon in Attic society, in response to which the Adonia can take their significance: surely the Thesmophoria, the autumn festival in honor of Demeter at which thewomen of Athens celebrated the growth of food crops. Detienne finds a further, sociological opposition here: the Thesmophoria were celebrated only by thewives of Athenian citizens; theAdonia were notoriously celebrated by prostitutes. He positions Adonis and the data of his cult within various oppositional codes discernible in Greek culture-each illustrated by a diagram-that parallel one another quite precisely, replicating the samemeaning in different terms: aromatically, Adonis stands for heady perfume; botanically, for profitless agriculture; socially, for seduction and extramarital pleasure. The Adonia, Detienne declares, were a celebration of infertility and fruitless sex, a spectacular illustration of the dangers of untrammeled female sexuality, serving to balance and emphasize the autumn celebration of fruitfulness and legitimate connubiality in the service of thepolls. But much evidence slips throughDetienne's grid. In several versions of the birth of Adonis myrrh has no place: in our earliest his mother is one Alphesiboea ([Hes.], fr. 139M-W); in another she is oneMetharme ([Apollod.], Bibl. 3.14.3). Philostephanus of Cyrene made him the son of Zeus alone (ap. [Probus]on Verg., Ecl. 10.18).22As for the carnival of whores, theAdoniac festivities in brothels 20. The Golden Bough, pt IV "Adonis Attis Osiris" (1st ed. London, 1913); Frazer's interpre tationgoes back toW. Mannhardt, Wal- und Feldkulte, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1877) 273-91. For thoughtful critques of Frazer's comparative method here see H. Frankfort, The Problem ofSimilarity inAncient Near Eastern Religions (Oxford, 1951); C. Colpe inAlter Orient und altes Testament, vol. 1 (1969) 23-44. 21. Detienne 1994, firstpublished inFrench in 1972. Atallah 1966:325-27 sketches a version of the same thesis, whence perhaps Detienne. 22. On Detienne's selectivity see the reviews by D. E. Eichholz, CR 24 (1974) 234-35 andG. Piccaluga, Maia 26 (1974) 38-39. 322 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 in Diphilus, fr. 42.38-41 PCG and Alciphron 4.14.8 (based on fourth-century comedy), are to be supplemented by Aristophanes, Lys. 391-96, andMenander, Sam. 35-50, in which wives and daughters of citizens celebrate the Adonia.23 Most surprisingly, Detienne's theory takes only passing account of the ritual lamentation, which ancient sources make themost conspicuous feature of the festival, and in general ignores what the celebrants themselves thought of what they were doing-unless we are to imagine that thewomen of Athens climbed onto their roofs once a year deliberately to celebrate their own failings to the community. There was probably another reason, one which feminist studies of the cult have begun to seek.2 Another assumption, however, more fundamentally flawsDetienne's interpre tation.While proposing to tease an inherentmeaning fromAthenian cult practice by identifying the inherent correspondences and oppositions within it,Detienne fails to define a perspective more specific than a homogeneous Greco-Roman society. Adonis, for example, must have meant many things tomany people at many times (even different things to the same people at different times), butDeti enne's formula assumes that he meant essentially the same thing to everybody, no matter how many borders of nation, culture, language, gender, or time he may have crossed-as if any detail of themyth of Adonis tapped into one im manent meaning and could be adduced for the significance of theAthenian cult.25 Rhetorical motives are undifferentiated: a line of Sappho is treatedequally with a line of Philodemus; the testimony of Aristophanes is put on a par with the tes timony of St. Cyril. This method is programmatic and derives fromL6vi-Strauss, who articulates the principle thus vis-A-vis his interpretationof Oedipus: "[W]e define themyth as consisting of all its versions; or to put it otherwise, a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such."26Combining details from diverse myths of Adonis, regardless of date or provenance, Detienne treats the resulting conglomeration as a single sacred tale holding a precious key to themeaning of the ritual.But for whom does it hold meaning? For Detienne alone. Purportedly context-based, his method actually isolates phenomena from theirdiverse cultural 23. See Winkler 1990:199-203. 24. Cf. Winkler 1990:199: 'The notion thatwomen gathered for both festivals [Adonia and Thesmophoria] to express theexcellence of male farmers and the tawdriness of pleasure-bent females seems counter-intuitive. Itwould imply a complete assimilation of women's consciousness, even on occasions of relative autonomy, to the ruling categories of male discourse"; Stehle 1990:93: "The courtesans, on [Detienne's] interpretation,would be enacting theirown marginality." 25. Cf. 1994:77-78, where he denies the value of historicism "for our type of study" and uses a detail gleaned from Ovid to decode the Attic rite. A new afterword acknowledges boundaries between theAttic Adonia and those of Roman Byblos and Alexandria (1994:134-45), but ends by reaffirming the vision of the structuralist critic "[c]rossing through texts, leaping over chronologies, pushing aside the gatekeepers of History" (1994:143). 26. C. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, tr. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (New York, 1963) 217. Levi-Strauss himself reviews Detienne's interpretation in L'homme 12.4 (1972) 97-102. REED:The Sexuality of Adonis 323 uses and recontextualizes them into an artificial code that transcends themessy inconsistencies of Greek thought. Meaning is to be sought not in a phenomenon itself, but in itsmatrix. Let us pay as much attention to the context of the testimony on Adonis as to its content, following two guiding principles whose importancehas already emerged from our brief discussion of the festival. First: for Classical Athenian practice we must stick to Classical Athenian sources (though admitting later texts that seem to draw on them), always staying alert to syncretism.A text likeTheocritus' Id. 15 (Ad6niazousai) is born of a different socio-political situation and different ideological compulsions from a text like Aristophanes' Lysistrata; moreover, many of theAdonis cults described by Hellenistic and later authors are ancient Near Eastern cults, Hellenized only nominally and irrelevant toClassical Athens. To presume that their practices explicate themindset of theAttic Adoniazousai is blind Athenocentrism. Secondly: only a distorted female perspective can be discerned in texts controlled bymen or developing in themale-controlled matrices We shall have a few chances to hear the actual of dramatic literatureor the like.27 words of women who may actually have taken part in the rites (Sappho and Praxilla); otherwise we must be cautious, remembering the control thatmen had over thewritten and unwritten discourses of the time.We confront in the ancient testimony a throngof religious, literary,and artistic characters passing under the name "Adonis," inwhom we should hesitate to seek consistency of meaning, since it is a priori likely thatonce he passed fromone context into another (e.g., from the hands of thewomen worshippers to theprofessional myth-tellers or the coiners of proverbs) he became a newAdonis, took on new life in a new symbolic framework. We should, of course, remember that constancy of meaning may indeed follow constancy of name, and that the typical attitudes andmodes of expression of one sex are habitually internalized by the other; but also that other Adonises could be suppressedwhen one was in use. In the end, context is all-important:we must never inquire into themeaning of a thingwithout insistently asking "forwhom?" Let us take as a test case the "gardens of Adonis," those seedlings sown in crockery and carried up to the rooftops for the festival. The prevalent view, based onDetienne's interpretation(1994:101-22), is that they representanti-agriculture: the celebrants deliberately let theplantswilt in a botanical reenactmentof Adonis' own untimely demise. This equivalence between Adonis and the gardens goes back toMannhardt and Frazer (n. 20 above). Detienne's theory,while inverting theirs, foregrounds agriculture no less.28The current consensus is expressed most clearly andmost vulnerably thus: 27. Cf. Holst-Warhaft 1992:100: "Trying to imagine how women saw theirown role in a society like that of ancient Greece by readingmale sources is as difficult an exercise as peeling the drapery from amarble image of Aphrodite." 28. Burkert 1979:107 finds the ritual's origins in "play-acting the failure of planting in order to insure its success in reality," but cautions that it "has a meaning in itself and is not necessarily correlated toAphrodite's lover." 324 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 The rituals surrounding theGardens of Adonis, asMarcel Detienne has argued, are a negative dramatization of fertility ... [They] are planted in themost unseasonable of times, theDog Days of summer: theplants grow with excessive speed and vigor, only to be scorched to death by the sun's excessive heat, and thisdeath thenprovides theoccasion for themourning of Adonis, prot6g6 of Aphrodite.... Like his suddenly and violently growing plants, Adonis himself dies prohebes "beforematurity."29 Some of this comes from the data; much is supplied from Detienne's theory alone. The season of the festival is not to be taken automatically as a sign of anti agriculture, since plenty of food crops were sown in high summer (cf. Theophr., H.P. 7.1.2). Never do our sources blame the sun's heat, nor name the seedlings' death as the object of celebration, deliberately engineered by theAdoniazousai. They only say that the gardens soon wither and so are proverbial for things that do not last long enough to produce anything of value ("More fruitless than the gardens of Adonis").30 The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is that the greenery, used as traditional d6cor at the festival, was simply thrown away (like an old Christmas tree) and left to wilt as soon as theAdonia were over and itwas no longer needed. Artistic evidence-the seedlings depicted by that during white dabs in a red-figured vase-painting (LIMC pl. 47)-suggests the lamentation the gardens were meant to be alive and flourishing. That is the proper condition of theirNear Eastern prototypes and theirmodern survivals.31 The "negative dramatization of fertility" exists in the use to which the proverb was put, not necessarily in the gardens themselves as theworshippers understood them. Observers of the fresh young shoots allowed to grow &XpIX6Yg F6v7)q (Zenobius 1.49 [L-S i.19]), then discarded and left to die, found an irresistible metaphor for all thingsof great promise thatnever reach fruition.32But thegardens preceded theirproverbial value, which is attested inmale-oriented sources and no 29. G. Nagy in T. J. Figueira and G. Nagy, eds., Theognis of Megara (Baltimore, 1985) 62. Cf. Winkler 1990:192 "They were then deprived of water and allowed to turn brown and shrivel up"; Piccaluga 1977:47; Stehle 1990:92;Murray 1993:87. 