The Classics: “Homer’s Hymn to Venus” Through the Lens of the 19th Century

Ancient Greece represents one of the pillars upon which society managed to build what we now refer to as “Pop Culture.” Superheroes, celebrities, influential figures of our times, all of them are depicted within the media in a similar way to the deities of antiquity. This parallel is made possible because of the monumental impact that “word of mouth” maintained throughout the centuries. Nowadays, we live in a world which is fully immersed within the digital realm, which makes it easier for the audience to fact-check information. Unfortunately, up until the 20th century, the masses had a harder time accessing reliable sources, making it easier for biases and subjective perspectives to thrive. Keeping that in mind, in order to accurately analyse how Greek Antiquity influenced the way in which women were viewed within the social sphere during the 18th and 19th centuries, one would find it best suited to tackle texts that were written during the above-mentioned time period. Thus, I will be referring to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Homer’s Hymn to Venus.”

There are a total of thirty-three Homeric Hymns, each dedicated to certain deities and describing their glorious deeds. Out of all of these, due to his affinity for the Greek language, Percy Shelley managed to translate six of them, conferring a new sense of originality and uniqueness to each one. All of these translations serve as proof that only one synonym used in a specific context can carry great meaning and significance when it comes to the understanding of a text. That being said, a lot of his translations are filled with heavy social and political subtleties. Shelley was particularly clever about the wording he used in a lot of his translations, as a way of pushing the boundaries between literature and reality, testing the waters in regards to how they both influence one another.

As a perfect example of the social influence that Percy’s texts had on the large audience, one needs to look no further than the magazines in which his translations were published, some of which were directly and strictly “addressed particularly to the ladies,” as the title-page of “The Court Magazine” proclaimed. He managed to tap into a vast pool of Hellenistic references in order to bridge the gap between past and present, presenting the same themes in a way that makes them more accessible to the readers of his days, almost in order to completely erase the elitist stigma that surrounded knowledge of Greece and its culture. For the first time ever, women of the 19th century British society had the opportunity to not only directly interact with the Greek language and its rich history, but also to see themselves represented in a manner that was not afraid to be unconventional. The femininity that was described within his works and translations was complex, at times overtly sexual, or sometimes described by celibacy. Womanhood managed to transgress what society deemed as appropriate, allowing a list of further possibilities to be written for what it meant to be a woman during those times.

A mythological figure that became quite popular during the Romantic period would be Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, also known as Venus, her Roman name. One version of her is depicted as a primordial being that arose from the sea foam and the blood of the great titan Uranus, being able to charm every being that walked the earth. She is the embodiment of beauty, love, lust and, as Shelley’s translation of “Homer’s Hymn to Venus” informs us, there are only three entities that can escape her magic: Minerva, Diana and Hestia, the three chaste goddesses, while everyone else is entirely vulnerable to her charms and spells: “But none beside escape, so well she weaves/ Her unseen toils; nor mortal men, nor gods/ Who live secure in their unseen abodes.” The hymn goes on to explain that Venus became such a problem for Jupiter that he made her fall in love with a mortal. A vast majority of these myths and hymns, if not all, were invented by men. In almost all depictions of Aphrodite, as soon as she makes her way up to Mount Olympus and greets the other gods, Zeus forces her into either a marriage with another god, most commonly Hephaestus, or into a relationship with a common mortal. All of these myths point to one thing: men, especially those living in ancient times, feared love. They knew that it could lead to wars and destruction, the best example being Helen of Troy. Love and war were all that a human being was able to experience at the time and the two were often interconnected with each other.

This is noticeable in the many myths and artworks that portray Venus having an affair with the god of war, as well as in the names of two of their children, spawns of love and war, Phobos and Deimos, the twin gods of fear and terror. She might be the only goddess that is not faithful to her husband, having enough power and agency over her body so that she can do as she pleases. Where Athena was a goddess created and depicted in literature for the men, Aphrodite was for the women, the commonly strong masculine epithets used to describe the goddess of wisdom being replace by feminine ones, more sensual and yet just as powerful. Moreover, as Bettany Hughes depicts in her book, Venus was considered to be a patron of the ancient sex workers and what we would now identify as queer people. Thus, in more modern and contemporary times, she is often used as a symbol in a lot of social and political movements, as well as a prominent literary figure in queer and feminist poetry.

All in all, the publication of a translation such as this one was a necessary step for the women of the 19th century, representing a very small factor which ultimately led to the emancipation of women within the literary world, changing the stigma in regards to all that a woman can be.

Source

1 Bettany Hughes, Venus and Aphrodite: a biography of desire (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 51-73.