by Tony Narloch

Created on: June 17, 2009

Beautiful, fickle and lovely enough to cause no end of warring between the Gods, Aphrodite was the fairest of all the Gods and was the patron god of many a handsome young man, and beautiful young girl. Whilst in theory Aphrodite was the Goddess of Love, a better definition would be the Goddess of passion and lust, for the majority of the myths surrounding her, and which she plays some role in, invariably involve more than a few examples of these baser instincts!

Aphrodite who was later to become the (long suffering it should be noted) wife of Hephaestus, was really the diva of her time, prickly, short-tempered and extremely fickle, Aphrodite was extremely prone to punishing those who failed to provide her with enough attention or did not shower her with enough love. It was precisely because of her selfish and petulant as well as extremely argumentative personality that Zeus decided in his infinite wisdom that she would be wed to Hephaestus in order to prevent bickering and civil war between the gods. An ugly, misshapen creature, Hephaestus nevertheless loved his wife very much and was extremely fond of her, always hard at work in order to try and create an even more beautiful piece of jewelry for her to wear, and for those of us who are more astute, will no doubt have worked out that such lavish attention was intended to compensate for his lack of personality, good looks and happiness. The bitter irony here however, is that the harder he worked to provide his wife with beautiful jewelry, the (even) more desirable she became to the other Gods, and mortals as well.

Aphrodite for her part did not return her husband's affections, although she rightly thought he was an ugly and despicable troll, she was not even discrete in her affairs and infidelities which were as sordid as they were multiple. To his eternal credit, Hephaestus only ever felt resentment towards the men who had cuckolded him, rather than his wife.

Aphrodite was no stranger to causing trouble and strife in the mortal realm as well, as it was she who was responsible for triggering the Trojan War that broke out between the Trojans and Greece. Paris, the Prince of Troy was asked to judge a beauty contest between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite and when Aphrodite claimed that she would make Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world fall in love with him Paris quickly named her victor. The end result of such a seemingly trivial decision was to have deadly results.....

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