30. Theophr., C.P. 1.12.2; Schol. Plato, Phdr. 276B; Epict. 4.8.36; Zenobius 1.49 (L-S i.l9); [Diogen.] 1.14 (L-S i.183); [Diogen.], Epit. 1.12 (L-S ii.3); Plut., Mor. 560C; Greg. Naz., Carm. mor. 29.53 (37.888 Migne); Julian, Symp. 329C-D; anon. ap. Stobaeus 2.6.2; Simplicius on Aristot., De caelo 269A9, Phys. 230A31; Suda s.vv. 'A8&vi8og xMpoTand -or; Photius, Lex. s.v. 'AbcOvtLo x7itOL. The first comprehensive discussion of the proverb was by R. Rochette, RA 8 (1851) 97-123. 31. On themodern usage in Greece and elsewhere, attached toGood Friday, see G. Pilitsis, Journal of Modem Greek Studies 3 (1985) 160-66; Burkert 1979:107. On a South Indian version of the rite see the articles by A. Hiltebeitel andM. Biardeau inA.-M. Blondeau and K. Schipper, eds., Essais sur le rituel I (Louvain, 1988). 32. As Weill 1966:390-91 notes, this comparison is implicit in Plutarch's description of the launching of the Sicilian expedition, when the funereal rites of theAdonia caused the superstitious "to fear for the campaign thathad been prepared, lestwith all itsbrilliance and conspicuous splendor it quickly wither away (czapav0IO)"(Nic. 13.7). REED:The Sexuality of Adonis 325 doubt originated among male observers; the proverb gives no clue to the value they had for thewomen celebrators. As we have seen, two late lexica mention lettuce among the plants used in the gardens.33 From the ancient belief that lettuce was an antaphrodisiac modern scholarship has inferred that the ancients held Adonis to be sexually dysfunctional.34 His procreative abilities seem not to have been questioned by authorswho make Aphrodite themother of various children by him:Alexander the Great's chamberlain Chares, for example, makes Adonis the father of Hystaspes and Zariadres.35The unexpected diagnosis finds specious support in a discussion byAthenaeus of twoHellenistic poets and twoMiddle Comedy poets (Deipn. 69B D). Callimachus wrote somewhere thatAphrodite hid Adonis in a bed of lettuce (fr. 478 Pfeiffer),36 and Nicander, in an explanation of the term ppv0tLSfor "lettuce" in his Glosses, said thatAdonis died therewhile trying to escape the boar thatkilled him (fr. 120 Schneider). These accountswere doubtless inspiredby the sowing of lettuce in thepotted gardens; theywould have even more etiological point if the traditionalAdonis-figurine rested amid the greenery in thepots during the festivities. But Athenaeus asserts that these poets were furtheralluding to the xTov otlx)v 6rt proverbial antaphrodisiac powers of lettuce (&XX)yropouvT(o)v ot elat &craevet; np6 &ycpooslla auvex(xq Xp6ieVOt OpilSotL),and quotes from theAstytoi ("unerect")of Eubulus tomake his point: Don't set lettuce before me on the table, wife, or you'll only have yourself to blame. For in thatvegetable, as the story goes, once upon a time Cypris laid out the dead Adonis: so it is the food of the dead. Eubulus, fr. 13 PCG Detienne carries Athenaeus' claim farther and raises impotence to a central position in the persona of Adonis for the Greeks, pairing the lettuce of his deathbed with the seductive perfume of his birth to portray an Adonis who ' 33. Hesych. and theSuda s.v. AS6vto; xtnxo. H. Erbse, Untersuchungen zuden attizistischen Lexica (Berlin, 1950) 154 traces the testimonium to the lexicographer Pausanias in the second century CE. 34. Detienne 1994:67-71; cf.Winkler 1990:204. Medical writers of theRoman period record the power of lettuce-seed to inhibit the sex drive, check the flow of semen, and prevent wet dreams: Dioscorides, M.M. 2.136.1; Ruf. Eph., frr. 109 and 456 Ruelle; Oribasius, Eup. 2.8. Cf. RE 12.368. 35. Chares of Mytilene, FGrH 125 F 5. One might object thatChares does not reflectClassical Athenian tradition-but according to Detienne's methodology that should not matter. Nonnus, Dion. 41.155-57 records that Aphrodite and Adonis were the parents of Beroe; other children attributed to them areGolgos (Schol. Theoc. 15.100/101) and Priapus (Tzetzes on Lycophron, Alex. 831; cf. Schol. Ap. Rh. 1.932-33A). Servius on Verg., Ecl. 10.18 says thatAdonis and Erinoma were the parents of Taleus. 36. Hid from the boar that killed him?We could imagine a version inwhich Aphrodite whisks Adonis out of the hunt (as she rescues Paris and Aeneas from combat inHI. 3.380 and 5.318); but therewere other enemies and rivals she could have hidden him from. 326 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 embodies premature and infertile sensuality.37But Eubulus offers no evidence for the characterization. His speaker gives a comic etiology for the lettuce's unwelcome property by alluding to the etiology for the cult practice treated in somewhat different form by Callimachus andNicander. Eubulus' joke depends on a delicate juxtaposition of the literalmeaning "dead" in the case of Adonis and the metaphor "dead= impotent" (common inAttic comedy38) in thepresent situation; it does not depend on or necessarily reflect an assumption of Adonis' impotence by the audience. An incomplete passage of Amphis (fr. 20 PCG), also quoted by Athenaeus, seems to reflect the same pun, not theological dogma.39Eubulus' "as the story goes" t(& )X6yoS)may or may not indicate that the story of Adonis' laying-out in the lettuce was well known and had perhaps originated among the Adoniazousai. But of a story thatAdonis was impotent there is no trace among either men or women of ancient times. It is a figment of modem scholarship, resting upon the fallacious assumption that a sign (lettuce) will transcend its context and bear the same referent (impotence) anywhere. Note that the problems with Detienne's interpretationdo not lie simply in the way it handles this or that bit of data, but in its theoretical underpinning. We would of course be obliged to accept that in Classical Athens the gardens of Adonis mimed failed agriculture, and thatAdonis himself was correspondingly considered infertile, if we subscribe to a rigid structuralist logic that identifies polarities, marks out a network of fixed cultural assumptions, and then expects any phenomenon placed on the field to takeon an inevitable, predictablemeaning from the signs around it. Then indeed, if theAdonia suggest a contrast with the Thesmophoria, their every detail could be fruitfully interpreted in light of that contrast. But a thingmay suggest different oppositions from different points of view, and the other phenomena that it suggests and responds to are themselves charged with a flickering multivalence. The various oppositional terms that have been used to explain Adonis and theAdonia-true agriculture vs. failed agriculture,male hegemony vs. female autonomy, Greek vs. Oriental, divine vs. human-and many others-are all atwork on the field, both simultaneously and by turns, activated and deactivated according to the changing stances and passing preoccupations of the players. The negative position thatDetienne assigns the Adonia within the symbolic vegetable code of the Greeks is not the only one possible, andwould have to be substantiated by actual texts inwhich Greeks use the cult in theway thatDetienne says they did. His characterization of Adonis as an infertile seducer is not quite falsifiable, but neither can it be proved simply by Adonis' location amid theother data of Classical Athenian society. 37. Cf. Detienne 1994:63-67 on the seductiveness of myrrh. No extant myth, however, makes Adonis a seducer, and no testimony links aromatics or seduction to the Adonia (notwithstanding the intrigue inMen., Sam. 47-50). 38. Cf. R. L. Hunter, Eubulus: The Fragments (Cambridge, 1983) 104. 39. Hesych. s.v. 'AS6vioto xiiot also says thatAphrodite laid the dead Adonis in lettuce, perhaps following these comic fragments. REED: TheSexuality ofAdonis 327 Detienne's interpretation, in fact, seems to work so well only because it must. The framework of spices and herbs that he establishes-myrrh, lettuce, mint, sea-holly, and the rest,with their attendant network of opposing scents-is so perfectly self-contained that interpretations based on it will necessarily be tautological.With its single perspective it flattens our testimony into univocality, but its constituents come from widely disparate sources. No extant myth, for example, includes both themyrrh of Adonis' birth and the lettuce of his deathbed, so an interpretation that includes both will have to rely on a kind of super-myth, transcending actual tellings. Likewise, the polarity between richly scentedmyrrh and the scentless anemone intowhich Adonis' blood is said to be metamorphosed upon his death is neat in theory,4 andmight have value for elucidating a Greek collective unconscious, but is of little use in interpreting the actual texts: the anemonemyth isunattested untilNicander (fr.65 Schneider),41and inour only full not scentlessness (Venus treatmentof it-Ovid, Met. 10.737-39-emblematizes effects the metamorphosis by means of "fragrant nectar"), but the poignant evanescence implicit inmany comparisons of flowers with youth and beauty. Bion of Smyrna, who actually calls Adonis Aphrodite's "perfume" by way of hypercorism (1.78), spoils the potential binarism by metamorphosing his blood into the proverbially fragrant rose (1.66). Each of Detienne's seemingly planar codes is really a constellation reaching intomany spheres, many levels of discourse. The planting of lettuce in the gardens (perhaps for its quick growth) was fortuitous and arbitrary, so if its negative connotations rubbedoff on Adonis, thatwill have been a secondary development, part of the lore thataccrued to him in amale milieu (where impotence, after all, would have been of greater concern than among women). The gardens will yield another meaning within another framework, one closer to women's experience-and I do not mean simply experience of state run religious festivals like theThesmophoria.We have seen that thegardens were a relic of an agricultural ritual, but need not have had-and seem not to have had any agricultural value, positive or negative, to theAthenian celebrants. Perhaps because fertility cults like that at Eleusis already took the place inAthenian life that theworship of Tammuz and his counterparts did in the East, that potential lay dormant.4 Yet as a more distant metaphor the gardens still had life, and 40. M. Detienne, Dionysos mis a mort (Paris, 1977) 115; Detienne 1994:141-43. Our only ancient testimony on the scentlessness of the anemone seems to be Schol. Theoc. 5.92F &veujvwva &vOoq&vo8taov, 8 (paowva&vBoOfvacL x TOOatluaToS 'A6vt80oo (note thatcommentatorsmay well have invented its scentlessness in order to explain Theocritus' line, a contrast of the anemone with the rose). 41. This is significant, since no flower metamorphosis is attested in Greek myth before the Hellenistic period (P.M. C. Forbes Irving,Metamorphosis in Greek Myths [Oxford, 1990] 129). Thus if the fable goes back to a dying god of theNear East (W. F. Albright, History, Archeology, and Christian Humanism [New York, 1964] 172-73), its entry intoGreek ismore likely due to Hellenistic syncretism than to an original transmissionwith theTammuzian lament. 42. G. von LUcken, Forschungen und Fortschritte 36 (1962) 243-45; cf.Murray 1993:86. 328 Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY it is possible to equate the little plants with Adonis without seeing either an allegory of the crops' renewal or a condemnation of sterility. Viewed from the standpoint of women's laments in ancient andmodem Greece, everything about the gardens insofar as they can be compared to Adonis suggests compassion rather than contempt. Comparison of dead youths to young plants, for example, was and remains conventional (cf. Alexiou 1974:195-97). We cannot reach an interpretation that is certain, but we should look for women's understanding of the gardens of Adonis somewhere within their own culture of lamentation and its idioms. Stehle 1990:94 well cautions us to take "positionality"-"awareness that in terpretationalways comes from a specific social, sexual, and intellectual place" into account. Whence ismeaning created? Although Detienne seems to assume an objectively constituted framework of signs, he is clearly scanning the scene from the viewpoint of a hypothetical Athenian male citizen.What happens when we shift perspective? If we scrutinize for the female viewpoint our three earli est testimonia on the life and death of Adonis, we already find a split between the female poet, Sappho, who reflects the ritual lamentation (frr. 140A and 168 L-P), and the male poets, Pseudo-Hesiod and Panyassis, who elaborate myths about Adonis-perhaps based on the ritual, but not necessarily. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibl. 3.14.4, theCatalogue of Women made Adonis the son of Alphesiboea and Phoenix, an eponymous representative of the Phoenicians in Greek mythology.43 The affiliation is part of the poet's largerprogram of subsum ing "eastern"mythological figures intoGreek genealogies.4 Pseudo-Apollodorus (ibid.) ascribes to the early fifth-century epic poet Panyassis of Halicarassus a longermyth, whose basic outline became standard: Panyassis says that he was the son of Theias, king of Assyria, who had a daughter Smyrna. On account of thewrath of Aphrodite (for she did not honor the goddess), Smyrna conceived a passion for her father,and taking her nurse as accomplice she sleptwith her father for twelve nightswithout his knowledge. When he found out, he drew his sword and pursued her. Being overtaken, she prayed to the gods that shemight disappear, and the gods in pity changed her into a tree,which is called "myrrh" [avutpva]. In tenmonths' time the tree burst open and Adonis, as he is called, was born.45 Certain elements inPseudo-Apollodorus' retelling suggestHellenistic sources (e.g., the complicity of the nurse), and itmay be a composite. On the other hand, 43. [Hes.], fr. 139 M-W. On Phoenix and his role in Greek mythology see C. Tzavellas-Bonnet, EtCl 51 (1983) 3-11. A nymph Alphesiboea ismetamorphosed into the river Tigris in [Plut.], De fluv. 28.1. 44. Cf. M. L.West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Oxford, 1985) 149-50. 45. Panyassis, fr. 22A Davies. Adapted from Sir James Frazer's Loeb translationof [Apollod.], Bibl. (ii.85-87). REED:The Sexuality ofAdonis 329 the intrigue is quite Herodotean-remember thatPanyassis is said to have been Herodotus' uncle-and theHellenistic poets themselves only raised into the lime light certain types of stories, previously marginalized in epic, that engaged their new sensibility.4 In any case, if Panyassis indeed said thatAdonis was "the son of Theias, who had a daughter Smyrna," then he presumably included the incest and themetamorphosis. This etiology of Adonis' birth is unlikely to have had a part in the dynamics of the cult. No evidence connects myrrh or any in cense or perfume with theAdonia. Myrrh was probably no more prominent there than at any ritual gathering; sprinkled on the fire by those who could afford it, it added exotic fragrance to any proceeding.47 Furthermore, Panyassis' myth is constructed as an unsavory sexual daydream told from themale point of view: an older man has relations with his nubile adolescent daughter without the re motest risk of being blamed for themisdeed. Notice especially, when Theias finds out the truth, the excessive violence of his punitiveness, serving as an em phatic denial of guilt.4 But before any harm is done, Smyrnamiraculously turns into a tree.Why themyrrh tree? Because the Greeks purchased myrrh (which grows in southernArabia) from Phoenician merchants and originally thought it native to theLevant.4 Adonis' birth from themyrrh tree has not been traced to anyNear Eastern source.? Rather Panyassis or some priorGreek mythographer has spliced a just-so story of myrrh onto that of another eastern import,Adonis (whose origins theGreeks constantly located in theOrient).51The result conforms to a common myth-pattern whereby women who commit crimes of passion, or are victims of crimes of passion (their fathers treat them as criminals in either 46. On prefigurations of Alexandrianism in Panyassis see H. Lloyd-Jones, Gnomon 48 (1976) 504. 47. W. Burkert, Greek Religion, tr. J.Raffan (Harvard, 1985) 62 does not support his statement that "Incense offerings and altars are associated particularly with the cult of Aphrodite andAdonis." The vase-paintings inwhich Detienne sees amock harvesting of myrrh at the festival (1994:115-16) are not demonstrably Adoniac; see n. 15 above. 48. In an anonymous version reported by St. Cyril of Alexandria, Comm. in Is. 2.3 (70.440 Migne) the father is the seducer; elsewhere he is unwitting (Theodorus, SH 749; Ovid, Met. 10.465 74; Hyginus, Fab. 58; Ant. Lib., Met. 34; Schol. Theoc. 1.109A; Schol. Opp., Hal. 3.403). 49. Pseudo-Apollodorus' or Panyassis' "Assyria" should not be taken literally; the name was often used loosely for any region of theNear East at one time subject to theAssyrian empire. See T. NOldeke, Hermes 5 (1871) 443-68. 50. The bare motif of the baby in the tree, however, may have come from theNear East with Adonis: in a Sumerian text themother of Dumuzi (here called Damu) puts him to sleep in the bark of a tree; see Penglase 1994:179. 51. Inmany sources the passion of Smyrna is transferred from Theias and Assyria toCinyras andCyprus (e.g., Theodorus, SH 749; Ovid, Met. 10; Schol. Theoc. 1.109A; Xenophon, FGrH 755). Cinyras, a legendary Cypriot king as early as 11. 11.20, is first attested as Adonis' father around 400 BCE(Antimachus, fr. 102West; Plato Comicus, fr. 3 PCG); his colorful history probably gave him an advantage over the shadowy Theias, who was just a kind of stand-in for "mythical figures of the East" (his name may be a calque on that of Semitic 'El). On Cinyras see C. Baurain, BCH 104 (1980) 277-308. 330 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 case), subsequently bear children.5 This is a literary invention, and although Athenian women may have known about it,we cannot see that it influenced their understanding of the rites. Pseudo-Apollodorus continues: While he was still a baby Aphrodite hid him from the gods in a chest because of his beauty and entrusted him to Persephone. But when Perse phone beheld him, shewould not give him back. The case coming before Zeus, the year was divided into three parts, and the god decreed that Adonis should spend one part by himself, one with Persephone, and one with Aphrodite. But Adonis made his own share over to Aphrodite in addition. As Adonis starts out still a baby here, it is most likely that this portion of the summary represents Panyassis' own continuation; we shall indeed see that it conforms more to an Archaic than to a Hellenistic narrative pattern. Immediate models for the story are perhaps themyths of Erichthonius (the baby in the box) and of Persephone (the judgment of Zeus). At its core is a very ancient Sumerian season-myth about how Dumuzi spends half theyearwith Ereshkigal, thequeen of theunderworld, and half with Inanna,his divine consort; thismyth may well have been transmittedalong with the cult as its etiology.53But although thePanyassian story explains the salient features of theAdonia-Adonis' yearly disappearance and his connection with the goddess-there is no emphasis on the lament and no hint of the love affair with Aphrodite. Mere alternation between lower and upper worlds mitigates the tragedy (inMesopotamian lament-texts Dumuzi is brutally murdered at the instigation of his divine lover) and thus obscures the origin of the ritualmourning,54 and even if the prospect of a love affair with Adonis in eighteen or twenty years' timewas supposed to have drawnAphrodite (and then Persephone) to his infantile beauty, this surprising story shunts it into the background.55 52. Cf. themyths of Danad, Antiope, and Auge, which introduce the birth of the founder of an important city or dynasty; Panyassis, in adopting the pattern,may ormay not have given Adonis such historical importance. 53. Cf. Burkert 1979:110. 54. A final sentence inPseudo-Apollodorus ("But afterwards,while hunting, he was gored and killed by a boar") reprises a version mentioned just before our testimony and is not to be considered part of Panyassis' account. On Adonis' widely attested fatal boar-hunt, first attested after 400 BCE, see below. 55. InPhilodemus' list of tellers of Aphrodite's "shameful" love forAdonis Philippson restores the name of Panyassis for.[ (P.Herc. 243 col. v/vi 18 = Panyassis fr. 22B Davies); V. J.Matthews, Panyassis of Halicarnassus (Leiden, 1974 = Mnemosyne Suppl. 33) 121 is more certain than I that Philodemus is accurately reflecting Panyassis' account. In other versions Aphrodite makes Adonis her lover and disputes him with Persephone after he has been reared tomanhood: Ovid, Met. 10.519-28; Ant. Lib. 34.5; Servius on Verg., Aen. 5.72 (< Ovid); Cyr. Alex. (n. 48 above); Tzetzes on Lycophron, Alex. 829. REED:The Sexuality of Adonis 331 David Daube, observing that the story has "distinct legal overtones," analyzes it thus: "Aphrodite saves a foundling, who may thereby turn into her slave, her foster-son or her adoptive son.5 ... Aphrodite immediately hands the child on to Persephone, who doubtless becomes a foster-mother. A foster-mother who does her duty may acquire strong rights to the child. The case, then, is rather subtle: the foster-mother who has actually brought up the child57defending the title against the woman-owner, first foster-mother or adoptive mother-from whom she received him.... Perhaps the verdict in themyth establishes something like ajoint usufruct, to be exercised in rotation.Or maybe itmakes the competing women into a kind of co-owners, defining the precise extent of each one's share. Nor would the grant of a third of the year to Adonis himself ... necessarily conflict with this construction. He, too, is a co-owner."58Daube well evokes the associations andmeaning that the storywould have held for Panyassis' readers, within the fabric of the various and subtle legal bonds operating between persons inGreek society. Compare Aphrodite's abduction of thebeautiful child Phagthon, whom in an Archaic version of the story ([Hes.], Theog. 988-91) she makes a temple-keeper in her sanctuary and a Batl.tova Btov-is this the presumed destination of baby Adonis in Panyassis' telling? Homer, too, assimilates the story of Zeus and Ganymede to this pattern-a human child is taken away to serve the gods because of his beauty-whether or not the sexual relationship between themwas yet current inmyth (1. 20.234-35).59 These legendary children become older sexual objects in later versions of their stories, but early literature knows them as comely servers, and theAphrodite of Panyassis, far from betraying nepiophilic tendencies, hides Adonis from theother gods in a vain attempt to avoid rivalmasters for her captivating page-to-be. Hellenized, theMesopotamian tale of Tammuz has been strippednot only of its agricultural import,but also of the love affair and the lament.The connections with the rite have been downplayed and obscured through literary re-formation, and thoughwomen lamenters inGreece may have known Panyassis' version, it will not have originated with them.We do not even know if the lamenters thought of Adonis as dividing his year between upper and lowerworlds according to the Mesopotamian tradition,or how indeed they rationalized his yearly dying; since 56. C. Sourvinou-Inwood, JHS 98 (1978) 114-18 sees the placing of a child in a basket as a symbol of ritual adoption by a deity in theArchaic kourotrophic cult of Persephone at Locri; cf. Athena's concealment of her "son" Erichthonius. 57. Panyassis' account does not state, but only implies, thatPersephone has rearedAdonis by the time of Zeus' arbitration. 58. D. Daube, Collected Studies inRoman Law, vol. 2 (FrankfurtamMain, 1991) 1103. Daube connects Apollodorus' phrase iveLv Notp&with the legal term ltcapalov5, denoting a situation in which a slave or debtor is freed, but stays bound to serve his formermaster. 59. Cf. Dover 1989:196-97: "[W]e may wonder why beauty (as distinct from zeal and a steady hand) is a desirable attribute in a wine-pourer, but it should not be impossible for us ... to imagine that the gods on Olympos, like the souls of men in theMuslim paradise (Koran 76.19), simply rejoiced in the beauty of their servants as one ingredientof felicity." 332 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No.2/October 1995 there is no attested Greek celebration of his ascent corresponding to the ritual mourning for his death,60 the resurrection and division of his year need not have figured at all in the cult or the cultists' attitudes. Aphrodite's enclosing Adonis in a chest recalls Callimachus' statement that she hid him in a lettuce patch (fr. 478 Pfeiffer, mentioned above): both motifs would seem to introduce an element of maternal solicitude, even in a hypothetical context where he is a grown youth.Winkler, speculating on connections between themyth of Adonis and the rite of the potted gardens, sees in the story of Adonis a pattern familiar from otherGreek myths, thatof a great goddess who takes away and conceals a mortal beloved: Aphrodite and Adonis, Selene and Endymion, Eos and Tithonus.61Winkler finds in these stories evidence of a female love of peaceful stability, a disposition to nurture and protect: "The implied permanence of the union makes it a quasi-marriage. This is quite different from what gods do when they desire mortal women. Male deities come down and consummate their desire on the spot, then leave themaiden behind to become the founding member of an important race or noble family line, usually aftermuch suffering and disgrace" (Winkler 1990:203). The contrast between female benevolence and the callousness of men ismisapplied. Adonis is dead, Endymion is permanently unconscious, Tithonus spends his endless senility locked away in a cabinet are these exemplars of the ideal husband seen through female eyes, or men's nightmares of what will happen to them should they fall under the spell of a powerful woman? As Winkler stresses, Sappho told all of these stories, and she, perhaps, elaborated them as fantasymarriages; but themyths have come down to us elaborated and interpretedby male writers, and we should be skeptical of automatically seeing in them the female point of view.6 Let us add to the list the stories of Calypso, whose love for Odysseus threatens to keep him forever from his family and estate (Od. 1.48-59), andAnchises, who fears that the love of a goddess will cripple him (H.H. 5.188-90). Selene, Eos, andCalypso promise an immortality that turnsout tobe not an eternal life of divine splendor,but an endless languor or senescence. Winkler assumes that stories of the loves of male gods reflectmale desires, and stories of the loves of goddesses the desires of women. The fallacy is obvious. In stories toldby men, both reflectmale feelings: brute lust temperedby historical consciousness, and abject fear of woman's power were she 60. See P. Lambrechts inMelanges Isidore LEvy (Bruxelles, 1955) 207-40. Such passages as Theoc. 15.13644 and Lucian, Dea syr. 6 reflect Near Eastern resurrected gods syncretistically disguised under the name of Greek Adonis, and are not evidence for Classical practice. Cf. R. de Vaux, Revue biblique 42 (1933) 31-56. 61. Winkler 1990:202-206, working from a paper by Eva Stehle published in revised form as Stehle 1990 (cf. esp. 110-12). Aphrodite and Phaon, also listed by Winkler, are a dubious case; cf. Stehle 1990:89. 62. Winkler 1990:204 is duly skeptical (cf. Stehle 1990:100), but still sees themiserable fates of the young paramours as part of the fantasies of women. As we have them the stories may well be entirely the creations of men. REED:The Sexuality of Adonis 333 to get the upper hand.6 Beautifully comparing a red-figure painting of awoman watering a garden of pert phalloi (itself, of course, thework of a man), Winkler interprets the proverbial brevity of the gardens of Adonis as a sexual joke at the expense of men's quick defatigability: "'O woe forAdonis!' Poor little thing, he just had no staying power."64But canwe not detect in this allegation of amused solicitude towardmale potency a lurking androcentrism that even the feminist Winkler is unable to avoid? If such a sentiment lies behind the proverb-and the connection with Aphrodite's beautiful, short-lived lover makes some such equation at least plausible-are we dealing with a joke of Athenian women, or the anxiety of Athenian men? I know of only one interpretationof such amyth that is carefully grounded in the presumptive perspective of themyth's telling.Winkler himself, in an article that should be better known, convincingly interpretsSappho'smyth of Tithonus in her badly damaged fr.58 L-P as drawing an analogy between Tithonus and thepoet herself, inevitably approaching old age and death but confident in the immortality of her beautiful voice.6 "Sappho allows us briefly to see herself in the role of Tithonos, wrapped in the rosy arms of Dawn and rapt away to the goddess' home in theFar East to be her 'spouse' (22) forever."So thewoman teller of thismyth identifies not with the great goddess, but with her mortal favorite. The "fantasy marriage"motif is applied quite differently and says nothing aboutwomen's self image vis-A-vis men inArchaic Mytilenean society.Men are irrelevanthere; the myth, asWinkler interprets it, is truly gynecocentric. The other myths of this kind Sappho may well have treated in like fashion. Her Adonis-myth is poorly preserved, but suggests a mimetic treatmentwithin a festival ode (in greater Asclepiads), with a chorus of girls inmourning and a second voice representing Aphrodite herself: -Lovely (&Ppoq)Adonis is dead, Cytherea; what shallwe do?6 - Beat yourselves in lamentation, girls, and rend your garments. fr. 140A L-P67 63. Bion's lateHellenistic Epitaph on Adonis, for instance, is suffused with the fear of being smothered by female power. Compa Gilgamesh, spurning the favors of Ishtar lest he share the fate of Adonis' Mesopotamian prototype: "ForTammuz, the lover of thy youth, / Thou hast ordained wailing year after year" (J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts3 [Princeton, 1969] 84); Daphnis' rebuke toAphrodite concerning Anchises andAdonis inTheoc. 1.105-10 is similar. 64. Winkler 1990:205-206. 65. "Sappho and theCrack of Dawn (fragment 58 L-P)," Journal of Homosexuality 20 (1990) 227-33. Winkler 1990:204-205 summarizes this article. For the prospect of immortality through song cf. Sappho, fr. 55 L-P. 66. Pres. xo?09v&oxet is probably used perfectively here: cf. Soph., O.T. 118; Eur., Hec. 696; Bion 1.14 (of Adonis). "Adonis is dead"may have been a traditional ritual cry at theAdonia. 67. Sappho's Adonis-odes arementioned by Dioscorides, A.P. 7.407.7-8 and Paus. 9.29.8. On this fragment see J. Herington, Poetry intoDrama (Berkeley, 1985) 56-57; M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992) 339-40; A. Lardinois, TAPA124 (1994) 65-66. 334 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No.2/October 1995 This reflects no fantasy marriage, but the grief of the goddess replicated in the yearly ceremony: myth and ritual are collapsed into one. Fr. 168 L-P a& 6v "Atovtv, from this or another ode for theAdonia, directly reflects the rite; the rare exclamatory accusative is found mainly in lamentatory cult formulas, and Sappho's formula is paralleled by later sources:Aristoph., Lys. 393 alta "A8ovWv; Bion 1.32 t xr6v "A8XvLv. Our single other testimonium onAdonis definitely by a female author,Praxilla of Sicyon (mid fifth century), may reflect the ritualmore obliquely. According to its preserver, Zenobius 4.21 (L-S i.89), Adonis is answering questioners in the Underworld: The most beautiful thing I leave behind is the light of the sun; secondly, the bright stars and the face of themoon and ripe cucumbers and apples and pears. fr. 747 PMG (in dactylic hexameters).68 This is the only place in all of surviving ancient literaturewhere an author gives Adonis direct speech. The seeming bathos in the last line gave rise to the proverb "More foolish thanPraxilla's Adonis," but in context a wistful remembrance of fresh garden produce on the part of the dead youth, consigned to theUnderworld, is poignant. If Praxilla took part in the ritual lamentation herself (evidence for Adonia inmid-fifth-century Sicyon?), we have a sympathetic identification on the part of the lamenterwith the object of her lament. There is thus little direct evidence for a genuinely female perspective on the myth of Adonis. The early versions of Adonis' life-story that have come from theminds and pens of men should not be expected to reflect, nor indeed seem to reflect, the viewpoint of his worshippers, and the two fragmentary accounts by women frustratingly give only the expected sense of grief and tenderness. Extant later versions come from male comic poets, Hellenistic show-offs and pedants, Roman spoofers, and beetle-browed church fathers.What we have in all these stories, as in theproverb based on thegardens, is amale-oriented Adonis proceeding from the facts of the rite as theywere observed bymen, but elaborated into new traditions.We should admit a priori thatonce Adonis got into the hands of men, theymight have found uses for him quite unrelated to the ritual context whence he came, or to their feelings toward it.Whatever female attitudes these male authorsmay have absorbed from observing the celebrants we must expect to find transformed and transgendered. So what of themale attitude towardAdonis in the Classical period? The motif of Adonis' death, obviously inferred from the yearly mourning over him, lends itself to the anxiety-ridden perspective we noted in similar stories of mortals 68. The statement of Athenaeus, Deipn. 694A thatPraxilla was admired for her skolia raises the suspicion of a particularlymale context for her poetry; but Athenaeus' statementmay only mean that her poems became popular at symposia. Zenobius finds these lines Iv Toti ?OlivotL. REED: TheSexuality ofAdonis 335 and their goddess-lovers, and thewell-known version inwhich he is killed by a wild boar that he is hunting reinforces that perspective by assimilating Adonis to a type of failed hunter.6 Since the Stone Age, hunting is themanly activity par excellence, and its successful execution the supreme test of manhood, both where it is still practiced as a source of livelihood and even where it has become merely emblematic. Soft Adonis, grown effeminate in the chambers of Aphrodite, would naturally lose to his prey, in binary opposition to the stalwart ephebes who battle boars in solitary combat on red-figuredvases.70Ribichini feels thatAdonis' status as failed hunter excludes him from the society of adultmen (1981:108-44; cf. Detienne 1994:66-67); the boar-wound, which he will have sustained in the vicinity of thegroin, could symbolize emasculation71(support forDetienne's view of Adonis as infertile?). Giulia Piccaluga sees inAdonis a parable of the end of serious hunting and the advent of an agricultural way of life, whose antithesis he will embody.7 A problem: his boar-hunting death is not even hinted at until after 400 BCE (Araros, fr. 1PCG; Dionysius Iof Syracuse, fr. 1TrGF) and isnot certainly attested until the early Hellenistic poets Lycophron (Alex. 831-33) and Glycon (PMG 1029).73There is no evidence that it came over toGreece with Adonis from some Near Eastern legend. Its source, however, probably is Classical: contamination fromAttis, who in one version of his Greek legend (seemingly as old as the fifth century) was killed by a wild boar that he was hunting.74Adonis andAttis, both imports from the East, both darlings of mighty goddesses, both dying young, both increasingly celebrated inAthens in the later fifth century, were no doubt readily confused, eithermistakenly or for comic effect. Again, this contamination did not necessarily originate among the women celebrants, who would hardly have confused the object of their lamentationwith the prototype of the eunuch priests of Cybele, but more likely in themale-dominated discourse of dramatic fiction. Comedy was a fertile producer of new myths, and in addition to that of Araros we know of comedies titledAdonis by Nicophon, Antiphanes, Philiscus, and Plato Comicus. The last, according toAthenaeus, Deipn. 456A (= Plato, fr. 3 PCG), made Adonis both loverof Aphrodite and beloved of Dionysus, apparently in a bisexualized burlesque on the Panyassian rivalry between Aphrodite and Persephone. The comic element found by Athenians here lies in the undignified 69. On this figure see especially Piccaluga 1977; N. F. Rubin andW. M. Sale, Arethusa 16 (1983) 137-71. 70. Cf. A. Schnapp, RA (1979) 195-218. 71. Burkert 1979:108. Adonis' wound is on his thigh or groin in Bion 1.7 and 41; Ovid, Am. 3.9.16 andMet. 10.715; often in art. 72. Piccaluga 1977. 73. On Araros' fragment see Atallah 1966:72-73. On Glycon and his date seeW. J.W. Koster, Philologus 80 (1924-1925) 357. Two early fourth-century vase paintings, described inUMC i.l s.v. Adonis nos. 27-28, have been thought to represent the hunting myth. 74. Burkert 1979:108. The story of Atys inHdt. 1.34-45 rationalizes thismyth, which is explicit inHermesianax, fr. 8 Powell; Plut., Sert. 1; Schol. Nicander, Alex. 8. 336 Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY spectacle of theOlympians squabbling over an affair of the heart, and the later efflorescence of myths of jealousy and revenge inwhich various deities instigate Adonis' boar-hunt or actually are the boar may also come from lost comic treatmentsorHellenistic works based on them.75 Thus Adonis' status as a "failed hunter,"with all the connotations that that type would have carried, could have marked him for Classical audiences as a man manque, a model of what a Greek man should avoid being. The binarism is established, the system of associations is well marked out, the semantic net is cast-but once again Adonis slips through. This use of the hunting motif is pure hypothesis. Classical and laterversions that survive give no hint thathe was thought to be anything but a brave young hunter who met a tragic end. This is the impression given, for example, by his story as depicted in relief on numerous Roman sarcophagi.76Venus' vain plea inOvid, Met. 10.705-707 that he avoid fiercebeasts and chase only timidones, though some take itas evidence thatOvid's Adonis was a coward (e.g., Ribichini 1981:70), clearly implies the opposite; cf. 709 sed stat monitis contraria virtus. Comedies like that of Araros, of course, may have presented him as a coward for their special purposes, and the story recounted by Nicander, fr. 120 Schneider thathe sought refuge from the boar in a lettuce patch may reflect such a treatment.On the other hand, the very fact that Adonis was the subject of Dionysius' tragedyAdonis, presumably performed in Athens like Dionysius' other plays, suggests that he could accommodate more for Classical audiences than a mere target for contempt, and the speaker of our only fragment-a boar-hunter, probably Adonis himself-sounds overconfident, if anything (Dionysius, fr. 1 TrGF; cf. Bion 1.60-61). That very boldness, to be sure,might have been used as a kind of "tragic flaw" to sound a warning, a sign of a hot-headed young man's hubris, inexorably to be punished; but such interpretationsof Adonis' downfall-either from cowardice or its opposite-are valuable for showing how theGreeks could have characterized him, not how they must have characterized him. Extant references toAdonis' hunting, in fact, are so scrappy that it is hard to tell what mythological type (if any) it assimilated him to. His hunting might have borne little semantic weight at all: the etiological emphasis on Aphrodite's mourning and the cursory treatmentof the accident itself in our few full literary versions of Adonis' death (Bion 1; Ovid, Met. 10.708-39) recall Hyas, whose death while hunting serves only tomotivate the grief of his sisters, theHyades.77 75. The Muses (Lycophron, Alex. 831 with schol.), Apollo (Ptolemy Chennus in Photius, Bibl. 146B), Artemis ([Apoll.], Bibl. 3.14.4 < Schol. Eur., Hi. 1420?), Jupiter (Servius on Verg., Eel. 10.18), Hephaestus (Nonnus, Dion. 42.320-21), Ares (Nonnus, Dion. 46.209-11 and often). Cf. Atallah 1966:53-56. 76. LIMC pl. 38-39f. Cf. J.Aymard, Essai sur les chasses romaines (Paris, 1951) 520-22. 77. Hyas is killed by a snake, a boar, or a lion; for the extant versions see RE 9.24-25. The earliest is by the early Hellenistic historian Timaeus of Tauromenium (FGrH 566 F 91), but a hunter depicted near theHyades on an early fourth-century kratermay be Hyas (UMC v. 1.550). REED:The Sexuality of Adonis 337 If models are to be sought, the figures most often invoked as examples of the "failed hunter"-Actaeon, Orion, Meleager-are unsatisfactory parallels to Adonis. They do not, like him, actually fail at hunting; they are hunters who die in some other way. Mythological boar-hunters killed by theirquarry are not necessarily constructed as social failures. The people of Tegea inArcadia seem to have representedAncaeus' death by the Calydonian boar as a heroic last stand (Paus. 8.4.10 and 45.2). Apollonius' tale of the death of Idmon, the seer of the Argonauts ambushed by awild boar in the landof theMariandyni (Arg. 2.815-50), probably goes back toHerodorus, who in theearly fourthcenturywrote of Idmon's death and the grand tomb raised for him in the agora of Heraclea (FGrH 31 F 50-51). These honorable deaths attested in ancient poets and historians, rather than the contemptible deaths hypothesized by modern critics, would have been readymodels for the hunting-myth of Adonis. Permit me, as a kind of devil's advocate, to proffer a new interpretationof Adonis' death by the boar, only to retract it for lack of contextual confirmation. My intent is simply heuristic. A youngman's hunt, even where it is not actually an initiatory rite (as it apparentlywas in Crete: Ephorus, FGrH 70 F 149), always carries overtones of a coming-of-age.78 At the dawn of ancient Greek literature, the young Odysseus proves his worth to his maternal uncles and grandfather by killing his boar (Od. 19.392-466); toward the end, the emperor Hadrian holds back from a lion-hunt in order to test themarksmanship of his beloved Antinous (Pancrates, 15.2.6-9 Heitsch). In this light,Adonis' boar hunt might brand him as the pathetic antithesis of all a boy must do to become aman. On the other hand, death is also a commonmotif in initiation ritualsand relatedmyths: symbolic death in the rituals themselves, mythopoetically transformed into the actual demise of fictional youths likeDionysus, Hyacinthus, andOrion, followed by resurrection, posthumous honors, or translation to a higher existence.7 Whether we are dealing with direct reflections of initiation rites or of idioms of transition thatmyths and rites shared,Adonis' death assimilates him to a paradigm-not an antitype-of the successful passage from boyhood tomanhood: the initiatoryhunt kills the boy, but he is reborn in new guise. To support this interpretation,however, we would search our sources in vain for references to a "new"Adonis, cleansed by death of pre-initiatory folly, or indeed for any real sequel to his yearly resurrection,which does not seem to have engaged the imagination of theGreeks anywhere near as much as his death did. Nevertheless, the interpretationIhave just sketched should 78. On hunting as an initiatory idiom inGreek mythology seemost recently Leitao 1993:86-141, who follows M. Bloch, Prey intoHunter (Cambridge, 1992). P.Vidal-Naquet discusses adolescent hunting in ancient Greece as a preliminary inversion of adultwarfare: The Black Hunter (Baltimore, 1986); cf. PCPS 212 (1986) 126-44. 79. See V. Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, 1967) 96 on death as a metaphor for vanGennep's "liminal" stage of rites of passage; Bloch (n. 78 above) sees any such rite as beginning with a relinquishing of vitality. C. Gallini, SMSR 34 (1963) 61-90 discusses drowning as a symbol of transition inGreek myth and ritual. 338 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 keep us aware not only of the need for individual contexts to establish meaning, but also-if mythical death may signal either success or failure, depending on how it is used-of the Protean polysemousness of amotif. The interpretation of the potted gardens of Adonis as dramatizations of failed agriculture, although it does not illuminate the ritual itself, may at least illuminate themotivation behind theproverb, and thusmen's attitudes.Detienne exhaustively lists the authorswho rank the gardens with sterility against fertility, with precocity against maturity, with women and children against adult men, and concludes that "from Plato to Simplicius an entire tradition condemns the What Adonian gardens for being cultureswithout crops and essentially sterile."80 we have in this tradition is a smearing of "theOther" inmicrocosm, partof the long monologue of self-definition carried out by Greek male writers over amillennium. The proverb is used iLTxxv &dp(Cxv xal 6XtyoXpovitVvxcal &v&vspwv,according to the epitome of Pseudo-Diogenianus (L-S ii.3). Although extant writers who use the gardensmetaphorically aremostly late,8'we may assume that theymodel theircensoriousness on theClassical authors fromwhom they adopted themaxim. Caution, however, is in order, since Imperialprosaists, while addicted toClassical proverbs and other such flosculi, had theirown programs, and theAtticizing lexica that served themmust reflect post-Classical impressions of the bygone heyday of Athens. Our only Classical attestation comes from Plato, Phdr. 276B,82where Socrates says: Tell me this:Would an intelligent farmer, with seeds he cared about and wished to grow to fruition, sow them in gardens of Adonis in all seriousness during the summer and rejoice as he watched them become beautiful inamatter of eight days; orwould he do this for fun and festivity, when he did it at all? For things he was serious about, would he not use his farmerly craft, plant them in a suitable environment, and be content if everything he planted came tomaturity in the eighthmonth? Recent scholarship on theAdonia seems tobe unanimous inholding thatPlato, speaking throughSocrates, disparages and despises the rite as "anti-agricultural." But Socrates is not even addressing theAdonia directly. The gardens here are a byword for potted plants in general, and Socrates is simply drawing a contrast between planting that you do seriously and planting that you do just for fun. "Would a serious farmer plant corn and peas and tend them until harvest-time, orwould he waste his time forcing narcissus bulbs?"Disapproval is not intimated in the upshot of the parable in 276D, where writing-the analogue to the potted gardens-is an exercise for short-termpleasure and amusement, unlike the lasting, 80. Detienne 1994:101-106, 135-36. 81. Citations above, n. 30. Elsewhere potted plants are similarly reviled without mention of theAdonia (e.g., Jo. Chrys., Epist. ad Ephes. 4.12 [62.91Migne]). 82. The scholiast on this passage says that Euripides used the gardens proverbially in his Melanippe (= Eur., fr. 514 Nauck). Theophr., C.P. 1.12.2 is another early example. REED: TheSexuality ofAdonis 339 generative mode of discourse, speech.83Perhaps readers are so used to thinking of Plato as the dour Savonarola of Academe that they cannot see him speaking of "fun and games" without a scowl on his face; but Socrates is surely smiling. There is a tendency in recent scholarship to extend the disdain thatGreeks felt for "things that do not last long enough to produce anything of value" not only to the ritual potted plants, but to the entire festival and toAdonis himself. In comedy the Adonia do represent the realm of the unworthy or unmanly. A character in the Boukoloi of Cratinus (fr. 17 PCG) mocks the poetic aspirations of the son of Cleomachus by suggesting thathe is unworthy to traina chorus even for theAdonia, let alone for theGreat Dionysia; compare the comic bathos in Aristophanes, Pax 420 pua-SopL' 'EpAju,AutoXlet', 'Axvtma.84Aristophanes' lost H6rai, in which foreign gods (Sabazius, for one; cf. Aristoph., fr. 578 PCG) were expelled on a charge of xenia-impersonating a citizen-suggests that comic belittlement of theAdonia may have reflected asmuch xenophobia as misogyny;85 but the proboulos inLys. 387-96, suspicious that thewomen on the Acropolis are up to some Sabazius-worship or "Adoniasm," clearly demarcates the emotion-filled new cults as an outbreak of female licentiousness, classing them as women's tryphe (387) and contrasting the speechifying of a responsible citizen in theAssembly with his wife's cries of "alas for Adonis!" on the roof (391-96).86 So Attic comedy supports the view that "license and shamelessness lie at the very heart of the Adonia" (Detienne 1994:122)-as long as we are own a the as foil for As about men's of cult their self-control. talking conception Stehle (1990:106) observes, the hetairas' Adonia inDiphilus, fr. 42.38-41 PCG andAlciphron 4.14 (based on fourth-century comedy) demonstrate "how the cult was explained (away) by the dominant culture: by joking about courtesans and their lovers enjoying it,mainstream discourse at once acknowledged curiosity, claimed control (for courtesans live at themercy of men), and dismissed the cult asmarginal." As for Adonis himself, we have already encountered the notion that he, like his gardens, symbolized infertility and premature growth. Fissures appear in the even, monolithic planes of meaning thatDetienne assumes when we ob serve that for Roman-era intellectuals, among whom the proverbial use of the 83. Cf. 0. Balleriaux in J. Servais et al., eds., Stemmata (Liege, 1987) 161-64. An anonymous commentator anthologized in Stobaeus 2.6.1 misses themark when he says that "Plato likens the majority of what certain authorswrite to the gardens of Adonis, which readily wither, their charm being ephemeral." 84. Cratinus' joke does not, of course, imply thatmen were actually engaged to compose Adonis-odes atAthens like those of Sappho inMytilene. 85. On the reflection of Classical Athenian xenophobia in theHorai and its part inAthenian self-definition see Hall 1989:175. 86. Cf. Winkler 1990:190-91 on this passage. A scholiast on 389 seems to discern notes of both misogyny and xenophobia in the proboulos' comments: xpat xioXXotL; 6pytL&ovToat at yuvaLxcs 0tonc oi ~8toTeXe ob: 'Ec(xyIpvoug. For contemptuous references to later Adonis-worship (coupled with Attis-worship) see Callim., fr. 193.34-38 Pfeiffer; Plut., Mor. 756C. 340 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 quickly fading gardens is best attested, Adonis himself, on the contrary, sym bolizes the ripe fruits of the earth (n. 16 above). Only Pseudo-Diogenianus 1.14 (L-S i.183) etymologizes the gardens' name from Adonis' own similar fate, and the extemporaneity of this etiology is as patent as its inventiveness.87 The emperor Julian compares the gardens to the fruitless works of Constantine (Symp. 329C-D); his contemporary and supporterSallustius has Adonis symbol ize xapoo6bs (De deis 4.3). For Porphyry it is ratherAttis who represents plants that fade pilv TeXeoLyovioaat,in binary contrast to Adonis, Tr:s trcv )TeXtov xtpxxpv ixXropi ao6ipoXov (in Euseb., PE. 3.11.9). The Etymologicum mag num even attests a sort of counter-proverb: 'AGSvLsoqxapx6S, &ipcoxv (19.9). The Greeks of Classical times, too, must often have constructed meaning in despite of mere homonymy; clearly, we must resist extrapolating their characteri zation of Adonis simply from their apparentdisdain for his eponymous gardens. We shall soon discern quite a different attitude towardAdonis on the part of Athenian men. Nevertheless, he would probably have attracted censure. Itwas typical for Greek men to despise youths who sought to attract women. Hector hectors Paris for being woman-crazy (II. 3.39). Pentheus derides Dionysus as a fair skinned gigolo "on the prowl forAphrodite" (Eur.,Ba. 457-59): who more than Adonis was open to this charge? A few passages in extant ancient literature do suggest a conception of him as a hopeless molly-coddle, a slave to love, incapable of manly behavior. The earliest, probably derived from a Classical source, is fromAristotle's studentClearchus of Soli, who explained the proverb o6iv teipv ("worthless, good-for-nothing") by a story thatHeracles, upon seeing the worship of Adonis, coined it as an expression of his disgust (Clearchus, fr. 66A-C Wehrli); the contrast between the paradigmatic he-man and the soft minion of Aphrodite speaks for itself.88A century or so afterClearchus, Plautus' Menaechmus, dressed in his wife's gown, facetiously compares himself to a kept boy like "Catamitus" (Ganymede) or "Adoneus" (Men. 143-44); inCatullus 29.8 "Adoneus" is a term of abuse of one who perambulabit omnium cubilia.8 Dio Chrysostom twice uses Adonis in images of effeminate luxury (Or. 29.18, 62.6). Again, behind this disapprobation lies masculine fear lest a youth fall under a woman's power and thus fail ever to become a man. Classical Athenian boys were discouraged from relationswith women before the darkening of theirbeard 87. Cf. the amusingly puzzled explanations for the proverb given by [Diogen.], Epit. 1.12 (L-S ii.3), plainly contrived by a late scholarwho knew something of Adonis but nothing of the rite: "For Adonis was a good-looking young man who did not benefit from his beauty. Or because having acquired a rocky garden, he got no profit of it." 88. Compare the proverbial-sounding remark used in a scholium on 11. 24.23 that goes back to Aristarchus: &S; st xal 'HpaxXf' &rywov.woto tp6<; "A8ovwv (analogous to Athena's futile beauty contest with Aphrodite). 89. The unusual form of Adonis' name recurs inAusonius, Ep. 48.6. REED: TheSexuality ofAdonis 341 signified that they were ready for such expenditures of their vital substance.9 Lysias testifies to the recklessness, and explains the effeteness, of the younger Alcibiades by the charge that he kept a mistress before coming of age (14.25). Men saw mythical Adonis as dominated by a powerful goddess-lover, and scarier-ritual Adonis as dominated by their own wives and mothers. Their presumptive belittling of him would be a defense against identifying him with theirown youthful selves, a defensive tactic againstwomen's power in the sexual and social realms. This web of prejudices and apprehensions is thematrix of a four-line frag ment of the comic Plato's Adonis, an oracle delivered to Cinyras, king of the (i.e., emphatically, even comically, masculine) Cypriots: a most 8a6itp(oxot beautiful and wondrous boy has been born to him, who will "row" a goddess and "be rowed" by a god. As noted above, Athenaeus, who may well have had Plato's text before him, identifies the goddess as Aphrodite (of course) and the god as Dionysus. The humor here, apart from the bawdy metaphor, lies in the depiction of Adonis as a youth involved in heterosexual and pederastic relations simultaneously, spending his precious energies on a woman before he has been made aman. The perils of such activity aremade explicit by thegenerally accepted emendation of Jacobs: the two deities will thus destroy the son of Cinyras.91 Yet this is comedy, where the drama of self-definition was played out so as to make a male audience mock thatwhich they feared. This attitude does not enter the other Classical treatments of Adonis that we possess, and it is risky to project it into them universally. The qualities that are supposed to have marked Adonis for contempt-early death, wifelessness, childlessness-are rathergrounds for compassion in themain traditionof Greek epitaphic literature and underlie themost hackneyed conventions of grave inscriptions and epicedic verse.9 Given the chance-in amore reflective genre, for example, like tragedy (that of Dionysius?) or narrative elegy (cf. Antimachus, fr. 102West)-could Athenian men not have pitied Adonis as they did their &Dpot sons, despite his violations of their sexual protocols? Pretty-boy though he might have seemed from some perspectives, could Adonis not have embodied all the complexity and ambivalence of aHippolytus, inviting both censure for the foolhardy boy thathe had been, yet the deepest sympathy for theman that he would never become? We are speculating now, but we are speculating within legitimate boundaries of Greek thought,where the cognitive oppositions are always shifting. If on one and the same stageHeracles could be both a paragon of noble suffering and a buffoon, 90. Leitao 1993:173-78. R. A. Segal's interpretationof theAdonis-myth, tempering the social criticism of Detienne with Jung's archetype of the puer aeternus, faults Adonis' youth (in D. C. Pozzi and J.M. Wickersham, Myth and thePolls [Ithaca, 1991] 64-83). 91. Jacobs reads 6Xet:ov where themanuscripts have the nonsensical XCLXeov or Xverov. 92. Cf. R. Lattimore, Themes inGreek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana, 1962); E. Griessmaier, Das Motiv der mors immatura in den griechischen metrischen Grabinscriften (Innsbruck, 1966). 342 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 poets could no doubt similarlymanipulate the figure of Adonis and elaborate his best-known features into contradictory personae. Sergio Ribichini haswritten a book discussing Adonis as aGreek formulation of "the Oriental," "the anti-Greek," "the Other," a figure onto which a Greek man could project all the qualities he considered-or desired-to be foreign to himself.9 The notion is exciting, but again, the evidence disappoints. Despite Detienne's tour through the fabulous landscape that forHerodotus was theOrient (1994:5-36), Classical Adonis seems not to have been much of an exotic: our scanty literary treatments do not emphasize this quality, and in the visual arts he wears only the vaguely Ionian style that at Athens had long passed for luxury, both good and ill. Adonis' incestuous parentage might have signified barbarian incontinence,4 but thatmotif would have indictedMyrrha rather than Adonis himself. Some of Ribichini's suggestions aremisleading. He believes, for example, thatAdonis' homosexuality places him "aimargini della normality."95 Now, Adonis is beloved of Dionysus in the scurrilous fancy of Plato the comic poet (discussed above; followed by Phanocles, fr. 3 Powell). Versions preserved by Ptolemy Chennus make Heracles and Apollo Aphrodite's rivals for Adonis' favors; these too may come from Attic comedy or Hellenistic works derived from or modeled after it.96But since when does homosexual activity of this kind-playing paidika to amore experienced male-put anyone at the "margins of normality" for an Athenian? It is ratherhis pathological heterosexuality that would putAdonis, like Paris forHector andDionysus for Pentheus, at the limits of acceptable behavior-would put him there, if we had evidence thatGreek men thought of him this way. In any case, there is no reason to think that an Athenian man was always concerned tomake his feelings about a mythological character absolutely consistent-that if he sneered at Adonis in one context he was forbidden to slaver over him in another. For if vase-paintings, created and purchased by men, are any indication of male attitudes,Athenian men of the later fifth century rather likedAdonis. Clas sical iconography gives him-and other youths beloved of goddesses, like Phaon, Cephalus, Tithonus, and Endymion-the flowing hair, the beardless profile, and the smooth Polyclitean physique of the paradigmatically beautiful paidika, what 93. Ribichini 1981 (this interpretation is anticipated by Detienne 1994:128-29). The use of eastern peoples as an alter ego or foil, studied for themodern West by E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), becomes a basic tactic of Greek self-construction after the Persian Wars: F. Hartog, TheMirror of Herodotus, tr.J. Lloyd (Berkeley, 1988); Hall 1989. 94. Ribichini 1981:70-71; cf. Hall 1989:189-90. 95. Ribichini 1981:71. 96. Ptolemy Chennus' stories arepreserved inPhotius, Bibl. 147A and 15 1B.See K. H. Tomberg, Die Kaine Historia des Ptolemaios Chennos (diss. Bonn, 1967) on Ptolemy (earlyRoman period) and his compendium of bizarre exegeses, many of which may be the improvisations of commentators, like the story thatmakes Adonis beloved of Zeus (Schol. Theoc. 15.86A; see T.Wolbergs, Griechische religiose Gedichte der ersten nachchristlichen Jahrhunderte [Meisenheim amGlan, 1971] 67-68). REED:The Sexuality of Adonis 343 Kenneth Dover calls a "pin-up."97He often holds a lyre, token of the nubile youth.9 Here is the soft, passive Adonis whom themen of Athens are supposed to have despised, glorified on theirmost elaborate tableware; here, too, lies the explanation of a long line of poets' describing him as habros9 or in terms of that quality-not to effeminize and belittle him, but to celebrate his ephebic gorgeous ness, employing a well-established traditionof homosexual acclamation.'? This was an aristocratic tradition, known first and best from the pederastic effusions of Ibycus and Anacreon, but one thatwas paralleled more andmore in popular art toward the end of the fifth century, as by thepainterParrhasius,whose Theseus "appeared to have been fed on roses."'10In otherwords, men are appropriating the stance of theirwives towardAdonis and assimilating him to their own paradigm of youthful male attractiveness. The gaze-theory towhich Stehle appeals, based on the assumption that "themale figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectifi cation" since "[m]an is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like,"'02is helpless to explain such images as these. Stehle sees in vase-paintings of a goddess and her mortal beloved, and in the legend they illustrate, "an irreconcilable conflict between two established hierarchies, thatof male and female and that of divine and human,"'03and she finds one way around this impasse by approaching the scene from a hierarchy-dissolving female viewpoint, though allowing thatcertain motifs could divert amale gaze into a subliminalmother-and-child fantasy.'0 Of course, almost any interpretationof any text is possible, insofar as any viewer reconstitutes its meaning according to his or her own lights; but in the social context of these vase-paintings there is no room for a genuine female viewpoint ungoverned and unwarped by male painters and patrons.What resolves the con 97. Dover 1989:6. See Dover 1989:172 on how "the attributes which made a young male attractive to erastai were assumed tomake him no less attractive towomen," with special reference to paintings of the er6menoi of goddesses. For such depictions of Adonis see e.g., LIMC pi. 5, 8-11; they are common in contemporary Etruscan art aswell. Cf. Wehgartner 1987. 98. On the lyre as a standard part of the equipage of beautiful young men on vase paintings, including the inamoratiof deities, see Dover 1989:75. 99. First Sappho, fr. 140A.1 L-P, whence male poets: Bion 1.79; [Orph.], H. 56.2; Proclus, H. 1.26. 100. See L. Kurke, ClAnt 11 (1992) 91-120 on the double-edged semantics of habrosyne in the Archaic and Classical periods. 101. Plut., Mor. 346A. This changing tastewas no doubt connected to the increased value placed on private sentiments:men could appreciate habrosyne as a private ideal,while scorning it as a civic one.Wehgartner 1987:196-97 notes the aristocratic-not to say oligarchic-motifs present inmany late fifth-century representations of Adonis (e.g., personified Eunomia); cf. Burn 1987:38-39. 102. L. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989) 20. Mulvey's distinction (derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis) between scopophilic spectation of a woman as erotic object and ego-forming spectation of aman is too limited for our purposes. 103. Stehle 1990:94. 104. Stehle 1990:101-104. She is pleased to find that in such paintings "the scene has been detached from the narrativewhose closure determines its ideological shape" (Stehle 1990:101), but a student of cultural poetics would take the circumstances of the paintings' conception, production, and use as the unavoidable matrix of their content, and so interpret text and context as a continuum thatprovides more than enough ideological closure. 344 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 flict ismore likely the representation of Adonis and the other boys as paidika, who in Athenian society would not be granted any hierarchical power.105The subordinationof male to female in these paintings would not have caused anxiety to their hypothetical male focalizers, who were objectifying Adonis more than identifying with him. Artistic depictions of Adonis begin appearing inAthens (indeed, anywhere) in the late fifth century.'1 The finest from this period appears on a hydria by theMeidias Painter (Florence 81948 = LIMC 10). Itmay have been designed as a gift for an Athenian bride: male iconographers are creating a female gaze in the image of their own. Adonis is shown in left profile, wearing shoulder-length curling hair, a fringed headband, and an expression of almost torpescent bliss: this is the living face of habrosyne. Nude but for some token drapery over his far leg, he reclines between the knees of Aphrodite, who is seated a little uphill from him; she has her hands on his shoulders as if massaging them. He has let his lyre slip to the ground. Aphrodite's attendants-personifications of good fortune, thewedding feast, and the like, creating by their presence a connubial paradise-surround the couple, as splendidly coifed and attired as the goddess herself. A winged Desire hovers above Adonis' face, holding his attentionwith an iynx. Lucilla Burn, discussing the symmetry with which the artist has disposed all these figures, notes the subtle organization of intercrossed gazes converging on Adonis and his divine paramour,whose limbs envelop him and whose face is bowed toward him.'1 Everything directs one's eye to the youth embowered at the center of the composition, hypnotized and stilled by the spinning love-charm. Men could indeed have representedAdonis as the antithesis of what they were, but seem more often to have represented him as the ideal of what they wanted; if we thus shift theirmotivation from identification to desire, a whole new paradigm opens up, foiling both the antitypist interpretationof Ribichini and the strict feminist approach that declines to see a male as object of a male gaze. Thus my title: what was the sexuality of Adonis? That is to say, where was he located, and how was he oriented, amid theAthenian protocols of sexual behavior? The answer depends on which Adonis you are talking about, or at least on how he was being used in a given context. A first answer might be that he was loved by women, despised by men; yet thatmale attitude is poorly attested and is unhelpful for the interpretationof much of our evidence. The discourse surroundingAdonis has come to us in chips and shards, and in its disorderly 105. The subordinate sexual and social status of paidika has been much discussed, especially since Dover's study. See M. Golden, Phoenix 38 (1984) 308-24 on the strategies used to keep eromenoi from being assimilated entirely to slaves and women. Stehle 1990:97 discusses Adonis among other such paidika, but admits them only as models of failure "to make the transition to adulthood." 106. There is insufficient reason to think that the earlierworks discussed by Atallah 1966:141-68 and D. Callipolitis-Feytmans, BCH 104 (1980) 325-30 depict Adonis. 107. Bur 1987:5-6. REED:The Sexuality of Adonis 345 wealth we glimpse amyriad of refractions of the beautiful boy. Easily dissociated from the ritual thatmen feared, derided, or simply ignored, he soon took on new lives with new significance. Diachronically, the firstmyths of Adonis, intended to account for his rites and encode him in theGreeks' mythological understanding of theirworld, gave way in the later fifth century to reactions to his popularity among Athenian women; thusAdonis entered theHellenistic period a cipher for the anxieties and lusts of post-Periclean Athenian men. Synchronically, in the sum of all his Classical manifestations, he is a pawn-or better, a go-between-in the negotiations between men andwomen in a harshly gendered society. So how did women deploy this pawn? We shall never know what stories the celebrants themselves told on the rooftops in the twilight, while wailing and beating their breasts over a figurine of Aphrodite's toy-boy. In the absence of direct testimony, however, we can infer from the socio-political matrix of the Attic cult at least some motivation for its popularity. Private, ritual lamentation may have fulfilled some of the same emotional needs as public laments at real funerals, and part of the appeal of theAdonia may have lain in the sheer luxuryof mourning, perhaps mingled with a rarely indulged sexual expressiveness. It is true that in playing the role of Aphrodite over a doll-like effigy of her beautiful lover thewomen of Athens were taking on a sexual role quite different from the one they showed to theirolder, dominant husbands, and itwould not be surprising if the cult offered them an escapist outlet. The Adoniazousai, suggests Oswyn Murray, "mourn forbidden fruit-the fantasy lover that society has deprived them of, and those frontiers of desire that theywill never know."108 Now consider the status of lamentation, generally speaking, in Classical Athens. Legislators since the timeof Solon had steadily restricted funereal activity to the prothesis at home, cracking down on public displays on the road during the ekphora and at the grave. These restrictions strengthened civic loyalties to the detriment of aristocratic clan-loyalties, thus nurturing a unified, democratic polls; but at the same time they tended to strike at one of women's only public roles in traditionalAthenian society."09Yet the very weakening of clan-loyalties fragmented the polis into new centers of loyalty and authority in the private space of the home, and the fierceness with which women might defend their prerogatives against social change-the background of Sophocles' Antigone"1? guaranteed that in that traditionally female space women's power over death 108. Murray 1993:87. Cf. Burkert 1979:107; E. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus (New York, 1985) 28: "In bemoaning the death of Adonis, Athenian women lamented their own loveless lives." 109. On Athenian funeral legislation (attested in [Dem.] 43.62; Cic., Leg. 2.64 and 66; Plut., Sol. 21) see especially Alexiou 1974:3-23; R. Garland, The Greek Way of Death (London, 1985) 21-23, 137;Holst-Warhaft 1992:102-103, 114-19. 110. Cf. Holst-Warhaft 1992:4: "Wemust listen toAntigone's lines with care, not reading into them somuch awoman's side to the conflict over the right to control death, but perhaps the tragedian's awareness that there is in theAthenian state, thatembodiment of civilized man, a danger in interfering with traditional customs and the family's relationship to the dead." 346 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 14/No. 2/October 1995 and its ceremonies could assert itself anew.11 A private religious festival that reaffirmed this ancient power would be welcome, and the rooftop venue of the Adonia, outside of the house yet stillwithin the home, offered a nice compromise between public and private, a stage for female privilege within sight, but beyond the reach, of the dominant society. Our first datable testimony on the Attic Adonia is Aristophanes, Pax 420 (421 BCE);Cratinus, fr. 17 PCG may be earlier. Adonis himself first appears in Athenian art a decade or so later.Other imported cults that emphasized high pitched emotion are first attested inAthens around the same time: those of Attis, Bendis, and Sabazius are examples."2 This was a time of crisis forAthens: the Peloponnesian war polarized the city inmany different ways, not least by sex. The Adonia emblematize this polarization in the passage from Aristophanes' Lysistrata already cited, where the proboulos wants to know if the women's hijinks are part of some outlandish cult; in fact, the women have seized the Acropolis in an attempt to stop the war. Frustration at the plight of their city and their own powerlessness to do anything about it (and fury at the stupidity of theirhusbands, who can do something about itbutwon't) inspire thewomen of Athens, in the fantasy of the comic poet, to astounding feats of civil disobedience and diplomatic success. As the proboulos guesses, a good cry up on the roof, mingled with festivity in the company of otherwomen, was thebest relief that life could offer. Relief not just from the strains of war-time, but from thewear and tearof ordinary life, especially those stresses peculiar toAthenian womanhood."13 The upper-class woman, confined to her house all day andmade to feel that itwas not nice even to be seen bymen outside her family, and theworking-class woman, consigned to a life of drudgerywithout even the satisfaction her husband got from his place in the ranks of Pericles' democracy, must have felt, it need hardly be said, a certain amount of oppression and distance from what was important and significant in her society. But once a year, in the privacy of her own home, she could be Aphrodite. Ohio State University 111. Detienne sees "an explosive expansion of the private sector" as a formative influence on the Attic Adonia and their public representation, but dates this development specifically to the years after the Peloponnesian War (Detienne 1994:130). 112. On this trendcf. E. R. Dodds, HThR 33 (1940) 171-76, Euripides: Bacchae2 (Oxford, 1960) xxiii. 113. The appeal of thePtolemaic cult of Adonis described inTheoc. 15 has been discussed in the context of the social status of women by F. T. Griffiths in H. Foley, ed., Reflections of Women in Antiquity (London, 1981) 247-59; R.-S. Kramer,Her Share of theBlessings (Oxford, 1992) 31-34. It remains to explore the situation of thewomen of Syro-Palestine and the socio-political dynamics of the original eastward transmission of the lament forTammuz. REED:The Sexuality ofAdonis 347 WORKS CITED AND ABBREVIATIONS Alexiou, M. 1974. The Ritual Lament inGreek Tradition. Cambridge. Atallah, W. 1966. Adonis dans la literature et l'art grecs. Paris. Burkert,W. 1979.StructureandHistory inGreekMythology andRitual.Berkeley. Bur, L. 1987. The Meidias Painter. Oxford. Detienne, M. 1994. The Gardens of Adonis. Tr. J. Lloyd. 2nd ed. Princeton. Dover, K. J. 1989. Greek Homosexuality. Updated ed. Harvard. Hall, E. 1989. Inventing the Barbarian. Oxford. Holst-Warhaft, G. 1992. Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature. London. Leitao, D. D. 1993. The "Measure of Youth": Body and Gender in Boys' Transitions in AncientGreece.Diss. U. Michigan. LIMC = Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae, i.2 s.v. Adonis (unless another article is specified). L-S = E. L. von Leutsch and F. Schneidewin, Paroemiographi graeci. Gottingae, 1839 1851. Murray, 0. 1993. Early Greece. 2nd ed. Harvard. Penglase, C. 1994. Greek Myths and Mesopotamia. London. Piccaluga, G. 1977. "Adonis, i cacciatori falliti e l'avvento dell'agricoltura." In B. Gentili and G. Paioni, eds., IImito greco: 33-48. Roma. Ribichini, S. 1981. Adonis: Aspetti "orientali" di un mito greco. Roma. Stehle, E. 1990. "Sappho's Gaze: Fantasies of a Goddess and aYoung Man." differences 2.1: 88-125. Wehgartner, I. 1987. "Das Ideal massvoller Liebe auf einem attischen Vasenbild." 102: 185-97. Weill, N. 1966. "Ad6niazousai ou les femmes sur la toit." BCH 90: 664-98. Winkler, J. J. 1990. TheConstraintsof Desire. New York. JDAI

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